Has there every been a unified theory of the hoax?

[supermeerkat]

The only hoaxing material I've come across has only ever been about individual parts of the moon landing program, or loosely connected ideas. Has anyone ever tried to come up with a theory that explains the entire Apollo program from launch to landing?

[echnaton]

The target market for hoaxes couldn't follow the argument, so there wouldn't be an audience to pay attention to the proponent.

[gillianren]

So far, I haven't heard one. Every idea I've heard is so full of self-contradiction that you couldn't put it together right if you tried. And none of them ever know anything about anything before Apollo except the couple of years where the Soviets were beating us by whole weeks.

[blackstar]

Plus there are several different versions of the hoax, they didn't go, somebody went but not Apollo, they met aliens, etc. I don't think it's possible to reconcile it all.

[Count Zero]

Over at the "Unexplained Mysteries" forum, Turbonium argues that the Van Allen Belts are impassable, Ove says that the CSM went through the inner belt and orbited Earth between the inner and outer belt, and Cosmored says the CSM footage was filmed on Earth. When the contradiction was pointed out (again), Ove said,

Theres no contradiction, the Command Modules remained in earth orbit with or without the astronauts. The whole thing was staged it doesn't mater exactly how they did it. We are looking for, and find different evidences that they did stage it.

www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=113834&st=8385

[Bob B.]

When one is simply grasping at straws, a consistent theory isn't to be expected.

I've always maintained that the wide variation and inconsistencies in the various hoax theories is strong evidence that it's all a bunch of hogwash. If there was the slightest bit of evidence that any off it were true, then we would begin to see a little bit of order in the chaos as the theories would gravitate toward that one element of truth. But instead, we see every conceivable idea thrown against the wall creating one big chaotic mess.

[Data Cable]

God did it. Reconciles all contradictions, impossible to refute.

[Jason]

May 4, 2010 12:15:14 GMT -4 Data Cable said:

God did it. Reconciles all contradictions, impossible to refute.

That's one Apollo Hoax theory I haven't seen yet.

[thetart]

I like Hagbards one - they faked the whole thing on a completely different planet then on the way home they left six balsa-wood models at the sites, and a couple of balsa-wood ALSEPs.

Does balsa-wood decompose in the moons atmosphere?

[JayUtah]

May 3, 2010 20:52:38 GMT -4 Count Zero said:

...

When the contradiction was pointed out (again), Ove said, ..."The whole thing was staged it doesn't mater exactly how they did it."

And that's typical of the antithesis of investigation that's followed by pseudoscientists, pseudohistorians, and conspiracy theorists. In normal investigation one formulates a hypothesis or set of them and follows each specific one through the available evidence seeing whether that evidence supports or contradicts it. That is, one moves toward a theory in real investigation. If it starts to look like the wrong direction, you back up to where the evidence stopped and come up with a new direction.

In conspiracism the motion is always away from some "official story." The goal is not to find out what happened, but rather to appear to show that some particular thing did not happen. When your approach is to flee from some proposition, there are infinite directions in which to flee.

www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=113834&st=8385

Wow, I love the part where Ove is claiming I didn't know about "the safe zone" until he "learned" me about it! Good heavens, we've known about the basic geometry of the belts for 50 years. The existence I questioned was that of some magical oasis Ove described where manned spacecraft could orbit indefinitely with no ill effects.

He posts the same comically simplified diagram of the Van Allen belts and the same brief web snippet everywhere and makes no actual quantitative argument! And he interprets my attempt to get one from him as ignorance on my part, while all the while he continues to beg the question.

Dunning and Kruger could make a career out of this guy.

[Apollo Gnomon]

No, but it might blow away in the solar wind, or disintegrate in the searing radiation hell of the lunar surface.

In fact, I think 40+ years of temperature cycling alone would disprove the "balsa" theory.

[thetart]

May 4, 2010 16:24:23 GMT -4 Apollo Gnomon said:

No, but it might blow away in the solar wind, or disintegrate in the searing radiation hell of the lunar surface.

In fact, I think 40+ years of temperature cycling alone would disprove the "balsa" theory.

Aaah. But maybe they painted them with solar-wind resistant paint. And nailed them to the lunar regolith with extra-long nails. And they forgot to dig "blast craters" underneath.

[gillianren]

You know, it's one of the pivotal differences between conspiracy theorism of any kind and the "official story." You ask any five CTs who killed JFK and how, and they will all have different answers, often wildly so. You ask anyone who accepts that Oswald did it, and the answers will be consistent and explain the evidence, not explain it away. Ditto Apollo and 9/11. Also, where we're uncertain, we'll admit it and not just say "it has to be that way because my idea doesn't make sense without it," not that it's ever so bluntly phrased.

[blackstar]

May 4, 2010 11:57:24 GMT -4 Bob B. said:

When one is simply grasping at straws, a consistent theory isn't to be expected.

I've always maintained that the wide variation and inconsistencies in the various hoax theories is strong evidence that it's all a bunch of hogwash. If there was the slightest bit of evidence that any off it were true, then we would begin to see a little bit of order in the chaos as the theories would gravitate toward that one element of truth. But instead, we see every conceivable idea thrown against the wall creating one big chaotic mess.

Also their case is based entirely on attacking or misrepresenting the the existing evidence that supports the mainstream explanation, they never do any positive research to back up their claims. For example despite years of attacking moon rocks with the 'radiation oven' nonsense no one has ever come up with a design for such an item.

[LunarOrbit]

May 4, 2010 12:18:02 GMT -4 Jason said:

May 4, 2010 12:15:14 GMT -4 Data Cable said:

God did it. Reconciles all contradictions, impossible to refute.

That's one Apollo Hoax theory I haven't seen yet.

If I remember it correctly, in "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon" Bart Sibrel said that God put the Van Allen Belt between the Earth and the Moon to prevent us from going there. He used the Tower of Babel and the Titanic as past examples of God punishing us for being too ambitious.