In the early days of the Cold War, three men claim they were chosen by a powerful new government agency to undertake a historically perilous journey. They claim this well-funded operation was staffed with the best scientists and engineers using technology pioneered by the Nazis, and they created the most powerful machine ever built.
In July of 1969, they claim, they climbed aboard an enormous rocket assembled in a Florida swamp, and were sent hurtling at incredible speeds into the sky … all the way to the Moon! Two of them even claim they landed on the Moon, got out, and walked around!
And what prize did they bring back from this momentous journey? Well … they have a bunch of black and white photos of unidentifiable persons in bulky white spacemen costumes in a field of gravel (but curiously without any stars in the black sky) -- and several bags of gray, dusty rocks.
Put that way, the story of the Apollo program can sound pretty far-fetched.
But why should we believe the stories? What evidence is there, really, that the Apollo program landed men on the Moon and brought them back?
Phil Plait, an astronomer at Sonoma University in California, and the Web master of BadAstronomy.com, has his reasons.
If I were trying to fake this, I would put stars in the image," he said referring to the complaint made by hoax proponents that the Apollo photos lack stars. If this had been an oversight, he said, it's an amazingly stupid thing to have forgotten, considering the scope of the "hoax."
Not to mention that with the way cameras work, photographing stars under those conditions would have been nearly impossible.
"If you do know about physics and photographs, you can see these arguments are all ridiculous," Plait said.
Here's a link that puts to rest these hoaxes
Here's a link to an article about a "famous" hoax believer.
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