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To The Moon!

Holly and I were watching this show on "NatGeo" (National Geographic Channel) last night. It was talking about these people (aka morons) out there that believe NASA's missions to the moon were all hoaxes. Not only do they not believe anyone has landed, they think that we will never go back. They cited pretty mundane arguments. Let me see if I can recap:

• The technology didn't exist for us to land on the moon.
• The flag was "blowing in the wind" as the skeptics put it.
• There were non-parallel shadows, which they concluded were from a second light source and they said there should have been only one... the sun.
• The contrast on the shots the astronauts did take was not extreme enough for the skeptics. Their thinking is that if you take a picture of something and one side of it is facing the sun and the side is not, the dark side should be completely black... no reflective or ambient light allowed... no exceptions (being an amateur photographer and generally NOT a moron, this one was my favorite).
• The astronauts would have been physically unable to snap such good photos with the cameras they had and the suits they were wearing. They referenced something about the vacuum of space being too great for the astronauts to move as easily as they did.
• They said that, as part of this grandiose hoax, NASA broadcast the video of the astronauts walking in half-speed. See, their argument is that if you double the speed of the original broadcasts, it is clear that it was filmed here and not on the moon because their movements are much more "earth-like."

Then the show laid the final blow. They interviewed this dude that works at an observatory in Texas who shoots a laser up to a device on the moon to track the earth's position. You can clearly see a strobe on the moon's surface after a couple of minutes indicating that the laser is being reflected back. I doubt aliens put that device there. This guy says that these skeptics have never contacted him or asked to come and see the operation. The devices were placed on the moon by ASTRONAUTS THAT F'ING LANDED THERE. Idiots!

I love the fact that these people, who have never been outside Earth's atmosphere and have probably never been outside their own counties, are such experts about an environment their simple minds cannot even begin to fathom. We know so little about that environment yet a an ex-non-engineered-employee (which I took to mean he was a janitor) of the company that built the Saturn V rocket, who by the way lives in the Nevada desert and owns a cat sanctuary, can sit in his ratty-ass la-z-boy and proclaim that he has physical proof that manned missions to the moon were a hoax. The show could've done a better job getting some reputable skeptics. Maybe that was the point.

I was yelling at my TV last night. Seriously. Ask Holly.