BAN #353: Moon hoax conspiracy theorists shoot themselves in the boot

[The planetary nebula M 2-9, winds from a dying star. Credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Legacy Archive / Judy Schmidt]

Subscribers leave tread marks on my heart.

Blog Jam

What I’ve recently written on the blog, ICYMI

[Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) observed by Hubble on April 20, 2020, showing it disintegrating. From Monday’s article. Credit: NASA/ESA/Quanzhi Ye/Alyssa Pagan]

Monday 2 August, 2021: Why did this comet disintegrate when its sibling was able to hold it together?

Tuesday 3 August, 2021: Meet 2021 PH27, a newly discovered asteroid with the shortest known year!

Wednesday 4 August, 2021: Want to find Planet Nine? Here's a treasure map.

Thursday 5 August, 2021: Beautifully dying stars and the scale of the Universe

Friday 6 August, 2021: An immense volcanic eruption in 1257 A.D. affected our entire planet. But which volcano exploded?

Debunkening

You can’t debunk something unless it’s bunk to start with

I believe I’ve mentioned once or twice that I have a Google alert set for my name; I did it ages ago to see what chuckleheaded conspiracy theorist was attacking me now, but over the years it’s just been fun to see what articles I’ve written get linked and whatnot.

But this one. Oh my, this one. This may be my favorite.

I got an alert that the Agence France Presse, or AFP, had an article mentioning me. OK, fine, so I click it, and sigh: It’s about the Moon Hoax. You know, boneheads who think the Apollo Moon landings were faked.

[Photo from a Facebook post claiming the Moon landings were faked, showing the Apollo 11 EVA suit used by Neil Armstrong on the left and a bootprint left on the Moon on the right. Credit: AFP]

But this one took an unexpected turn. It shows a photo of Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit that he wore while walking around on the Moon in July 1969. Thing is, you can see that the soles of the feet on the suit are smooth! How then could he have left tread marks in the lunar surface??1!!

Check and mate, NASA!

Except, oops, the astronauts wore overshoes, slip-on wellies, if you like, to go out on the surface. Those rubber slip-ons were treaded, and that’s why they left the boot prints seen.

And, by the way, the boot print they always show was left by Buzz Aldrin, not Armstrong. You can read about it on the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal (scroll down to 110:25:09).

OK, duh, but so what? Why does this one tickle me so?

Take another look at the photo. The part on the left, showing the supine suit and the person standing next to it?

Yeah. I took that photo.

Here’s the original:

[The original photo that I took at the Smithsonian of Neil Armstrong’s EVA suit. Credit: Phil Plait]

I was part of a campaign to raise money for the National Air and Space Museum to fix the suit up and bring it back as close as possible to its original state. They asked me to host a short video for KickStarter (which, hey cool, is still available to watch!), so I flew to DC where we recorded it, and I got to actually be in the same room with the suit!

The woman on the left with purple gloves is curator Cathy Lewis, who was in charge of the actual conservation effort. She was terrific, showing me all the different parts of the suit and answering my questions.

I remember seeing the smooth soles of the boots and being surprised. I pointed that out and asked her if they had overshoes or something they wore, and she said yes, and told me about them.

See, there is the difference between conspiracy thinking and scientific thinking. I knew the boot prints on the Moon were real, so when confronted with an apparent discrepancy I assumed there was something I didn’t know, thought about it for a sec, came up with an idea, and then asked an expert in the field about it.

As opposed to arrogantly thinking I knew more than the hundreds of thousands of people who worked on the Apollo project and the millions since who have worked on various space missions and immediately posting an easily debunked pile of crap on Facebook.

Say.

But the irony of a Moon hoax twinkie using a photo I took, of all people, to try to show the landings were faked? That could outstrip a supernova. Amazing.

Come to think of it, some of you may not have been around long enough to understand just why this is so ironic. I was literally one of the first people to do a detailed debunking online of people who think NASA faked the Apollo missions. I might have been the first, really. But either way that page led to me doing countless radio and TV interviews about it, and around that same time I had a chapter in my first book about it, too (affiliate link).

So some conspiracy theorist using a photo I took to try to show NASA faked the landings but which instead shows them to be ill equipped to argue their way out of a wet paper bag? <chef’s kiss>

By the way, in that very same room where we examined Armstrong’s suit I met another piece of history that got me very excited. I love this tale, but I’ll just leave a link to what I wrote on the blog at the time about it. Yeah, click that, nerds. You’ll like it.

[That was a good day. Credit: Phil Plait]

Et alia

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!