NASA Admits Photo Retouching
Monday, October 18, 2010 – by Staff Report
Dominant Social Theme: American bureaucracies are not generally in any sense dishonest, nor have they covered up anything of import. Government works, and big government works better.
Free-Market Analysis: We wanted to return to the issue of whether American astronauts landed on the moon because it is obviously a controversial one. In the above article excerpt, we can see how even a little Photoshopping can cause a big uproar, such is the sensitivity about NASA's history and the accusations that have been made. Sub dominant social theme: "NASA itself has been unfairly maligned and even its best efforts are somehow misinterpreted."
Perhaps, collectively, we shall never summon 100 percent certainty about the moon landing, though as we explained in our last article, we are far more suspicious now than we were. Let us explain. There are some elite promotions that are obvious. Central banking is an obvious promotion because it is impossible to fix the price of money. Global warming may be occurring, but it is impossible that humans can have much to do with it because water vapor constitutes most of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, up to 95 percent whereas human contributions may constitute three percent, if that much.
Peak oil is a hoax (at its topmost level) because the modern marketplace will either find more oil and gas or would find suitable replacements. To argue otherwise is jettison neoclassical economics, marginal utility and Say's Law and a return to the dark ages of static, classical economics and Malthusian projections of imminent starvation. In fact all scarcity promotions are economically illiterate. It is a hallmark of elite fear-based themes, which deny economic science and make generally unsound arguments that rely on emotion to remove wealth and power from the middle classes in order to advance some sort of global governance.
But going to the moon is not an evident hoax in the sense that no obvious economic laws are being traduced and no natural laws are being visibly sundered. There is the issue of the Van Allen radiation belt, but that is not in our estimation as fully fleshed out yet as, say, the presence and delineation of atmospheric gases as regards global warming. So there are reasons that one cannot be as certain that the moon landing was a hoax as one is of, say, central banking – or not in the short-term anyway.
But having said all this, there are plenty of anomalies that one confronts when contemplating whether NASA went to the moon or whether it is yet another "big lie." In fact NASA and the US generally had a motive to pull off the hoax: the elite at the time was genuinely worried about the American anti-war movement that had spread to Europe and was actively destabilizing France and Germany at the time.
A moon landing by a reputable bureaucracy such as NASA would provide additional evidence that Big Government worked and that Leviathan could be effective at peace-time chores and was not merely good (or bad) at making war. It didn't hurt that NASA was essentially a military agency and that the astronauts were in the military as well. There are, of course, thorough debunking lists that go through the accusations against the moon landings point by point. The most famous one is perhaps Robert A. Braeunig's DID WE LAND ON THE MOON? A Debunking of the Moon Hoax Theory. This is a convincing one because Braeunig does not seem to have a motive to try to defend the NASA moon landing other than evident anger that people are being misled by the moon hoaxers. It is a convincing list of some 70 painstaking rebuttals.
But when we returned to it, we found it less convincing. Braeunig's debunking is, in fact, merely one more set of opinions. He explains that the ripping American flag was caused by a lack of gravity. But when looks at the actual flag going back and forth it doesn't look like a vacuum is causing the movement; it looks like a breeze. He points out that the reason that the astronaut's photos came out so perfectly was because they were cropped after the fact. But he doesn't deal with a striking mathematical statistic that the astronauts would apparently have had to take one photo on average every 15 seconds of their free time to account for the number of photos known to have been taken.
Another piece of disturbing evidence is the news conference with the astronauts themselves after they had returned from the moon. It can be seen at Youtube in numerous parts entitled Apollo 11 Press Conference and is notable for the almost painful reluctance of Neil Armstrong to make statements pertaining to the moon landing. Watching it will, in hindsight, give most people at least a sense of unease about what actually occurred. The whole press conference has the atmosphere of a funeral.
Another disturbing Youtube video is entitled "Moon Landing Hoax Apollo: Disney used Fake Miniature Astronauts, Lunar Rovers & Modules." The apparent platforms of the doll-like astronauts are pointed out in excruciating detail. Yet another series of Youtube videos purport to interpret the dialogue from the initial landing to show how the astronauts were speaking in code to refer to technicians manipulating the wires that moved machinery around and the astronauts as well. Still another video shows an astronaut struggling to his feet after falling, but he moves from a horizontal to a vertical plane without bending his knees, as if he is being tugged erect. Other videos purport to show glints of actual wires. Comments have been disabled for most of the videos.
Yet another video shows astronaut Alan Bean, who was the fourth person to walk on the Moon in November 1969, being interviewed about the deadly Van Allen radiation belt. An older man now, he states that he is not sure whether the astronauts went out "far enough" to make contact with the radiation belts. This is an odd statement because the Van Allen radiation belt begins a thousand miles out and the astronauts went 240,000 miles to the moon and back. In fact, with the exception of the moon landings, no vehicles have ventured out into the deadly Van Allen radiations belts. Yet it does not seem to be an obstacle to the moon landings and is rarely, if ever, referred to as a major engineering or flight issue by NASA back in the 1960s.
