Moon Landings: Did They Happen or Not?

[Ursus Minor]

I kinda sit on the side that thinks, as the Cs seemed to confirm, we did, but that the Apollo missions themselves were not what they were presented to be. There’s a lot of evidence that the lander could not have even done the mission, so no, when we saw Armstrong set his foot down it was theater, possibly staged with the assistance of Mr Kubrick. Of course I also think the “faked mission” conspiracy is misdirection (like the 9-11 Truther stuff) keeping people trying to prove or disprove what ultimately doesn’t matter. How we got there and when (and with whose assistance) is where the fat of the meal is.

This is of course just my opinion.

I should add that my father was an astrophysicist who worked on the Apollo for Rockwell and JPL. I have little doubt we got up there. It’s the on there part that’s dodgy.

The C's confirmation seems to have clinched it and discussing all of the trifles of the Apollo missions is probably futile.

One of the important questions that have arisen since late 1972 (Apollo 17 ended on Dec. 19, 1972) is:
"Why did NASA/ or the US never return to the moon ever since?"

Conventional wisdom is that the Apollo missions 18 to 20 were cancelled because NASA was running out of funds, while conspiracy theory has it that those missions were taken over by the military (or the Deep state).

The remote viewing artists at Farsight.org have just completed a series on these supposed secret Apollo missions.
I must agree with the skeptics though that the lift-off of a Saturn V rocket in Florida could not have gone unnoticed.

So from 1973 on space stations and the Space shuttle certainly had priority over Moon landings, no doubt.

But at that point "conspiracy" returns.

There are indications that in the 1970s "secret technology" had advanced up to a point, where Wernher von Braun's 1940's rocket technology was rendered obsolete.

These are excerpts from an RA session in January, 1981...

8.6 ▶ Questioner: How did the United States learn of the technology to build these land [inaudible]?
Ra: I am Ra. There was a mind/body/spirit complex known to your people by the vibratory sound complex, Nikola. This entity departed the illusion and the papers containing the necessary understandings were taken by mind/body/spirit complexes serving your security of national divisional complex. Thus your people became privy to the basic technology.(...)

8.7 ▶ Questioner: I’m puzzled by these craft that we have undersea bases for. They are [inaudible]. Is this technology sufficient to overshadow all other armaments? Do we have just the ability to fly in these craft or are there any weapons like there are… Were they given to us [inaudible] or are they just craft for transport? What is the basic mechanism of their [inaudible]? It’s really hard to believe is what I’m saying.
Ra: I am Ra. The craft are perhaps misnamed in some instances. It would be more appropriate to consider them as weaponry. The energy used is that of the field of electromagnetic energy which polarizes the Earth sphere. The weaponry is of two basic kinds: that which is called by your peoples psychotronic and that which is called by your peoples particle beam. The amount of destruction which is contained in this technology is considerable and the weapons have been used in many cases to alter weather patterns and to enhance the vibratory change which engulfs your planet at this time.

8.8 ▶ Questioner: How have they been able to keep this a secret? Why aren’t these craft in use for transport?
Ra: The governments of each of your societal division illusions desire to refrain from publicity so that the surprise may be retained in case of hostile action from what your peoples call enemies.

8.9 ▶ Questioner: How many of these craft does the United States have?
Ra: I am Ra. The United States has five hundred seven three, five seven three [573] at this time. They are in the process of adding to this number.

With 573 craft of secret technology in early 1981 we can surmise that construction and testing would have begun in the early seventees.
Surely they also will have created some bigger vehicles to can be used for transit to the Moon and Mars...

The same session contains a further remark of the RA entity:

There are bases [of your so-called military complex] upon your moon, as you call this satellite.

So did the US never return to the Moon ever since?

 

[Hi_Henry]

Conventional wisdom is that the Apollo missions 18 to 20 were cancelled because NASA was running out of funds, while conspiracy theory has it that those missions were taken over by the military (or the Deep state).

That's why I don't give much credence to "conventinal wisdom". The US State has bottomless pockets. Bridges and water supply infrastructure can go to Hell but the State will spend the last penney on things that are important to it. "The People" obviously are not in the least of any concern as the most recent Public display of this has become obvious, F-35.

 

[Brewer]

Hello

Woodsman, you have set the tone, like this comment below, saying I'm fixated and an overused Kubrick meme.

This is madness.

Why is it madness?

I remember spending an afternoon with some high resolution photographs, Photoshop and digital perspective rulers to test claims that shadows were not falling correctly on the LEM and that this indicated artificial lighting. After a few hours work, it became apparent that the claims were wrong and the shadows weren't.

You studied the shadows for a whole afternoon? OK hardly exhaustive but do have any images of these results and the context in which you became aware of these images and could you post them? I've been avoiding visiting the hoax and hoax debunking sites and videos preferring to look at information provided in official archives. I also look for the obvious, which is why I posted the double shadow LEM, of which there are many and don't post distant landscape anomalies, not yet anyway, I'll harvest the low hanging fruit first.

I've gone to some effort to explain my thinking on this material; I believe my logic is sound but you haven't offered any comment on it one way or another; I can't tell if you understood me or if you even read it.

You did provide a written explanation but no images or technical links. Just a link to an article on how it's possible to fake Apollo, five decades later. You said, in words to the effect that because the background is real it couldn't have be done in a studio or outdoor set and therefore everything else is unlikely to be faked.

So it's your turn: I suggest you put together a cohesive narrative which explains what you think you are seeing with these various pictures you are sharing and then subject that narrative to logic tests to see if they can fit in Objective Reality. Then share your work so that others can critique it.

The images show double shadows where only one should be present. Indicating there was more than one light source, one higher than the other and one stronger/nearer/further than the other. One light is fixed and the other light is moved from image to image, left to right, up and down. The photos appear to be taken within a short time of each other as were many other LM/EVA photos. The other photos on the magazine show no sign of double exposure so I doubt it's that. As for NASA's sloppiness these images were probably never meant to see the light of day and lay forgotten for 35 years. The people who scanned and uploaded them had no idea that any could've been faked and didn't bother to check.

Just dropping pictures and vague suggestions is pointless and energy-expensive for others.

Encourages people to look, think, make up their own minds. Am I expected to provide an entire narrative to a possible moon landing hoax? The images I provide indicate that something is amiss and the moon landing merits further study, as do the other NASA ventures that followed and continue to this day. You never know what it could lead to.

(For instance, I don't understand what the glove cue card image was supposed to represent. Whatever point you were trying to make with it wasn't clear to me.)

That was in answer to Hi Henry's comment that the 'Apollo 16 Grand Prix' video seemed scripted. It was, the card carries abbreviated details on how to film the scene and what comments to make. Watch the video, listen to the 'naut's, you'll see what I mean.

 

[Woodsman]

Hello

Woodsman, you have set the tone, like this comment below, saying I'm fixated and an overused Kubrick meme.

You are fixated. And you are offended by that observation. It was not meant to be derogatory. It's a mental state many people find themselves in when exploring new areas. It can, however, obscure reality.

Why is it madness?

It is a kind of madness to believe in lies when the foundation for those lies has been thoroughly excavated and the findings are freely available. I do agree, though, that my comment was hyperbolic; I recognize that people new to the question must play catch up and go through the process of learning. I expressed this point earlier.

You studied the shadows for a whole afternoon? OK hardly exhaustive but do have any images of these results and the context in which you became aware of these images and could you post them? I've been avoiding visiting the hoax and hoax debunking sites and videos preferring to look at information provided in official archives. I also look for the obvious, which is why I posted the double shadow LEM, of which there are many and don't post distant landscape anomalies, not yet anyway, I'll harvest the low hanging fruit first.

It is important to work out if that fruit is rotten or not at some point in your exploration.

You did provide a written explanation but no images or technical links. Just a link to an article on how it's possible to fake Apollo, five decades later. You said, in words to the effect that because the background is real it couldn't have be done in a studio or outdoor set and therefore everything else is unlikely to be faked.

That's roughly correct. Do you agree or disagree? Why?

The images show double shadows where only one should be present. Indicating there was more than one light source, one higher than the other and one stronger/nearer/further than the other. One light is fixed and the other light is moved from image to image, left to right, up and down. The photos appear to be taken within a short time of each other as were many other LM/EVA photos. The other photos on the magazine show no sign of double exposure so I doubt it's that. As for NASA's sloppiness these images were probably never meant to see the light of day and lay forgotten for 35 years. The people who scanned and uploaded them had no idea that any could've been faked and didn't bother to check.

I think you are leaping to that conclusion without warrant, and that with further (due) diligence, you might come to a different conclusion. Please see my numbered list of considerations below.

Encourages people to look, think, make up their own minds. Am I expected to provide an entire narrative to a possible moon landing hoax? The images I provide indicate that something is amiss and the moon landing merits further study, as do the other NASA ventures that followed and continue to this day. You never know what it could lead to.

Now you are being hyperbolic; You are deliberately misinterpreting my earlier suggestion (being to create a narrative explaining the images and then to test it) as being something fantastic when I had hoped it should be clear that I meant something quite different.

Did you read through the thread I linked to?:

Dave McGowan's new series "Wagging the Moondoggie"

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

cassiopaea.org

That was from 2011.

You would do well to get caught up. This subject has been explored here before in some depth, and in the link above, I personally provided a lot of information regarding my own thoughts on the subject which, in the venn diagram of "Things Covered" would include much of the material you are sharing if you thought it through with a critical mind.

The posted links to my photographic experiments do appear to have become unlinked. It has been nearly a decade and I'm not sure I can find them again on my hard drive, and am I not eager to spend the time to re-create them for the benefit of somebody who hasn't bothered to Read Before Posting.

Rather I encourage you to do the tests described yourself, and again, to examine the images you have posted and try to work out why they might look the way they do rather than leap to exotic conclusions. Often this is a valuable exercise which will serve you well, not just in securing your connection to Objective Reality, but in identifying the truly weird stuff when it does come up.

In working on such an exercise, you might try to process some of these ideas:

1. The bright parts in all the images, the hills etc., are themselves light sources.

2. What was the focal length set to for the shots in question? How did the cameras work?

3. Are some of the dark shapes which look like shadows in fact parts of the lander up close and out of focus combined with incident shadows being cast beyond them? (This might explain why features on the ground appear to be in sharper focus than the large dark areas apparently right next to them.) The contrasting blurriness of the dark areas is the feature of interest to me which needs explaining as much as, and possibly more than the apparent doubling up of shadows.

4. What kind of geographic features were behind the photographer when this shot was taken which could have created secondary light sources?

5. The lander is covered in highly reflective materials. Does that figure into this?

6. It appears that experiments and other deployments were set up beside the lander; could those be casting light?

7. Were these photographs shot through glass or were they taken outside the lander?

8. Was there a flash on the camera, or were there any artificial light sources?

9. Could the manner in which the photos were developed be the cause of the blurry double-imaging?

10. Could the effect be caused not by a light source moving, but by the photographer moving? Is there a relationship between the camera position and the position of the blurred/dark artifacts? What would that imply? (You can test this yourself.)

11. If the light/s was/were artificial, why did it result in parallel lines rather than diverging lines?


These are the kinds of critical questions (the true low hanging fruit of logical inquiry) you would do well to satisfy before putting forward an exotic narrative, which, (correct me if I'm wrong), would essentially be, "Hoaxers shot these pictures on Earth, but revealed their strategy by foolishly using two light sources instead of one, and here we have caught them!" No?

I don't think that claim is substantiated, and I think that, Yes, you DO need to supply a convincing story which adequately satisfies rational inquiry before you can make it stick. Based on the work I have done, I don't think it can be achieved without ginning up errors in judgement, self-deception, slight of hand or some combination thereof.

 

[Hi_Henry]

preferring to look at information provided in official archives. I also look for the obvious,

When I was in grade school the Apollo Program was with me nearly non-stop. I loved it, until that is ...

Have a go at this image,

It never ceases to amaze me how miraculous the Universe is.

 

[Woodsman]

When I was in grade school the Apollo Program was with me nearly non-stop. I loved it, until that is ...

Have a go at this image,

It never ceases to amaze me how miraculous the Universe is.

Are you suggesting that something about this image changed your opinion about the space program? If so, what is it?

 

[Hi_Henry]

Are you suggesting that something about this image changed your opinion about the space program? If so, what is it?

The Space Program is/was more than just the so called "Moon Walks". More than just some of these weird images makes me believe that the "Moon Walk" Program is not what it's cracked up to be.

That picture poses a problem for me to except it as representing a scene from the surface of the Moon. I find it next to impossible to believe that the millions of years of collecting lunar dust on the Moon the rocket engine while descending would not have had that dust swept onto the LM foot pad. Where did the dust go ?

The acceleration due to gravity on the surface of the Moon is about 1.625 m/s2, about 16.6% that on Earth's surface.

I gather you see no problem in the image.

Near zero gravity environment sure is interesting.

 

[Woodsman]

The Space Program is/was more than just the so called "Moon Walks". More than just some of these weird images makes me believe that the "Moon Walk" Program is not what it's cracked up to be.

That picture poses a problem for me to except it as representing a scene from the surface of the Moon. I find it next to impossible to believe that the millions of years of collecting lunar dust on the Moon the rocket engine while descending would not have had that dust swept onto the LM foot pad. Where did the dust go ?



I gather you see no problem in the image.

Near zero gravity environment sure is interesting.

I'm not sure I'm following. You believe there should be moon dust on top of the lander foot and that the absence of dust indicates the moon landing didn't happen?

 

[mrtn]

In fact there *is* dust on the foot if you zoom in on the left part.

 

[lilies]

For me, the Moon landing hoax is simple: They might have landed on the Moon, but I think they saw so much alien activity, that very little photography was made, almost no footage, since making videos was out of the question, they were unusable with the cryptic objects flying around. They hurried or were chased back.

NASA must have realized way before that they won't be able to make Moon videos. They realized they had to create most footage in a Hollywood studio. The YT videos titles What Happened on the Moon Part 1 2 excellently explain this. I think only two egregious "mistakes" are enough to disintegrate the authenticity of the Moon footage:

1. Moon lander, when launching from the Moon had a rocket engine, which provided the necessary lift to escape Moon's gravity. This rocket engine - stated by a rocket engineer - produced a very thick brown smoke of a density somewhat like you see in the Houston launch videos. On the footage: there was no smoke. The Moon Lander was simply lifted off by a Hollywood Crane and ascended, then on the last frames you see that the lander began to weave as the Lander reached the top end of the crane, the cable run out and the structure couldn't be lifted no more: the video conveniently cuts out. Very telling errors.

2. The astronauts on the Moon had to wear super-heavy, super-sturdy Moon-gloves that allowed absolutely zero chance to operate the Moon Cameras with which NASA lied the videos were made. You can see on the Hollywood Footage that the astronauts are merrily manipulating their camera's buttons and dials in simple construction worker gloves used everywhere on this planet, which are thin and allow their fingers access to the camera controls.

There were at least two dozen other very interesting facts completely destroying the NASA Moon Footage lie. Like the camera that was made for them couldn't have possibly recorded film on the Moon with the visual quality - and in the cold cold cold temperatures, the way the footage was made in Hollywood, because of simple technological limitations: stated on film by The Maker of the Moon Camera.

Then there was the very very telltale Hollywood Studio Lighting, which should be a laughing matter around the world!
Any Technological Director or Lighting Specialist or amateur computer graphics trainee, like me, could tell you that the majority of movies that came out in the last 70 years or so until this very second.. are made with professional lighting techniques used everywhere and these average and better than average movies expect a sizeable profit rightly so! These movies are well lit from multiple sides[!!!], chairs, tables, rooms, spaces, caves, actors, trucks, anything in the scene are well lit - professionally - with multiple light sources and by now this look it has been ingrained into the public consciousness.

Unfortunately most of the Moon Landing Footage uses this Professional Studio Lighting. In the YT videos high expert Lighting Specialists analyze the footage and say it is artificial studio.
So when you see a non-movie footage that is lit horribly, you immediately know, it is not a movie. This very horrible real-life footage lighting we should see in the Moon Landings Videos with sharp & darkest deep shadows that completely obstruct most detail! Instead: what you are shown on most of the claimed "authentic" Moon footage is carefully and expertly constructed Hollywood Studio Lighting with soft & transparent pretty shadows so your eyes can feast on All Detail!

You can only fool the laymen Sheeple. The Unknowing, non-expert public is easy to fool.

You simply can't fool an expert and well respected nuclear physicist with a lie that your nuclear power plant is not leaking - when it is - , when the scientist explains in great detail why your nuclear power plant is leaking and will cause a catastrophe soon.

 

[Hi_Henry]

I'm not sure I'm following. You believe there should be moon dust on top of the lander foot and that the absence of dust indicates the moon landing didn't happen?

Yes, I believe there should be dust on that foot pad and plenty of it. During landing and once the engine is off I would expect dust to find its way into and onto that pad. Even more striking is the fact that inside the semi-closed space where we see the knuckle joint we see nothing in there. I would expect something in there. But things are not as one would expect on the Moon. The lunar dust ,fine portion of the regolith, that is said to cover the Moon is simply super special stuff. It flew off the lunar surface into space never to come back or lodge itself into any crevice. Neither do we see pit marks on the foil from the accelerated by the thrust rocks or dust particles.

There were at least two dozen other very interesting facts completely destroying the NASA Moon Footage lie. Like the camera that was made for them couldn't have possibly recorded film on the Moon with the visual quality - and in the cold cold cold temperatures, the way the footage was made in Hollywood, because of simple technological limitations: stated on film by The Maker of the Moon Camera.

Don't forget the heat from the Sun. That's why , I assume, we see that gold foil (? carat level) so as to prevent the pad from melting away. Oh sorry NASA, the AU foil is there to protect the miles of wiring for the probe which has the binary function "Touch" or "No touch". Unless that is it is an intelligent sensor calculating how much dust is below the LEM.

I will leave what I initially wrote above as there is an explanation for the foil.

This is what I managed to find once I started to look into what exactly were these spider legs,

The four landing gear system "legs" (or "struts") on the Apollo Lunar Module descent stages were indeed built by a Canadian company called Heroux-Devtek, based in Quebec. These landing legs were constructed of a light-weight aluminum and compressible honeycomb design to aid in shock absorption. These legs and their landing footpads were indeed covered in a very thin layer of insulating Kapton and Inconel foil wrap, which was manufactured by DuPont in the good ol' US of A. The fact that the landing pads were covered in this foil simply to ensure that a US-manufactured product was the first thing to contact the lunar surface is a bit of hyperbole though. They were wrapped in this foil because of Kapton's excellent insulative properties in a vacuum environment, and Inconel protected the equipment from the blast coming from the Lunar Module's descent engine.

Since there were sensors on the pads that means the engines were ON up to the moment of contacting the surface. Otherwise they would not be needed. Hence when touching the lunar surface the dust under the LEM would have being whipped up into an extremely clean storm. Where's the dust ?

Here we have a supposed visit to the Surveyor-2. The photo shows the little space midget's foot dirty as can be.

What a difference a human lunar pilot can make. No need to go to the Lem Wash after landing.

 

[Woodsman]

For me, the Moon landing hoax is simple: They might have landed on the Moon, but I think they saw so much alien activity, that very little photography was made, almost no footage, since making videos was out of the question, they were unusable with the cryptic objects flying around. They hurried or were chased back.

NASA must have realized way before that they won't be able to make Moon videos. They realized they had to create most footage in a Hollywood studio. The YT videos titles What Happened on the Moon Part 1 2 excellently explain this. I think only two egregious "mistakes" are enough to disintegrate the authenticity of the Moon footage:

1. Moon lander, when launching from the Moon had a rocket engine, which provided the necessary lift to escape Moon's gravity. This rocket engine - stated by a rocket engineer - produced a very thick brown smoke of a density somewhat like you see in the Houston launch videos. On the footage: there was no smoke. The Moon Lander was simply lifted off by a Hollywood Crane and ascended, then on the last frames you see that the lander began to weave as the Lander reached the top end of the crane, the cable run out and the structure couldn't be lifted no more: the video conveniently cuts out. Very telling errors.

The thing with these kinds of questions is that many people have asked them before, and plenty of research has been done regarding them. This is a benefit to us because we can then sift through the answers and meta check the claims. I've not come across anything which doesn't stack up against scrutiny. The following video addresses the question of fire plumes and why one was not visible when the LEM lifted off. It even offers an example of an earth-based launch of a Gemini mission using the same type of fuel, where the flame is transparent:

More information here:

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20090016298.pdf

-And because rocket engine tech is SO cool, I offer this video purely for the educational/awesome value. I defy anybody to watch it and not come away with an appreciation for how amazing and complex the accomplishments were of rocket science!

2. The astronauts on the Moon had to wear super-heavy, super-sturdy Moon-gloves that allowed absolutely zero chance to operate the Moon Cameras with which NASA lied the videos were made. You can see on the Hollywood Footage that the astronauts are merrily manipulating their camera's buttons and dials in simple construction worker gloves used everywhere on this planet, which are thin and allow their fingers access to the camera controls.

There were at least two dozen other very interesting facts completely destroying the NASA Moon Footage lie. Like the camera that was made for them couldn't have possibly recorded film on the Moon with the visual quality - and in the cold cold cold temperatures, the way the footage was made in Hollywood, because of simple technological limitations: stated on film by The Maker of the Moon Camera.

The story of the cameras used on the Moon mission is very interesting and detailed. Well worth reading up on. There is plenty of information about this fascinating element of the Apollo missions.

The Hassleblad cameras were specially modified both to function with heavy gloves and to function in extreme temperatures and vacuum, taking into account such aspects as static electricity and lubricants which would boil off in space. Photography being such an important part of the mission, extensive planning and preparation was put into the job of doing it right. The astronauts trained on the various cameras for months prior to the mission, learning how to calculate focal depths and such so that they did not need to use a view finder.

There is plenty of information you can look at to test your theory of hoax, but the link (below) is pretty good; as well as the main body of the essay, it also hosts a long discussion in the comments about temperature and the effects on film, which addresses and I think ought to satisfy the skeptics.

The Apollo 11 Hasselblad Cameras

I’ve been an avid follower of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing this week. Although it’s a bit on the side of what I usually write about, I want to celebrate this grea…

sterileeye.com

Then there was the very very telltale Hollywood Studio Lighting, which should be a laughing matter around the world!
Any Technological Director or Lighting Specialist or amateur computer graphics trainee, like me, could tell you that the majority of movies that came out in the last 70 years or so until this very second.. are made with professional lighting techniques used everywhere and these average and better than average movies expect a sizeable profit rightly so! These movies are well lit from multiple sides[!!!], chairs, tables, rooms, spaces, caves, actors, trucks, anything in the scene are well lit - professionally - with multiple light sources and by now this look it has been ingrained into the public consciousness.

Unfortunately most of the Moon Landing Footage uses this Professional Studio Lighting. In the YT videos high expert Lighting Specialists analyze the footage and say it is artificial studio.
So when you see a non-movie footage that is lit horribly, you immediately know, it is not a movie. This very horrible real-life footage lighting we should see in the Moon Landings Videos with sharp & darkest deep shadows that completely obstruct most detail! Instead: what you are shown on most of the claimed "authentic" Moon footage is carefully and expertly constructed Hollywood Studio Lighting with soft & transparent pretty shadows so your eyes can feast on All Detail!

I have to disagree. You must be looking at very different images than the ones I have seen to arrive at that conclusion. What are you looking at to conclude that multi-directional lighting was used? The images I see have almost pitch black shadows which are cast in the parallel lines one would expect from the Sun and which I don't even know how one would go about faking with artificial light sources.

 

[Woodsman]

Yes, I believe there should be dust on that foot pad and plenty of it. During landing and once the engine is off I would expect dust to find its way into and onto that pad. Even more striking is the fact that inside the semi-closed space where we see the knuckle joint we see nothing in there. I would expect something in there. But things are not as one would expect on the Moon. The lunar dust ,fine portion of the regolith, that is said to cover the Moon is simply super special stuff. It flew off the lunar surface into space never to come back or lodge itself into any crevice. Neither do we see pit marks on the foil from the accelerated by the thrust rocks or dust particles.

I think you are visualizing it incorrectly.

Try blowing on a sand pile. Even in an atmosphere, you will see the resulting surface look a lot like the ground as it appears under the lander, with some structures able to crumble upon pressure after you have done blowing on it. In a vacuum the dust, as we see in other pieces of motion picture footage, falls quickly to the ground again despite how fine it is. I don't think there is anything special about the fact that the tops of the lander's feet show no dust build up. They would have been above the blast radius after the dust was blown clear. There is no conflict that I can see.

 

[Hi_Henry]

I think you are visualizing it incorrectly.

Try blowing on a sand pile. Even in an atmosphere, you will see the resulting surface look a lot like the ground as it appears under the lander, with some structures able to crumble upon pressure after you have done blowing on it. In a vacuum the dust, as we see in other pieces of motion picture footage, falls quickly to the ground again despite how fine it is. I don't think there is anything special about the fact that the tops of the lander's feet show no dust build up. They would have been above the blast radius after the dust was blown clear. There is no conflict that I can see.

The dust (very fine particles) are not only found on the surface of this mélange layer but through out it. The lunar surface is a dynamic surface as it is also on other planets. Things accumulate, appear, and disappear as a result of dynamic forces, earthquakes, volcanoes, impact events etc.

THE LUNAR REGOLITH
David S. McKay, Grant Heiken, Abhijit Basu, George Blanford,
Steven Simon, Robert Reedy, Bevan M. French, and James Papike
Regolith is a terrestrial term, also used for the Moon. It has been defined as “a general term for the layer or mantle of fragmental and unconsolidated rock material, whether residual or transported and of highly varied character, that nearly everywhere forms the surface of the land and overlies or covers bedrock. It includes rock debris of all kinds, [including] volcanic ash . . .” ( Bates and Jackson, 1980). All the lunar landings and all photographic investigations show , that the entire lunar surface consists of a regolith layer that completely covers the underlying bedrock, except perhaps on some very steep-sided crater walls and lava channels, where there may be exposed bedrock.

We are told that this is the typical cross section of the lunar surface,

So we have about 10 meters of this stuff. Engine cut off is at around 1-2 feet from when the surface is contacted. At that height (> 2 feet) the rocket engine would be blowing not just dust but grains of various diameters so I find it hard to believe that no rock particle of whatever size (that was under such an engine) would not bounce inside that landing foot. Whatever it blew away more was available as the following paper suggests.

Reading this paper I get the impression that they were standing on a surface of dust (see table 7.3 and 7.17),

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

So the hypothesis that dust was cleared as they approached is a weak explanation as supported by the above (supposedly lunar) hard data provided in the paper.

 

[lilies]

The following video addresses the question of fire plumes and why one was not visible when the LEM lifted off. It even offers an example of an earth-based launch of a Gemini mission using the same type of fuel, where the flame is transparent:

Jesus, that's a millenial's word against experts twice her age in the What Happened On the Moon? Part 1 # 2 videos. She is as convincing to me as a yellow potato.

I have to disagree. You must be looking at very different images than the ones I have seen to arrive at that conclusion. What are you looking at to conclude that multi-directional lighting was used? The images I see have almost pitch black shadows which are cast in the parallel lines one would expect from the Sun and which I don't even know how one would go about faking with artificial light sources.

Right there is the staged photo with the studio lighting, made in a Hollywood studio with a professional, probably a Senior Lighting Technical Director

versus

Here is a real-world photo, properly unprocessed = zero post process, without any regard to studio lighting: just someone snapping a photo with a mere camera.. exactly as how it would look like if the Moon astronauts just snapped a photo with a mere camera