(Apollo XII astronaut and Surveyor III)
Of late, with the 40th anniversary of the Apollo XI landing this coming Monday, there've been more than a few articles purporting the failure of the program - because all of the lunar landings were 'faked'!
Several reasons have been postulated as to why this would be done - usually dealing with some vast conspiracy or another.
While I could point out the obvious reasons why a faked-landing wouldn't have worked (too many people involved; better technology to spot a fake; no credible evidence or witnesses) - I'll concentrate on one, and leave it at that.
I know that those who believe that the Apollo program was a fraud are not going to believe me. Those who, as I do, believe it was humankind's greatest accomplishment to-date are only going to be reinforced.
The photograph above is unique.
The reason is that it deals with something which (1) we knew was on the moon already, and (2) for which we had exact measurements, plus (3) an exact point at which the object was located.
In November of 1969, four months after Apollo XI, the crew of Apollo XII landed on the moon. The location was the Ocean of Storms (Oceanus Procellarum). It was not far from the site that Surveyor III, an umanned lunar probe, had landed two years earlier (in 1967).
Part of the mission of Apollo XI was to investigate Surveyor III, and to retrieve two instrument tubes and a camera, for the purposes of studying the effects of long-term exposure on equipment.
UFO's and Triangulation....
UFO investigators have a quick and simple method for determining the validity of a photograph - it's called 'triangulation'.
The process is simple - the math has been known since the ancient Greeks used it to determine the distance of a ship at sea. It involves two 45deg. triangles, used to establish (1) the known distance between two objects; (2) their relative size, and (3) the size of a third object - in this case, the UFO.
It's better with four. That's what we have in this case.
We have (1) an astronaut; next to (2) the Surveyor probe; (3) the moon, and (4) the relative distance to (5) the L.E.M., on the horizon. Plus, we have (6) the exact location of Surveyor III, and (7) the exact location of the Apollo XII L.E.M.
With four objects and two exact sets of coordinates, it is impossible to 'fake' size or distance. You can put them all together, but you cannot falsify the size of one of the objects -- it is what it is, and its relative size can be determined from the other three.
In 1969, the best Hollywood could do was the film "2001" - which, if viewed today in high-def, clearly shows the modelmaker's art. It was a very workmanlike film -- but if you're viewing it frame-by-frame to look for inconsistencies, you're going to find them, aplenty.
The Surveyor photo is the smoking-gun, folks. So is the television camera taken from the Surveyor probe -- it's now in the Smithsonian.
Visibility from Earth (or, "Why Can't We See The Landing Sites?")....
This one is easier.
The Hubble Space Telescope, designed in the 1980's and constructed/launched in 1990, is (currently) the best and most-unimpeded telescope we have which is capable of NEO and DSO (near-earth object/deep space object) photography.
Even at that, Hubble is capable of resolving objects around 20-25M in diameter - too large to accurately identify the individual landing-craft, or even the sites, where Apollo XII-XVII landed.
Some of the high-resolution photography now being performed by NASA's latest probe may put some of the controversy to rest, once and for all.
(If I've offended someone who likes to believe in conspiracy theories and the like, I'm not sorry. There's just too much evidence in this case to cause me to believe that we 'faked' Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo. Plus, all those model kits I built as a child are pretty damn cool, even today).
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