Moon hoax claim goes to court

Sunday Herald, The, Jul 11, 1999 by David Milne

LATER this month, as much of the Western world succumbs to a wave of nostalgia over one of man's greatest scientific achievements, a retired technical writer from Santa Cruz will be preparing to drag an all-American hero through the legal system to prove the Apollo moon landings were a hoax. Put simply, the eagle never landed: the whole thing was a con; no one has yet set foot on the moon.

Bill Kaysing is planning to sue James A Lovell, a member of the celebrated crew who survived the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission in April 1970, for calling him "wacky" in a newspaper interview. The slur is unlikely to convince a court of libel - in fact Kaysing is planning to appeal an earlier failed attempt - but that is not the 79-year- old's main aim.

Rather, he wants to air his research, painstakingly gathered, cross-referenced and catalogued over the last 30 years, which he believes points to just one conclusion. "I really believe that the body of evidence proves, beyond doubt, that no way could we have gotten to the moon," he said. Lovell, a Nasa legend who piloted two Gemini and two Apollo missions, was indignant at the claim. "This guy is wacky," he said in the offending report in the Santa Cruz Metro. "His position makes me feel angry. We spent a lot of time getting ready to go to the moon. We spent a lot of money, we took great risks, and it is something that everybody in this country should be proud of. His problem is he saw that movie Capricorn One and now he thinks that's really the way it goes." But Kaysing is difficult to dismiss. A graduate of South Carolina University, he worked for Rocketdyne Corporation, the engine contractor for the Apollo programme, from 1956 to 1963. By the time the eagle landed six years later, Kaysing was already convinced he had rumbled Nasa's ruse: "I could not generate the least enthusiasm for watching a phoney performance." He is not alone. The majority of the world's population - thanks mainly to propaganda - do not believe man walked on the moon. A recent survey even revealed that more than half of America's citizens now believe the whole exercise to be an elaborate hoax. Kaysing's key arguments, responsible for convincing at least some present-day sceptics, are echoed by two other persistent voices, Ralph Rene, a physicist from New Jersey, and David Percy, an award-winning British photographer. Between them, their claims have been persuasive. The only evidence that man ever went to the moon is photographic. Yet analysis by Percy and others claims to show that none of the pictures conforms to any rules of photography - shadows are in the wrong place or missing altogether, some pictures appear obviously manipulated and no still image matches film footage, yet both were supposedly shot at the same time. Furthermore, it is argued, the astronauts' cameras had no light meters or viewfinders and were operated by hands gloved with cumbersome, high pressure spacesuits, yet the pictures are perfectly exposed and sharply focused. Percy believes the images are simply too good, matching the quality achieved by advertising agencies after hours of set dressing. "This is a category of photograph that just does not compose itself," he reports. "This scenario is exactly the same as the official wedding photographer's nightmare, yet it was allegedly done in seconds flat. 'Turn around, click, that's it'.'' Their questions for Nasa do not stop at the pictures. Rene believes the astronauts should have perished in the radiation which emanates from solar flares firing out from the sun. The moon is 240,000 miles away, far outside the "Van Allen belt" which protects the earth and any astronaut operating within it from this radiation. "During the Apollo flights, astronomical data shows there were 1485 solar flares," he says. "Nasa had previously estimated shielding two metres thick would be needed for radiation protection yet the walls of the Lunar Landers were about the thickness of aluminium foil. They should have been fried." Rene has little faith in their spacesuits. "If the suits protected them then why didn't rescue workers utilise them after the Chernobyl meltdown?" Both Rene and Kaysing question the great technological leap that Nasa accomplished. Every Apollo mission before 11 was plagued with around 20,000 defects, Rene claims. Yet Nasa reported no technical problems with every successful Apollo mission afterwards. "The odds against this are so unlikely that God must have been the co-pilot," he said. Kaysing's experience at Rocketdyne echoes Rene's analysis. "They did a feasibility study on astronauts landing on the moon and found the chances of success were something like .0017%," he says. "Hopeless. The technology did not exist in 1969 and it certainly doesn't exist today." A Nasa spokeswoman said the agency did not have time to answer questions concerning hoax claims. But Rene has documented a performance by a Nasa public affairs officer called Julian Scheer in which he delights a private party with footage of astronauts on a Michigan lunar landscape film set. "The purpose of this film is to indicate that you really can fake things on the ground to the point of deception," Rene reports Scheer as saying. He then invited his audience to ''come to your own decision about whether or not man actually did walk on the moon". Legal experts in America believe that any appeal by Kaysing would fail, particularly if he represents himself as in his previous action. But the dedicated sceptics - and their growing band of believers - will not give up. "I can absolutely prove they never walked on the moon," said Rene. "I would destroy their lies. They wouldn't let me near a jury. They'd try to pay me off or kill me." Lovell was unavailable for comment.