Dave McGowan's new series "Wagging the Moondoggie"

[cholas]

Thanks for the heads-up Vulcan59. Good to have any series of Dave's back.

 

[Woodsman]

This whole piece struck me as damage control.

In his introduction to this new series Dave McGowan describes hitting a block in his writing. Then as if by magic, a new flow of words started to move through him, sending him off in an entirely new direction, this present series about the Apollo missions.

Hm. Sounds a bit like he was channeling material. But from who?

The thought which first occurred to me was, "Ah, he's shone a lot of light on Laurel Canyon, exposed a lot of practices which those responsible can't be happy about. So what did they do? They sent him off on a mission of professional self-destruction. Discrediting the Moon Landings with gobs of faulty logic."

Upon first encountering this series in 2009, I quickly came to the above conclusion and lost interest. Dave's vibe is one of a man who is a talented communicator and lateral thinker, but not somebody who is aware of many of the key ideas which are discussed on SOTT. I could be wrong on that, but it seemed to me that he was not a Work kind of man, or somebody who was aware of the Matrix nature of reality, of the Density system, of the UFO reality, etc.

If you ignore these aspects of reality, then you are going to be vastly limited in your ability to understand the results of your own research, especially in such subjects as Dave is drawn to.

I figured, he was in the process of being had, in much the same way politicians and actors who dared question 9/11, (and do so with media-respected authority) soon thereafter decided that they were the sons of god, were 'winners' and got sex-change operations etc. and thus wipe out their own credibility. And I just couldn't watch another such car wreck in progress.

But having read this whole thread, I felt compelled to revisit Dave's web series and see if maybe there was something more to it which I was missing the first time around. Good grief. No. The only thing I was missing was just how deeply irrational Dave is being, how faulty, lazy and sloppy his arguments are. It's an example of arm-chair theorizing of the worst form.

Every single point of friction he has with the official story is filled with obvious errors and logical blank spots. (EDIT*** This is an over-statement. I didn't actually read beyond part 5 of his series, so I can't speak on what might be discussed there.)

For example. . .

The first thing that I discovered was that the Soviet Union, right up until the time that we allegedly landed the first Apollo spacecraft on the Moon, was solidly kicking our ass in the space race. It wasn’t even close. The world wouldn’t see another mismatch of this magnitude until decades later when Kelly Clarkson and Justin Guarini came along. The Soviets launched the first orbiting satellite, sent the first animal into space, sent the first man into space, performed the first space walk, sent the first three-man crew into space, was the first nation to have two spacecraft in orbit simultaneously, performed the first unmanned docking maneuver in space, and landed the first unmanned probe on the Moon.

Everything the U.S. did, prior to actually sending a manned spacecraft to the Moon, had already been done by the Soviets, who clearly were staying at least a step or two ahead of our top-notch team of imported Nazi scientists. The smart money was clearly on the Soviets to make it to the Moon first, if anyone was to do so. Their astronauts had logged five times as many hours in space as had ours. And they had a considerable amount of time, money, scientific talent and, perhaps most of all, national pride riding on that goal.

And yet, amazingly enough, despite the incredibly long odds, the underdog Americans made it first. And not only did we make it first, but after a full forty years, the Soviets apparently still haven't quite figured out how we did it. The question that is clearly begged here is a simple one: Why is it that the nation that was leading the world in the field of space travel not only didn’t make it to the Moon back in the 1960s, but still to this day have never made it there? Could it be that they were just really poor losers? I am imagining that perhaps the conversation over in Moscow’s equivalent of NASA went something like this:

Boris: Comrade Ivan, there is terrible news today: the Yankee imperialists have beaten us to the Moon. What should we do?

Ivan: Let's just -shite--can our entire space program.

Boris: But comrade, we are so close to success! And we have so much invested in the effort!

Ivan: -flick- it! If we can't be first, we aren't going at all.

Boris: But I beg of you comrade! The moon has so much to teach us, and the Americans will surely not share with us the knowledge they have gained.

Ivan: Nyet!


In truth, the entire space program has largely been, from its inception, little more than an elaborate cover for the research, development and deployment of space-based weaponry and surveillance systems. The media never talk about such things, of course, but government documents make clear that the goals being pursued through space research are largely military in nature. For this reason alone, it is inconceivable that the Soviets would not have followed the Americans onto the Moon for the sake of their own national defense.

[...]

Again, the question that immediately comes to mind is: Why? Why has no nation ever duplicated, or even attempted to duplicate, this miraculous feat? Why has no other nation even sent a manned spacecraft to orbit the Moon? Why has no other nation ever attempted to send a manned spacecraft anywhere beyond low-Earth orbit?

The problem with this argument is that it ignores the idea that, "All governments are one". The division of states is illusory, designed to serve the purpose of population control. As I see it, the PTB and the 4D farmers of humanity are entirely content with there being a world-center of STS activity and hegemony like the U.S.. Allowing one nation to control space and be seen as the great 'winners' seems like a great way to achieve that goal. Arguing that mechanical influences like national military concerns should dictate policy ignores that humans are being controlled for the purpose of feeding 4D. Dave McGowan is arguing from ignorance.

To briefly recap then, in the twenty-first century, utilizing the most cutting-edge modern technology, the best manned spaceship the U.S. can build will only reach an altitude of 200 miles. But in the 1960s, we built a half-dozen of them that flew almost 1,200 times further into space. And then flew back. And they were able to do that despite the fact that the Saturn V rockets that powered the Apollo flights weighed in at a paltry 3,000 tons, about .004% of the size that the principal designer of those very same Saturn rockets had previously said would be required to actually get to the Moon and back (primarily due to the unfathomably large load of fuel that would be required).

This is patently silly. I recognize that Dave is using humor, but he is nonetheless suggesting that we ignore known science. The force of gravity diminishes with distance.

This is the equation:

GMm
----- or (GMm)/r^2
r^2

G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of one object, m is the mass of the other object and r is the distance between the two. r is measured from the center of mass of the both objects. This works if both objects are mostly spherical or one of the objects is really small in relation to the other, as an example you and the earth, it can be assumed that you are a point mass in respect Earth.

In this example, the gravitational force is inversely related to the square of the distance between the two objects.

Which is to say. . , a great deal of the distance traveled wouldn't need the rocket engines to be turned on, and thus has no requirement for fuel.

The Voyager mission which recently left the Solar System has traveled millions of miles further than the Apollo capsule and with a great deal less fuel. Is Dave suggesting by extension that the Voyager probe is also a fake because of the limited gas-milage? Is he not familiar with the observation Newton contributed to the science of thermodynamics:

"Bodies in motion tend to stay in motion."?

The math is available to everybody. If it were impossible to achieve such a feat of travel versus fuel budget economics as demonstrated by the Moon landing, it seems likely that somebody would have spoken up by now. --And I'm not using the, "Somebody would have known and leaked" argument. I'm talking about anybody with a sufficient knowledge in basic Newtonian physics and a calculator. Nobody, to my knowledge, has stepped forward to point out any problems.

This is typical of Dave's loose writing style, which is fine for the world of anecdote-driven Rock & Roll and lateral human connections, but for issues of science, you need to work with different parts of your brain. Facts become fixed and important to the development of the ideas under study.

Case in point. . .

As Moon landing skeptics have duly noted, if the broadcast tapes are played back at roughly twice their normal running speed, the astronauts appear to move about in ways entirely consistent with the way ordinary humans move about right here on planet Earth.

Actually, you'd need to speed up the tapes to 2.46 times to achieve parity with Earth physics. This can be observed in the video link below which compares swinging pendulums and objects thrown on the Moon. When the film is sped up to the match what the motion of those objects would have been observed as on Earth, the astronauts can be seen moving with jittery high-speed movements not unlike those seen in a Chaplin movie. --Keeping in mind that they were wearing big, heavy and awkward space suits, this doesn't line up with Dave's contentions.

_http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxZMjpMhwNE

Am I the only one, by the way, who finds it odd that people would move in slow motion on the Moon? Why would a reduced gravitational pull cause everything to move much more slowly? Given the fact that they were much lighter on their feet and not subject to air and wind resistance, shouldn’t the astronauts have been able to move quicker on the Moon than here on Earth? Was slow motion the only thing NASA could come up with to give the video footage an otherworldly feel?

They didn't move in slow motion. In taking a look at the clips available, I saw several instances where arms and flag material, feet pushing off from the ground, etc. moved as quickly as they might on Earth. It was only when dealing with weight management that things seemed to be slower. Dave claims not to care, that he's just looking at the facts, but it seems to me that he has fallen into the trap of believing in his conclusion before conducting the thinking. Put simply, Dave isn't looking at the material objectively.

Here's a video of some sped up footage of an astronaut falling down and righting himself. Judge for yourself if this man is on Earth or not:

_http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkLjVw-a9w0

Just this year, NASA itself boldly announced that it’s “Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has returned its first imagery of the Apollo moon landing sites. The pictures show the Apollo missions’ lunar module descent stages sitting on the moon’s surface, as long shadows from a low sun angle make the modules’ locations evident … ‘The LROC team anxiously awaited each image,’ said LROC principal investigator Mark Robinson of Arizona State University. ‘We were very interested in getting our first peek at the lunar module descent stages just for the thrill – and to see how well the cameras had come into focus. Indeed, the images are fantastic and so is the focus.’”

Sounds promising, doesn’t it? The images, however, hardly live up to the billing. They are, in fact, completely worthless. All they depict are tiny white dots on the lunar surface that could be just about anything and that would barely be visible at all without those handy “long shadows from a low sun angle.” And the weird thing about those shadows is that, in the very same NASA article, it says that “because the sun was so low to the horizon when the images were made, even subtle variations in topography create long shadows.” And yet while it is perfectly obvious that there are more than just “subtle variations” in the lunar topography in the images, the alleged lunar modules are the only things casting the long shadows.

Actually, there ARE numerous objects casting long shadows. Look at the example picture Dave offers. ~http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/369440main_lroc_apollo11_lrg.jpg To the Right of the module, there are several small brighter objects which cast long shadows in keeping with the position of the light source; keeping in mind, the lunar module is the tallest object on the ground aside from hills, which are also casting long but less abrupt shadows, it seems to me that Dave is again not looking at the evidence objectively. He's not seeing what is right in front of his eyes.

Also. . , I'm not sure what Dave is expecting. Putting a camera into orbit around the Earth, let alone the Moon, is an expensive and challenging endeavor, and even then, pixel resolution is often measured in meters per pixel. The module is four meters by four meters. So even a camera capable of high definition is only going to get a small blob of pixels. The available photographic results are consistent with most orbital photography of the Earth of objects of a similar size; just take a look at Google's Earth/maps using satellite images. Dave doesn't really have a compelling argument here.

And so, in this way, I took the time to check out many of Dave's assertions and lazy assumptions. There were MANY of them.

In a couple of instances, I was initially taken with some of his observations. In Part 4, two of those instances were pictures, one a shot of the landing module up close where shadows apparently did not fall parallel as they ought, suggesting a secondary light source. _http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/AS11-40-5925HR.jpg (part 4)

Another was a pair of images which featured an apparently identical background, but one with the lander and the other without, suggesting as Dave posits, that there was some fakery going on...

Here,
_http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/AS15-82-11057HR.jpg

And here,
_http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/AS15-82-11082HR.jpg


Fascinated, in both those cases, I imported the images into Photoshop and ran my own tests. In the case of the non-parallel shadow problem, I drew up lines of perspective from shadows in the foreground and in the background to see if they shared a common vanishing point. Guess what? They do. This took six minutes of investigation.

It's a very easy test, the results are very clear, (no Loch Ness fuzziness to debate. It's literally black and white). --Yes, in a single photographic scene, perspective can often be misleading because still images are locked into one perspective, whereas the human eye and head turn about to look at peripheral details in a single scene, thus changing the perspective for the living 3D observer, so the two experiences are very different. But the math and geometry don't lie. Seriously. Try it yourself if you are in any doubt. Don't have a copy of Photoshop? Use GIMP. It's free.

In the case of the 'identical backgrounds' problem, I overlayed the two photos with the same backgrounds and quickly learned that they were not actually identical. They appear to be the same distant hills shot from different slightly spots, one with the lander in front of the photographer and one either behind or out of the shot to the side. The hills did in fact betray this quite obviously, their crests changing relative position by quite a lot, (a great deal more than just a few pixels. Again, try it yourself.)

I find it interesting that Dave didn't run these tests. It suggests that he either doesn't know how to use Photoshop, which seems odd since he claims to be a photographer, or he's just lazy and assumptive. Neither condition is very confidence inspiring.

Overall, his understanding of physics is weak, and he says as much, but then fails to do anything about it, continuing to use his faulty modes of thinking to attempt to solve problems which clearly NEED an understanding of physics.

The whole issue surrounding gravity and the ability for the ships in question to even travel the distance to the moon with their fuel budget bespeak of a near total ignorance of physics, and worse, a lack of motivation in trying to determine whether his observations and criticisms held any water. If he couldn't work it out himself, he should have networked with somebody with greater facility in the subject.

His understanding of how light behaves is similarly filled with misunderstandings. Evidently, it's possible to be a photographer but still suffer from ignorance about the mechanics of light.

Example. . .

At some point it entered into popular debate regarding the lunar photographs the idea that light bounces directly back toward the Sun from the lunar surface, and Dave uses this notion to base nearly all of his arguments regarding the photographs. He has problems with objects appearing visible while standing in the shadows of larger objects. In a world where light doesn't scatter, then this would be a valid concern.

The problem is that light DOES scatter on the Moon. It has to for it to show up at all. Indeed, for us to be able to see it in the night sky from Earth means that light scatters from its surface.

Think about it; if light reflected from the Moon's surface didn't scatter randomly, but only uniformly bounced back toward its source in nice, parallel lines, then it would effectively be invisible. Everything on the Moon would appear to be pitch black to both eyes and cameras unless the camera were to stand directly between the reflecting object and the light source, and even then, it would remain black, because you'd be blocking the incident light from reaching the reflecting surface.

That's how light works. A photon is invisible until it hits the back of your eye. But people and cameras on the Moon were able to look around themselves 360 degrees and still see things. This means that light was coming at them from all around. This being the case, then clearly light was not *only* bouncing directly back at the Sun in perfect parallel lines, but that in fact there was a great deal of scattering going on. Seeing anything at all *requires* light scattering. So yes, of course there's a diffuse secondary light source in those photographs as Dave claims; it was the vast light diffuser which is the surface of the Moon itself. This understanding negates most of Dave's issues with the lunar photography.

Another of his contentions was that the astronauts would not have been able to operate the cameras well enough to produce decent images. With this argument, as with many others, he seems to rest his thinking on the idea that the astronauts were just average guys dropped into the mission with little or no training, and that the engineers who built the equipment for the mission were not highly motivated, intelligent and well-funded. None of those contentions are even slightly accurate.

And all of it is on public record. Hasselblad designed the camera for NASA specifically for the mission, with many of the key constraints and problems the astronauts would have to deal with understood well in advance. Certainly there were unknowns, but they did their best to use educated guesses to compensate and create wide margins of error. Their equipment was going to the Moon! It had to be the best they could produce. And so Hasselblad's engineers got down to work to solve those problems. And this was a dream job; there's a saying in engineering circles:

"Quality, time, and money. Pick two."

Engineering for NASA in the 60's might have been one of the few times when it was possible to have all three in healthy quantities.

The astronauts trained with the cameras and the required shooting techniques, taking the equipment with them on road trips to desert-like sites, shooting from the chest and learning the calculations required to take useful pictures.

In short, the problems Dave thought up from his arm chair were solved by smart engineers and by smart training solutions. If Dave was a photographer worth his salt, then he'd know that you can use basic math and pre-set configurations in a camera to take good pictures without needing to look through the viewfinder using the eye's bio-feedback systems to meet the focal and light requirements. But Dave is a writer who is clearly in touch with his instincts and imagination. For him, bio-feedback probably makes a great deal more sense than do mathematics and abstract thinking. That's my guess, anyway.

Still. . , it only took a few hours of research to address the MANY questions raised by Dave's work.

More examples. . .

Dave wondered how the lunar module could possibly have fit all the gear it needed to carry; he seemed particularly amazed by the Lunar rover, seeming to think that it was an impossibility that such a device could have been packed for the mission. He scoffs at the idea that it folded up. And yet there are several schematics of the clever engineering behind the rover, animations and even videos of the thing being deployed. Again, humans are actually really good at mechanical engineering. It's not magic. It just takes clever people spending a time and energy to solve the problems. And NASA did just that. Dave spent all of his time throwing clever ideas down and then completely failing to do any of the simple follow-up research to test them.

He doesn't understand physics and says so, which is commendable, but then seems to be content that his arm chair theorizing/mockery is sufficient to base a belief system upon. Rather than getting down to the work necessary to back up his claims with his own research or that provided from decent networking with those who could help, he instead decided only to poke fun and use logical fallacies which all seemed to fall back on the juvenile, "See? I make it sound ridiculous, therefore it IS ridiculous!"

I'm sorry, but maybe Dave should stick to Rock and Roll.

I've spent the better part of last evening reading over Dave's work on this story, and then after a good night's sleep and some distance to gain perspective, I'm still finding the same problems.

It's all fine and dandy to have an idea; Dave McGowan has plenty of good ones. He's an engaging, clever writer and lateral thinker, and he does know how to dig for novel information. These are useful traits and skills. But his research on this particular story was severely lacking. It's sloppy and lazy, full of false assumptions which he appears to have done as little work as possible to validate.

Maybe he gets better in future parts; I was only able to get through to the end of Part 5 before giving up on him. But honestly, this seems like a giant time and energy-sink.

Unless somebody can point out how I'm off base, then I'm done with this.



EDIT**** Cleaning and grammatical clarity. If I want to change my mind on any of these points, I'll do so in a future post and explain why.

EDIT******** Got the gravity math wrong; (I'd clipped the notation example from a math and physics site, and it included a defunct reference. Fixed now.)

 

[cholas]

I think many of your points are valid, Woodsman. In reading over this thread it seems that we might all agree that a) Mr. McGowan does not have the whole enchilada. and b) the official story, as is usually the case, is bogus.

The argument of whether or not humans have landed on the moon in the last 45 years seems somewhat mute, with what we discuss and understand here.

Fwiw, I really think Approaching Infinity's previous post is pretty spot-on:

The way I see it, IF the US actually went to the moon, they probably did so using black technology. I thought McGowan raised some interesting points on the absurdity of the technological innovations the Apollo programs. Perhaps they also staged several photos and/or videos as a propaganda program to stir up pro-America feelings.

And this one from anart(from the Laurel Canyon series):

If even 1/10th of what he puts together is true, it's a pretty damning picture in general and gives a good glimpse into the wholesale control and manipulation of the public mind through entertainment - that it's all 'created' and controlled.

I enjoyed this last Moondoggie post as I really was not familiar with atomic/hydrogen weapons 'testing' in space although I admittedly have yet to attempt to verify his claims.

 

[Woodsman]

I think many of your points are valid, Woodsman. In reading over this thread it seems that we might all agree that a) Mr. McGowan does not have the whole enchilada. and b) the official story, as is usually the case, is bogus.

The argument of whether or not humans have landed on the moon in the last 45 years seems somewhat mute, with what we discuss and understand here.

Fwiw, I really think Approaching Infinity's previous post is pretty spot-on:

The way I see it, IF the US actually went to the moon, they probably did so using black technology. I thought McGowan raised some interesting points on the absurdity of the technological innovations the Apollo programs. Perhaps they also staged several photos and/or videos as a propaganda program to stir up pro-America feelings.

From one perspective, the micro processor and microwave tech are the direct result of Black Technology. And I'd go along with the idea that the space program might have been used to levy these technologies onto the public in a believable way, so as to create the microwave/WiFi controlled society we currently live in.

But I find it difficult to justify the idea that the rockets and landers, etc., contained secret black boxes using alien tech necessary to make the Moon missions possible when basic rocket propulsion and other stone-age technologies upon investigation appear reasonably to have been able to accomplish the job.

Still, I should add that just because it seems to me that the U.S. really did land space ships on the Moon, I in no way think that NASA isn't a sneaky-as-hell agency. If Fletcher Prouty ("The Secret Team") is to be believed, the CIA had its hands in the project.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

But I find it difficult to justify the idea that the rockets and landers, etc., contained secret black boxes using alien tech necessary to make the Moon missions possible when basic rocket propulsion and other stone-age technologies upon investigation appear reasonably to have been able to accomplish the job.

That begs the question as to why NASA is consistently saying how hard it will be to get to the moon, that they have to develop all kinds of new technologies, etc. etc. If it was so easy the first time, why is it so hard now? What's going on in the back rooms that they're not telling the public?

 

[Woodsman]

But I find it difficult to justify the idea that the rockets and landers, etc., contained secret black boxes using alien tech necessary to make the Moon missions possible when basic rocket propulsion and other stone-age technologies upon investigation appear reasonably to have been able to accomplish the job.

That begs the question as to why NASA is consistently saying how hard it will be to get to the moon, that they have to develop all kinds of new technologies, etc. etc. If it was so easy the first time, why is it so hard now? What's going on in the back rooms that they're not telling the public?

I wonder if those images of monoliths and various structures on the Moon might not figure into this kind of avoidance. It was easier in the 60's to ignore that stuff, because information was so bottlenecked through NASA's control. Today, I think it would be harder to side-step such questions.

 

[anart]

But I find it difficult to justify the idea that the rockets and landers, etc., contained secret black boxes using alien tech necessary to make the Moon missions possible when basic rocket propulsion and other stone-age technologies upon investigation appear reasonably to have been able to accomplish the job.

That begs the question as to why NASA is consistently saying how hard it will be to get to the moon, that they have to develop all kinds of new technologies, etc. etc. If it was so easy the first time, why is it so hard now? What's going on in the back rooms that they're not telling the public?

I wonder if those images of monoliths and various structures on the Moon might not figure into this kind of avoidance. It was easier in the 60's to ignore that stuff, because information was so bottlenecked through NASA's control. Today, I think it would be harder to side-step such questions.

Information is still bottle necked and completely controlled (by JPL, more precisely). That would be no different. It's not like there would be paparazzi on the space craft...

 

[Woodsman]

But I find it difficult to justify the idea that the rockets and landers, etc., contained secret black boxes using alien tech necessary to make the Moon missions possible when basic rocket propulsion and other stone-age technologies upon investigation appear reasonably to have been able to accomplish the job.

That begs the question as to why NASA is consistently saying how hard it will be to get to the moon, that they have to develop all kinds of new technologies, etc. etc. If it was so easy the first time, why is it so hard now? What's going on in the back rooms that they're not telling the public?

I wonder if those images of monoliths and various structures on the Moon might not figure into this kind of avoidance. It was easier in the 60's to ignore that stuff, because information was so bottlenecked through NASA's control. Today, I think it would be harder to side-step such questions.

Information is still bottle necked and completely controlled (by JPL, more precisely). That would be no different. It's not like there would be paparazzi on the space craft...

Yeah, that's true. And it's not like the Russians and Chinese have been entirely forthcoming with their various missions, governments being one and all. Though, I would say that there is more ability today to discuss this stuff and foster non-official thoughts, share and collectively dissect any incoming data which IS released, the internet being what it is. But that still doesn't feel like the real reason to me. . .

Maybe it really is all about money and tactical advantages; maybe there just isn't enough 'unobatainium' on the Moon? Or maybe going there in the first place was a blip for which Kennedy was partly (or largely) responsible. Perhaps there was enough motivation for both expansive and contracting personality types to see reason enough to jump in. On the one side, a genuine spirit of joy and exploration encouraged into flame, and on the other side the lure of a lot of money transferred from public to private purses.

Maybe it was all a mind-conditioning endeavor to get people into the head-space where missiles and high-tech warfare were considered a 'natural' extension.

Maybe going to the Moon just isn't expensive and easy enough; STS likes things to be simple and bloody and territorial. Maybe wars are good enough. Or. . . Maybe the joy of exploration and expansion is the wrong 'flavor' of excitement for the sheep to resonate with. Maybe bloody-minded conquest and fear provide the 'right' flavor.

Hm. That last sounds closer to the truth to me.

But who can say for certain?

 

[Breton]

Maybe just like the moon landings, Dave is also not exactly what he appears to be either?

 

[Thomas Alan]

This whole subject illustrates for me how little we really know about historical events.

Thanks, Woodsman for your analysis of McGowan's series. I enjoy Dave's writing. It's fun to read and he challenges many sacred beliefs. But apparently he is quite sloppy in doing in-depth research and analysis.

I guess, at this point, I really don't know if the moon landings occurred or not. Or if they did, by what means or for what purpose.

We have to question everything we read, even every detail of what we read if we are to find a few little gems of truth. In the 5 years or so since discovering the Work I have discovered nearly everything I "believed" was based on little or nothing.

Mac

 

[shellycheval]

While I do not disagree that McGowan's research may be incomplete and contain inaccuracies, when I step back and look at the big picture this is what I see:

In 1969 we were told that we landed on the moon with very short preparation and primitive technology, and that we successfully went back to the moon several more times after that.


Now, Forty two years later, it appears that returning to the moon is more difficult than going initially, and that there are technical problems now that must have already been worked out at one time in the past in order for the original trip to have occurred.

In other words, I think McGowan's question is valid: what is the problem with going back now with our advanced technologies, if we have already been to the moon several times in the past with the technology of 42 years ago?

Something doesn't jive with this observation regardless of the details.

shellycheval

 

[Aaron r]

Woodsman, I think you should send your piece to Dave. He has seemed more than willing to answer criticisms in the past.

 

[Thomas Alan]

Woodsman, I think you should send your piece to Dave. He has seemed more than willing to answer criticisms in the past.

Indeed. It would be interesting to see his response. And if he does not respond that would be interesting as well.

Mac

 

[Breton]

Woodsman, I think you should send your piece to Dave. He has seemed more than willing to answer criticisms in the past.

Indeed. It would be interesting to see his response. And if he does not respond that would be interesting as well.

Mac

Hey, not a bad idea!

If he is really a "truth seeker" then he welcomes criticism and challenges. If instead he is in love with his own arguments, well at least you tried.

I suppose you can state your position that you are not doing it as a "debunker", but only as one who wants to create a fundamentally solid position of why the whole story of the moon landings is not quite what it seems, without being attached to either conclusion: did man actually land there or not? You want to separate the solid arguments from the speculation, and make a clear difference. The solid stuff is solid. The speculative stuff, the stuff without good research to back it up, is best to be noted as such.

The point can also be made that no matter how good one is, being alone is not as advantageous as consulting a network of thinking and seeking individuals.

 

[treesparrow]

About 10 years ago an extremely detailed three and half hour documentary entitled Dark Moon (links belows) was released, which - for me at least - pretty much demolished the idea that the Apollo missions succeeded in landing on the moon. (That's not to say that some deep secret covert project may have achieved that aim though.) Briefly the parts of the film that stood out (osit) were the problems of taking photos on the moon with the cameras and film purportedly used, the large amount of protective shielding on any spacecraft that would have been necessary to counter the radiation and the flashes/reflections of light seen on the overhead wires supporting the weight of the would be astronauts as they moved about. Another highlight was the moving of the background scenery which repeatedly turned up in places and seen from angles where it had no right to be.

All in all well worth watching I reckon.

Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo5w0pm24ic&feature=related

Part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MalYSn_qIU4&feature=related