Hi.
Good afternoon everybody.
How are you?
I hope you had a good lunch.
As always, if you go to my home page: stevenaskew.com you can find the script for this talk and
all my other talks.
You can find questions, you can find the answers, and you can download the MP3.
Practice your listening, practice your writing, practice your reading.
Your English will get better.
OK.
A couple of months ago I did a talk about the moon and while I was doing that I mentioned
the moon landing conspiracy, and I thought I would talk a little bit about that today,
because it's actually quite interesting.
Not because of the conspiracy itself, but more because of what it says about people
in general.
So, let's have a quick look at that.
OK.
Conspiracy.
What is a conspiracy?
Well the dictionary defines conspiracy as "a secret plan by a group to do something
illegal or harmful".
Now, the important words in that sentence of course, are group.
One person on their own cannot conspire to do something.
You must conspire with somebody.
"Conspiracy", "conspire" comes from the Latin "conspirare" which means to agree or to plot,
basically.
So, I could conspire with somebody to steal something, but on my own I just steal it.
OK.
There are obviously a lot of very famous conspiracy theories.
The JFK assassination, of course.
Even though the FBI, the CIA, the American government has released almost all of the
documents pertaining to the assassination, people still believe that Lee Harvey Oswald
on his own did not kill JFK.
They think there was a conspiracy.
There was another shooter on the grassy knoll.
You know the stories.
Maybe we could do that as a talk one day.
It's quite interesting.
9/11.
September the eleventh.
The terrorist attack in America.
2001.
A lot of people think that the Twin Towers were brought down by American placed dynamite,
placed explosions.
They don't think the fuel from the planes would have become hot enough to melt the building's
superstructure and to bring it down like it did.
They think ... and they think there's video footage of this, that there are explosions
at various points down the building, which bring the buildings down.
And they think that was done to ensure that the American people wouldn't argue when George
Bush took America into the war in Iraq.
But, of course, that's obviously not true.
The Hitler conspiracy.
A lot of people, maybe not these days, but a lot of people after the Second World War
believed that Hitler hadn't died, he hadn't killed himself, he had escaped and was living
somewhere in South America: Venezuela, Argentina or one of those countries.
The American government actually released pictures of what Hitler could look like if
he had escaped.
Like this one here.
The flat Earth theory.
Quite recently, I don't know why, but recently this is suddenly becoming more popular again.
There are many people that believe the Earth is actually flat, not a sphere.
And they believe that NASA, and all these government agencies and schools and textbooks
and you name it are conspiring against the general population to make them believe the
Earth is round.
Why they would want to do that I have no idea, but anyway that's ridiculous.
Of course, Watergate.
The conspiracy that brought down President Richard Nixon.
That was obviously quite a big conspiracy.
People broke into the Watergate hotel to steal ... to fix some bugs they'd placed in the
Democratic office, I think, and they were caught.
And it turned out that President Nixon was complicit in this and he'd been recording
conversations in the White House, and he ended up lying.
That conspiracy ended up bringing down his government, basically.
Anyway, the moon landing conspiracy.
What is it?
Well, obviously, Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon, July the 16th 1969.
I've shown you video of that before.
I won't show it to you again.
You all know that that happened.
Shortly after that ... well, in fact that very day, conspiracy theories started to appear.
Even though the footage was broadcast live across the world, one of the most watched
broadcasts in the history of anything ever, many people think it was faked.
They think it wasn't real.
They think that NASA filmed Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins in a film
studio, basically, and used like a trapezes and elastic ropes to make it look like they're
walking on the moon.
Why would people think that?
Well, firstly, why did we go to the moon?
In 1957, the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, had put the Sputnik into space.
The world's first man made satellite into space.
4th of October,1957.
America was nowhere near that.
Then, 1961, Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet astronaut, he was the first man in space, basically.
Well, incidentally, as a side note, Yuri Gagarin actually died later on in a car crash and
there was another conspiracy attached to that.
Some people think he was becoming too popular, so Stalin ... was it Stalin? ... or whoever
was in charge at the time ... Khrushchev?
... anyway ... had him killed.
So, that's another conspiracy theory, but let's leave that to one side.
So, America was losing the space race.
The USSR was beating America at every level: first satellite, first animal, first rocket,
first person, and America had to catch up.
So, May 25th, 1961, JFK, he made that famous speech where he said, "By the end of this
decade, we will put a man on the moon."
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things.
Not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
Which they did, of course.
But, many people think they couldn't.
The cost, the sheer cost alone.
It cost $30 billion of their money, which is hundreds of billions of dollars of today's money.
And many people think that it wasn't actually possible to put a man on the moon in that
short period of time, so, rather than lose face, what JFK ... well, he was dead by then
... but what the American government and NASA conspired to do was fake the moon landing.
Da daaaa!
All right.
Let's talk about some evidence.
Let's talk about ten reasons why people think the moon landing was faked.
I'll go through these in no particular order.
The first one.
If you look at pictures like this, the crosshairs in the middle appear to be behind the objects
in the picture.
Here, the crosshair is behind part of the rover, and here,
the crosshair is behind an astronaut.
And people think ... people say, "well, there you go.
There's evidence that the photographs were doctored."
Obviously, these characters, these people, have been placed in after the photograph was taken.
Number one.
Number two.
People say the high definition photographs are too good.
They could not have been taken in space.
They must have been taken on Earth.
Number three.
People say there are no stars.
You're on the moon.
It's dark.
It's black.
There must be stars in the sky.
Look at our sky.
When it's dark you can see stars.
There are no stars, therefore, it must have been filmed with a black background in a movie studio.
Number four, the shadows.
Look at this picture.
The shadows are all over the place.
Higgledy-piggledy.
If you look at shadows on Earth, obviously, because we have the sun, all the shadows go
the same way, but in this photograph of the moon there are shadows going this way, this
way, this way, and this way, which obviously must mean there is more than one light source.
Ergo, it's filmed in a film studio with different spotlights.
Number five.
Identical backgrounds.
Look at these two pictures, both taken in different places, but the background is identical.
It must be a picture.
It must be a film set.
Number six.
The waving flag.
Armstrong ... Neil Armstrong plants the flag and it waves in the wind.
There is no wind on the moon.
It must be in a film studio.
Number seven.
The props.
Look at this rock.
It has a "C" written on it.
It must be a film prop.
Number eight.
Hot spots.
Look behind this picture.
This is Buzz Aldrin, I think.
Look at the ground behind him.
It's obviously lit by a spotlight.
Number nine.
Footprints.
Look how clear that footprint is.
There is no way you could get that in a vacuum.
Number ten.
Neil Armstrong steps off the ladder, first man to put his foot on the face of the moon.
Who filmed him?
There must have been someone there filming him.
OK.
Right.
Those are basically my top ten reasons that I found researching this.
Now, let's go through and look at each one of them individually.
Number one.
The crosshairs.
Obviously, the crosshairs are marks that are etched on to the camera lens.
Their done to give perspective, because on the moon there is no perspective, so these
are marked on the camera lens because if you know the size of those you can look at the
size of the things you're looking at.
However, they're not actually black lines, they're just marks on the camera.
At the time, when you processed a photograph, there was no way of separating that mark from
anything that's white.
So, if that mark is in front of anything that is white, it will disappear.
If you reprint those photographs using modern techniques, they reappear.
Look at this photograph.
Number two, high definition pictures.
They took some pretty impressive cameras to the moon.
Hasselblad cameras, which are very very nice cameras.
Very very high definition cameras.
However, not all of the photographs are good.
NASA obviously chose the photographs they wanted to publicize.
There are thousands and thousands of photographs that are terrible.
Number three, no stars.
Just because it's black doesn't mean you should be able to see stars.
It's daylight.
It's daytime.
They landed on the moon in daytime, in direct sunlight.
If ... it's direct sunlight now.
It's sunny.
If I go outside and look up, I cannot see any stars.
Why?
Because the sun is brighter than all of the stars.
If you were to go to the other side of the moon you would be able to see stars.
But, on the side with the sun, you cannot see them for the same reason you cannot see
stars at night if you go into a bright city.
Light pollution.
So, there should not be any stars.
Number four.
The shadows.
Shadows are all over the place because yes there is more than one light source, but not
in the way that conspiracy theorists mean.
There is only the sun, of course, but the sun is reflecting off everything.
It's reflecting off the moon lander, it's reflecting off their very white space suits,
and it's also reflecting off the ground, which is extremely reflective.
So, because the moon ... the sunlight is reflecting in different angles and bouncing around, you
are going to have different angled shadows.
But, not just that, the ground of course is not completely flat.
There are hills, there are dips, there are craters.
So, if you have two rocks next to each other and one shadow is here, and one shadow is
here, this piece is on a small hill.
You can recreate this image quite easily.
Look.
Number five.
The identical backgrounds.
The backgrounds are not identical, they are very similar.
These are not hills, these are mountains in the far distance.
If you look at this photograph of mountains on Earth, you can see that the mountains are
in the distance.
How do you know that?
Because they're hazy, they're not quite as well focused as the details in the foreground.
And, because you can look at the trees, the water and you can judge the distances through
experience.
The moon does not have an atmosphere, so things in the distance do not appear any hazier than
things in the foreground.
And the moon does not have trees, so you cannot judge the scale of things.
So, these mountains in the far distance appear like hills close up.
Which, of course, they are not.
The waving flag.
The flag is not waving.
As Neil Armstrong puts it in, the flag is fastened here and here, as Neil Armstrong
fastens it in the ground he turns the flagpole, which makes the flag move.
And it stops.
And then it doesn't move again.
It looks like it's waving because the flag was folded up.
And when you unfolded it it has creases, but it's not actually waving, it's just hanging
there, as it would in a vacuum.
Labeled props.
That's a mark on a stone.
You can find other marks on stones.
Look at this.
Hot spots.
This is not a spotlight.
This is light reflecting off their very white space suits.
Sunlight is very very hot.
The surface of the moon is very very hot.
To cool the astronauts down, they had cooling systems inside the spacesuits, but also, they
had highly reflective spacesuits to reflect back as much sunlight as possible.
And that would mean that the sunlight would be reflected in all different angles, also
on to the ground, looking like spotlights, which it's not.
The footprints.
Sand on Earth and dust on the moon are very very different.
Sand on Earth is weathered by rain, by wind, and the particles they rub against each other
and they become very round.
If you stand on a soft beach, take your foot away, the sand falls back.
On the moon, because they don't have wind and they don't have rain, the particles are
not weathered, they are very very sharp, and these particles catch against each other.
So, if you put your footprint on the moon, it will stay there forever, unless it's hit
by a meteorite.
In fact, you can look at the moon right now and you can see the things that the astronauts
left there, and, if you had a powerful enough telescope, you could see that footprint, if
you know where to look.
Number ten.
Who filmed Neil Armstrong?
The camera affixed to the side of the moon lander.OK.
I got carried away there.
Sorry.
There are two more things.
Sorry.
There's one more thing, a lot of people also bring up: there are a lot of deaths of people
connected to these programs.
A lot of deaths of young people who are connected to these programs, and people say, "Aha!
NASA has been going around killing people that were going to give the game away."
But, if you think about it, most people that are connected with the space industry ... most
astronauts, how do they become astronauts?
They go through the military, usually through the air force, and they're usually test pilots.
Test pilots have a higher rate of death than the average person because they're flying
untested planes.
Test pilots also drive faster, they also take more risks.
It is not unusual for a large number of people involved in a space exploration program to die.
It's not unusual.
OK.
Two more important things that kind of refute this conspiracy.
The first one of course, is people conveniently forget Russia.
Now, Russia was winning in the space race.
When America started to build their Apollo rockets to start their Apollo program, Russia
was watching them.
The Cold War was in its depths.
Russia had spies in America.
Russia had satellites, Russia was following the whole space program.
If the Americans had not actually gone to the moon, Russia would have noticed, and they
would have told people, because that would be a huge public relations victory for them,
to be able to prove that America did not go to the moon.
If it had been faked, the Russians would have known about it.
And the second thing that makes this conspiracy completely impossible is this.
I talked about the Watergate conspiracy.
Richard Nixon's presidency was brought down by this.
There were seventy people, approximately, involved in that conspiracy.
Seventy people, and they could not keep this secret.
So many of them talked.
So many of them gave away the secret, that within months the whole thing collapsed.
Seventy people.
Do you know how many people were involved in sending the Apollo 11 to the moon?
Can you guess how many people?
400,000! 400,000 people would have to be complicit in this conspiracy.
400,000 people would have to keep this secret,
would have to not tell anybody or give anything away.
Is that possible?
Is that even remotely possible?
Of course not.
Even if there was evidence that you couldn't argue ... even if there was irrefutable proof
that the moon landing was faked, 400,000 people could not keep that a secret.
It would have come out decades ago.
It's obviously not true.
OK.
Now, people believe in conspiracies like this.
Why?
Well, up until 2001 about 6% of Americans believed that the moon landing was faked.
After the moon landing in 1969 that was high and gradually it came down of course, because
of education, information, people worked out that it was obviously not true.
In 2001, Fox, the Fox film company, they released a documentary called
Conspiracy Theory: Did we land on the moon?
As soon as that program was released, the number of people that believed that the moon
landing was faked went from 6% to 20%.
Because of that one program.
What does that say about us as a people in general?
Well, firstly, it says that we believe the media.
We believe what we see.
We believe what we're told far too easily.
Companies like Fox, they produce programs that they think people will watch.
They don't worry about the truth.
I mean, if you watch Fox News you would understand that pretty easily.
They don't worry about the truth, they produce things that they think people want to watch.
They are an entertainment company.
Now, our problem is we don't take that with a pinch of salt.
We just watch it and we accept it, which we shouldn't do.
The second thing is we implicitly don't trust our governments.
We think our governments are up to something they shouldn't be.
In any country, not just in America, we think our governments are doing things behind our backs.
Whether they are or not, that's what we believe as a people.
We want to understand things that we possibly can't understand.
The moon landing is pretty difficult to understand, how all of this could have happened.
It's pretty incredible.
It's much easier to think that it is a conspiracy.
It's much easier to think that, because then you feel you understand this, whereas to actually
really understand it you would have to put some time in and you would have to study about it.
It's much easier to say it's not true.
We want control and security.
We want to think we know what's happening.
Take, for example, climate change.
Climate change is a huge thing.
Human ... human caused climate change is a huge thing, and we have to accept that.
But, many people like to think it's a conspiracy.
They like to think the governments of the world are conspiring against us to raise taxes,
to get money, to do all these changes and stuff, because if climate change is actually
true, we have to change our lifestyles, and that's inconvenient.
It's much easier, we have much more a sense of control if we think, "No, it's all a lie."
Maintain our self-image, of course.
People have a sense of pride.
We like to believe we know a lot of stuff.
If you believe in a conspiracy theory, if you've researched a conspiracy theory, any
party you're at, any situation you're at when you can talk to people, you have a feeling
of superiority.
You know more than other people and you can feel good about yourself.
Plus, once you start believing in a conspiracy theory, you have to keep believing in it,
because, to admit you are wrong, means admitting you were wrong, and then you lose face.
So, once you start going down the path of conspiracy, you have to keep going.
OK.
So, humans naturally believe in conspiracies.
How do we not?
How do we stop?
How do we avoid that?
Well, obviously, think about anything you're told.
If something ... if a TV show tells you something, if the government tells you something, if
anybody tells you something, don't just accept it.
Think about it and research.
If you think and if you research, you will find all these answers yourself, and you will
know a lot more.
Anyway, thanks for listening.
I enjoyed talking about that.
I might talk about more conspiracy theories.
That was quite fun.
If you liked this video click "like" down there somewhere.
If you want to subscribe, that button's around about here.
Looks like my face.
And if you want to, if you have any ideas for talks, anything you'd like me to talk
about, please put them in the comments section below here.
Thank you.
Have a nice day.
Talk to you next week.
Bye.
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