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The Race to the Space Moon! (Back to the Conspiracy)
45 Plays1 year ago
Josh and M revisit both episode 29 and 191, as they revisit the space race and the most important question of all time: does the Moon actually exist?
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Transcript
Absurd Moon Myths and Humor
00:00:00
Speaker
The moon. For millions of years it has been humanity's greatest obsession. Early Mesopotamians believed the moon was a giant onion that had rolled off a dinner plate and onto the table spread of the gods. To the ancient Greeks, the moon was the source of all the snakes in the world. Spanish conquistadors would seek to harness its life-giving emanations by hurling newborn infants at it from cliff tops, resulting in their almost immediate extinction as a society.
00:00:26
Speaker
Well today we know the moon was mostly likely formed from the debris left by the destruction of an earlier, slightly larger moon. It remains a source of mystery forever out of our reach. Not a single word of that was true. Some of it was true. None. None of it was true.
00:00:42
Speaker
Well, what then? I gotta start with the whole people walked on the moon claptrap again, eh? You mean the events of the Apollo program, scrupulously recorded and witnessed firsthand by millions of people around the world? There you go again, Shaw. We exploded people at the moon in metal tubes and they drove around in a beach buggy before parachuting back down to Earth and going for a swim. Do you even listen to yourself?
00:01:07
Speaker
Why do I have it? Look, can we at least agree that whatever happened, Stanley Kubrick's version of The Shining is a clear metaphor for it? Obviously. Now, Saturn. Have you ever noticed how Saturn sounds an awful lot like Satan? I'm going outside for a while. Watch out for moon snakes. But that's no moon snake. It's a moon station. Moon station.
In-Person Recording Challenges
00:01:33
Speaker
Wah wah wah.
00:01:36
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dintus.
00:01:47
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Addison and also in Auckland, New Zealand, close enough that I could reach out and caress their clammy flesh. I got a pokey nipple. Ah, how dare. It's Dr. M.R.X.Tenteth. We're in the same place. We're literally in the same location. We are. We are breathing each other's fumes during a pandemic. Steering into one another's eyes. Steering into the abyss.
00:02:13
Speaker
So yeah, that's nice. If nothing else, it means there will be slightly fewer awkward pauses when one of us isn't quite sure that the other one at the other end of the Zoom call has stopped talking yet. And also it means that editing the podcast becomes an interesting proposition again, because when we've been recording on Zoom, we've had quite separate audio tracks.
00:02:32
Speaker
And now we're in the same room using lavier mics, but we're still talking in the same space. So it's now much harder to then separate out the bits or we talk over each other. So with benefits come detriment. Such is the circle of life. It's almost like it's a metaphor for something, but probably not. What's a metaphor? Exactly.
00:02:52
Speaker
So it's a back to the conspiracy episode. It is. We've gone almost all the way back. Not quite all the way back.
Moon Landing Hoaxes and Skepticism
00:03:03
Speaker
We're kind of jumping slightly back and then further back. We're jumping around throughout. And then asking the person in question, has there been any advances on this classic story since we first covered it back in episode 29 and also episode 191?
00:03:21
Speaker
So before we give the game away, should we play a little chime? A jolly jingle. I think we kind of gave the game away with the opening sketch. I'm assuming people... That could have been a metaphor as well. They don't know yet. Plus we also do use ID3 tags on the podcast. So you can technically skip the intro and go straight to the theme with certain podcast apps.
00:03:42
Speaker
God, don't tell them that. Jesus. I'm just making life exciting. Fine, fine, fine, fine. Especially if I start abusing the tags. But yes, let's not countenance that shocking possibility. Let's just play a chime and then do it. Bingo bonk. Buckle up. We're going back to the conspiracy.
00:04:03
Speaker
Right, it's the moon, yes, obviously we're talking about. Well, it's the moon and the race to the moon.
Space Race Propaganda
00:04:10
Speaker
So back in episode 191, we looked at Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy Theories. Sorry, episode 29. In episode 191, we looked at the Phantom Cosmo Mort thesis. Cosmo Mort? Cosmo Mort? Cosmo Mort? Ah, it's Russian, who knows? It could be literally anything.
00:04:28
Speaker
So what we're going to do this time is we're going to combine the race to the moon and did we ever actually get there? Because as we know, no human being can pass through the Van Allen belt without having to put on flares and astronaut suits, and they're called astronaut suits professionally, aren't flared, they're skinny jeans.
00:04:50
Speaker
Yes, no, it's a pickle, but we'll get there. The moon is a pickle, you're quite right. It's only when it gets small, sometimes it's a banana, sometimes it's a pickle, and then sometimes it's more of a melon. This is basic astrophysics, I'm surprised I have to explain it to you. You've forgotten the onion ring point, where it turns into an onion ring. Well, yeah, obviously. But only once every two or three hundred years.
00:05:14
Speaker
Yes, no, but we, so this is good doing it this way because we get to look at the conspiracies from both sides, I guess, the space race back in the late 60s, early 70s, America and... The Cold War. And the USSR engaged in a little bit of a, bit of a, bit of a, I wasn't even a proxy war, was it? It was the two of them strayed each other, but it was a... A Cold War as opposed to a Hot War.
00:05:34
Speaker
And so the race to the moon was very much, I guess, what a propaganda, I suppose. Well, I mean, it was a central part of the Kennedy administration was going to go to that moon, showing superiority, technological superiority. And we might even.
00:05:51
Speaker
blow bit to the moon up as part of scientific experiments, because nothing says human occupation than blowing things up. Yes, no, it would be irresponsible not to. But yes, so we had the Americans, the Americans with their Apollo program on one side and the other side we had the Russians. And I mean, the Russian space program was pretty much a conspiracy just all
Russian Space Secrecy and Cover-Ups
00:06:11
Speaker
around. It was it was notorious for the amount of secrecy involved from reading accounts of the time. It was
00:06:18
Speaker
there'd just be sort of, you know, silence from the Russian people. No, they had there, what was he called? The master engineer or something. There was this person who... Were you making a Halo reference there? I wish I was, but no. There's the person who was in charge of the Russian space program was not even mentioned by name. They were just this mysterious figure. And you'd hear nothing from Russia until they announced one of their many triumphs. And from what I understand, the space war, the space race rather, the Americans, they won.
00:06:47
Speaker
But it was sort of a come from behind sort of a victory. Russia appeared to be in the lead the whole time. Anytime the Americans would come up with some sort of advance, Russia would seemingly effortlessly throw out something even better. Which did lead to questions as to who was infiltrating who during the space race.
00:07:07
Speaker
which is a plot point in For All Mankind, the Apple TV series, which is a hypothetical, what if Russia got to the moon first? What would that mean for the American space race? And one of the plot lines, there is spoilers, is that between seasons two and season three, one of the core American characters basically gets compromised, compromises provided, which makes her start giving information to the Russians, like engine designs and flight plans.
00:07:35
Speaker
And there was a lot of discussion during the Cold War and the Space Race as to were there Russian infiltrators basically working at NASA passing information along. But as you say, the Russian space program was highly secretive and some people put this down to very different attitudes towards building rockets to launch people into space.
00:08:02
Speaker
Russia was not a particularly safety-first culture. It was very much of, we'll build a thing, we'll put a person in the thing, and hopefully the thing will work. While Samaria was much more of the case of, we will build a thing, we will test a thing, and if the thing works, then we might put a person in it, although we still might not do because we're a little bit concerned about the risk.
00:08:26
Speaker
And so there is a theory going around that the Russian space program wasn't just highly secretive but large sections of it have been removed from official histories because of things which went very, very wrong indeed. Or missions where the people who were going up in the rocket were told they were coming down in the rocket but there was never any intention to bring those people back.
00:08:55
Speaker
And that's the Phantom Cosmonaut thesis. Yes, so this is the theory that officially Yuri Gagarin was the first man into space in April of 1961. But the conspiracy theory goes that he's the first one who went into space and lived to tell the tale. Or at least the first one that Russia was willing to admit to.
00:09:16
Speaker
So the idea is that there had been previous missions, which one way or another went badly, but these were completely covered up, so it looked like Russia had a perfect success record. Again, officially, the first Russian cosmonaut to die during a mission was a man called Vladimir Komarov, who died in 1967.
Phantom Cosmonauts: Fact or Fiction?
00:09:35
Speaker
So that's six years after Gagarin's mission. He's the first person who they acknowledged his mission went wrong, and he died. He went up.
00:09:46
Speaker
And then his ashes came down.
00:10:16
Speaker
And so that led people to look at, if that's what we know about, and Russia has been so secretive, what don't we know? We know that missions weren't announced until they were imminent, and failed missions were usually covertly renamed after the fact.
00:10:37
Speaker
to make it hard to then track exactly what was going on with their space program. And also we don't have a complete list or a set of photos of the Nolan Cosmonauts, which given that Stalin and his contemporaries were very keen on photographic manipulation and making people disappear from photos, makes you go
00:10:59
Speaker
Hmm, I mean maybe some of those photos are missing? And this is where I tell my space dog story. Please do. Which I've told on the podcast before, but people may have forgotten it. So there's the Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA, which is one of those museums where
00:11:16
Speaker
Some of the exhibits are real and some of the exhibits are fake and the docents do not tell you. You're just meant to go through and try to work out what's real and what's fake. So I went there and there's an exhibition of the work of Athanas Kircher, which I was fairly sure was genuine because I know a little bit about Kircher and his work. There's also an exhibit about bats who can fly through walls. No, it's going up.
00:11:37
Speaker
Fairly sure that doesn't sound real, but on the top floor they have this room with oil paintings of all the Soviet dogs who went into space. Now these are oil paintings, oil paintings if you're going to just mock one up. They take a really, really long time to make and I was staring at these paintings going
00:12:00
Speaker
On one level, it seems ridiculous you'd commission individual oil paintings of all the dogs you sent into space. In the very least a single painting of all of them playing poker. Yeah. But then I was going, but would you...
00:12:15
Speaker
spend that much time faking oil paintings of all the Soviet space dogs and also it seems like the kind of thing the Soviets would do and it also seems like the kind of thing that would end up in America with the collapse of the Soviet Union and Americans going over there and buying up every single bit of tack they can find and I was going these may be legitimate Soviet era portraits of dogs who went into space or
00:12:43
Speaker
very, very elaborate forgery, which would have taken probably years to commit to because you're making oil paintings of dogs. Yes, I choose to believe they're genuine. I choose to be agnostic. But I live in hope that those are the portraits of those poor dogs who went into space and unfortunately probably never came back. They chased the ball up.
00:13:09
Speaker
all the way up to the moon now there are stories of soldiers of cosmonauts rather who went up and possibly came back but possibly not uh in in great condition there are a few sort of stories that have just circulated with names attached one of them is lieutenant colonel Vladimir Ilyushin he supposedly
00:13:31
Speaker
went into space before Gagarin did, but something went wrong on the mission. But that was always unclear. There was an article in the British Communist newspaper, The Daily Worker, which said that quote, some technical mishap had left Ilyushin deranged. And as a result, he was disappeared by the Russian
00:13:54
Speaker
administration because he was involved in publicity. Some people claim that actually the real problem and the reason why they never admitted to his involvement is that he went up fine but the re-entry was botched and he landed in China rather than in the Soviet Union and then was then held for a year as a kind of political prisoner. Although many people think that story seems unlikely because in the 1960s Russia and China were
00:14:21
Speaker
fairly close. They shared a communist manifesto, for example, and so you wouldn't think they'd be keeping Russian pilots in situations of that ilk.
00:14:31
Speaker
Yeah, so some people claim that there was a Vladimir Ilyushin, but he was a pilot and not actually involved in the space program. So maybe there is, you know, this is a case of there being some sort of a story there that was so sort of half reported and mangled and possibly multiple stories mixed together or something that what we actually have
00:14:51
Speaker
may well be far from the truth. One with a bit more detail is the story of a man called Sergeiev Ivanov, although this is apparently sort of a pseudonym given to him. So the story goes that a severely burned man was brought to a Dr Vladimir Golichovsky in 1961 shortly before Gagarin's mission and it was claimed
00:15:15
Speaker
that this man, who'd been given the pseudonym Sergei Ivanov, was actually Valentin Bondarenko, who was a cosmologist in training, who'd died not actually in a space mission, but on a training mission in a low pressure altitude chamber at the Institute of Biomedical Problems. Interesting euphemism in Moscow. I mean, that's going to be one of those... In Russian, it probably sounds a lot better, but when translated to English, it is the Institute of Biomedical Problems.
00:15:45
Speaker
So yes, apparently this was a chamber with a high level of oxygen a fire started and he was horribly burned and died shortly afterwards. So what we apparently know, his death was not reported at the time, supposedly he's one of these people who was removed from photographs.
00:16:04
Speaker
Again, for propaganda purposes, they don't want to acknowledge the existence of this guy. What about this guy over here? Yeah, we don't talk about him. He's a bit burnt. Apparently this story is credible in that details of his death were eventually published in the West in 1980.
00:16:25
Speaker
a case of a death as part of the space program but not actually a person going into space. But then we have the interesting case of the heartbeats in space from February 4th 1961. So the Soviets had announced there was going to be a Sputnik payload launched into space.
00:16:43
Speaker
and western observers who were listening in on the frequency because once again there's a cold war going on and people are spying on one another willy-nilly they claimed that the supposedly empty craft being used to kind of attest mission the radio broadcast bank had what sounded like moaning a human heartbeat and russian being translated in morse code that suddenly just ended yes so this
00:17:13
Speaker
This was the claim, but that's also been doubted. There was not a lot of evidence given for this, apart from the fact that the transmission was broadcast on a frequency that was easily accessible to amateurs. But people who talked about it suggested it might have been a hoax.
00:17:33
Speaker
or might have just been a test of the communication system on the payload, so those sounds weren't actually coming from someone or something inside the Sputnik payload, it was just something. Which is a plausible thing to think, because if you're doing testing of spacecraft, you need to make sure we've got radio communication, and we probably also want to have some kind of medical broadcast at the same time, so that we can, if the person isn't speaking, you're going,
00:18:00
Speaker
Are you not speaking because you're just being a normal, taciturn Russian? Or are you a normal, taciturn Russian who's a bit dead? So you'd probably have multiple channels and multiple bits of data coming through. So if you were testing a communications protocol, you'd want, you know, a bit of language, a bit of heartbeat, the TV.
00:18:20
Speaker
I'm about to make a joke about a British TV show called Heartbeat. I don't even think I've got enough information to make that reference. That's too deep a cut. Yeah, the main actor was Nick someone.
Debunking Moon Landing Skeptics
00:18:31
Speaker
Him going, no, no, I can't make this work. Maybe 10 years ago it would have been funnier, but now not so much.
00:18:37
Speaker
But yeah, you might have multiple chains of transmission that you're testing. Or, of course, you might have sent someone up in a rocket and then, oh no, that was just a payload test. Definitely weren't sending people up in that rocket. Definitely Eagle was not in that rocket. No one could Eagle was in that rocket at all.
00:18:56
Speaker
No. So that was one. A stronger claim came from two Italian amateur radio operators, the Judica Cordelia brothers. They claimed to have been monitoring Russian transmissions from the late fifties onwards. And they released nine different recordings that they said they had taken from different secret Soviet space missions from the early sixties. And these were all the ones they they released were supposedly missions that had ended in tragedy.
00:19:24
Speaker
So again, people have listened to these and they have not been treated as conclusive proof. Some people have pointed out that the cosmonauts who you hear speaking on these recordings don't use proper air force communication protocols or use the correct terminology, suggesting that possibly it's a hoax from people pretending to be cosmonauts, but they don't actually know all the proper lingo.
00:19:52
Speaker
So basically people laughing as astronauts or cosmonauts. Well, you know, yeah, whether it's people making transmissions for fun, which these brothers picked up on, or these brothers faking their own transmissions. Another thing was that supposedly some of these missions that went wrong record the mission going wrong and the astronauts veering off into space and being lost into deep space forever. I mean, lost in space with Dr. Smith and the robot.
00:20:22
Speaker
You bumbling bobblehead
00:20:25
Speaker
That would be nice, but they're more along the lines of... The pain! The pain! Well, a bit of that, yes, is presumably suffocating or starving to death in the blackness of space. What culture references are not working for me today? They're a little bit aged, a little bit creaking, some of them, I'm afraid. But no, but as people pointed out, in the early 60s, the Russians could put a spacecraft in orbit, but as far as we're aware, what they were launching, they weren't capable of sending something into outer space, even by accident.
00:20:55
Speaker
So people have sort of suggested, well, it's a nice story, but maybe these recordings don't actually give us proof of phantom cosmonauts either. But yet we have no proof that anyone's been to the moon thus far. Because all these stories about people going into space, allegedly, which indicates, does space even exist? And if we're going into space, does it exist? Does the moon exist?
00:21:21
Speaker
Or was it just a paper moon? Now that's a deep cut. That's deeper than I'd prefer, quite frankly. And now I'm going, well, we've got no proof anyone's been to the moon. At least we've got no proof Russians have been to the moon. Josh, persuade me that Americans have been to the moon. Well, lots of people saw them do it. Did they, though? Well, did they? They saw rockets launch into the air.
00:21:44
Speaker
anyone could go along to Cape Canaveral and watch the launches. There was video footage returned back, but we'll talk about that. Which is more about the event of the Michelin Web Sketch about faking going to the moon. We could get one up on the Russian team. We could say we've been to the moon. But what would it take to actually fake going to the moon? Well, you have to build a big rocket. Why? Because people need to see the rocket.
00:22:11
Speaker
But we'll save money elsewhere, we'll actually know not really, and that catering budget for a film set is going to be more expensive than feeding three astronauts in space. So you're saying we should fake going to the moon by actually going to the moon?
00:22:27
Speaker
might just work. Well, I mean, that's kind of the rebuttal. So of course, we're on to the classic now, the actual moon landing conspiracy theories. I don't know. We'll talk about this a bit at the end. I think this used to be certainly one of the big ones. It was the Kennedy assassination, the moon landings, and then 9-11 came along and became the biggest of the three. But it used to be that this was sort of the canonical example of a conspiracy theory, the idea that
00:22:56
Speaker
no one, or at least no Americans, had been on to the Moon, that the Apollo program was a fake, that the video of astronauts walking on the Moon was all faked, and no one had ever actually been there.
00:23:12
Speaker
Now, I remember when you first talked about this at the time, my first question was when, like, did people start talking about this at the time or is it one of those things where years later people suddenly decided they wanted to doubt that? Things like with the whole sort of Shakespeare stuff, which might be another one, another candidate for these back to the conspiracy episodes actually. Yeah, so you should probably go back to Shakespeare, see whether you get the ire of Alan
00:23:38
Speaker
Tarika, who I believe has been corresponding with you recently. I have received emails, but yes.
00:23:44
Speaker
I mean, that was very much a case where, as far as I'm aware, nobody was questioning the authorship of Shakespeare's plays at the time. It was something that happened later. Whereas with the moon landings, was there immediate suspicion or not? So when I first got into conspiracy theories as a child, the standard story everybody told was that actually moon landing conspiracy theories don't occur before the film Capricorn 1.
00:24:12
Speaker
Now Capricorn 1 is a thriller film, great first half, second half, not so great, about a mission to Mars which the American space program has to fake because even though they've built the rocket to take three astronauts to Mars an hour before the launch they discover that the life support system
00:24:35
Speaker
on the rocket is going to fail about three months into the G&A killing the astronauts but because funding for the base program is so fickle they decide they will fake the mission to Mars in order to secure additional funding in the next kind of financial term to then do the mission properly and so the first half of the film is about faking going to Mars and many people at the time watched it going
00:25:03
Speaker
That looks an awful lot.
00:25:07
Speaker
like the moon landing footage. And in this case, we know this footage was shot in a studio because they didn't fake a Mars mission in Capricorn 1 by literally sending people to Mars. And so for a time, people said, look, no one really doubted the moon landing until Capricorn 1 came out. And then it kind of got back ported. If you can fake a Mars landing, why can't you fake a moon landing as well?
00:25:34
Speaker
But it seems that that is not true. Moon landing conspiracy theories are much earlier than Capricorn won. Well, a few years earlier. But yes, Capricorn won apparently 1978. The Apollo program finished in 1972. But yes, the first book recorded about the subject called We Never Went to the Moon, America's $30 billion swindle,
00:25:56
Speaker
was written in 74 and self-published in 1976 by a guy called Bill Kasing. So self-published suggests it wasn't, possibly wasn't a big thing. Probably hard to pitch to a publisher. You know those moon landings you've written numerous books about? All fake. All fake. So he was a senior technical writer, bless him. He worked for Rocketdyne, the company that built the F1 engines used on the 75 rocket.
00:26:27
Speaker
You'd think so, but no. No, that was that was cyber dying, not rockets dying. They worked at terminator rockets. So he served as the head of the technical publications unit at the company's propulsion field laboratory until 1963. So they say that his book effectively began discussions of the moon landings being faked. So he claimed that the chance of a successful manned landing on the moon was calculated to be zero point zero zero one seven percent.
00:26:55
Speaker
I don't know how he came to that exact probability. And so he says that even though the USSR was keeping a very close eye on America, it still would have been easier for them to fake the moon landings than to actually land astronauts on the moon.
00:27:11
Speaker
Now that actually, which is interesting because this is the earliest thing, the earliest published thing about this conspiracy theory. And it does actually build into it a response to one of the most common points against moon landing conspiracy theories, which is if they were really faked, how come Russia didn't know? Because if they knew, surely, surely they would have said something.
00:27:31
Speaker
Yes, you would think that the propaganda value of exposing a conspiracy by NASA to fake a moon landing would be the meant value to the USSR because the USSR would be, look, our space program hasn't been entirely successful for landing people on the moon, but America
00:27:49
Speaker
They said they went there and we've got proof positive they faked it. And given Soviet infiltration of America and the fact that it was a huge problem with spying at the time, you would think they probably would have access to the information if the Americans had faked the moon landing. But I believe, Josh, you're going to provide a counter-argument to this.
00:28:13
Speaker
Well, I will actually in just a moment, because yes, so this guy is saying that even his argument was, yeah, if the Russians got wind that it was a fake, they'd be all over it. But even though, even then, it would still be easier to keep up the enormous amount of secrecy required to get away with the hoax than it would be to actually land people on the moon.
00:28:34
Speaker
The other possibility, of course, is that Russia was faking their space program at the same time. Well, yes, both sides were going, we keep exploding rockets. They go up, but then they don't come back down. If you don't blink, we won't blink. I mean, you said you went to the moon, but you also know that we keep killing our cosmonauts. So we'll just let this one slide. Just don't do it again.
Russian Blackmail and Moon Landing Hoax
00:29:00
Speaker
How many Apollo?
00:29:01
Speaker
no 18 no no but yes no i did i did see now i i read a comment and it was just before i think we decided to actually do an episode on this so i never made a note of it so i can't remember for the life of me where i read it but just recently i saw a comment on it might have been one of our old youtube videos but i couldn't see it in my youtube comments so i think maybe
00:29:23
Speaker
Because this podcast is now broadcast on Free FM in New Zealand and they put a post up on Facebook every time they do one of the episodes, maybe I saw a comment on the Facebook page for an old episode or something. But I don't think we gave them the moon landing episodes too early. Yeah.
00:29:40
Speaker
I don't know, but not too long ago, I saw a comment on a thing talking about moon landings where someone had said, well, obviously, the conspiracy theories are nonsense because Russia would have found out and they would have made an enormous stink about it. And this person replied, no, no, no, no, no. Russia would have found out and then kept it for blackmail purposes.
00:30:00
Speaker
Yeah, and I mean, use is compromise, quite useful, but then you have to explain why in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, someone then just doesn't go, ah, been sitting on this hoping to use it for years now. There's no point holding onto it because the entire administration has gone away. The Americans faked the moon landing.
00:30:20
Speaker
But then even then, the whole point of the space race was that it was this big propaganda war for each country trying to show their own technological superiority. Why, if you had the opportunity to essentially win the war, to show that the other side was cheating, would you then suddenly abandon the entire enterprise and make it look like you'd lost?
00:30:41
Speaker
for some sort of, you know, it doesn't, I can't see any sort of a cost benefit thing that would work out so that it would make sense to hold on to this information for any sort of benefit and in doing so through the space race.
00:30:56
Speaker
Which does suggest that maybe the Americans did go to the moon. But we should probably talk a little bit about the kind of evidence that people appealed to to say, but no, they didn't. Yes. So you've probably heard of a lot of these. There are all the supposed claims about eras in the footage of the astronauts. Rocks with markings on them, which have been painted on before the astronauts even leave their capture.
00:31:20
Speaker
Yes, the lack of stars in the background, the flag moving when there should be no air to make it flutter and so on.
00:31:29
Speaker
These have all basically been debunked as far as I know. The flame flooded because there was a motor attached to it to make it wave in a non-existent breeze. There are no stars in the background due to the focal length of the cameras being used and also, you know, the stark sunlight on the moon kind of washing out the little pinpricks of light from more distant stars. It turns out once you actually understand the, I'd say the Martian environment, I'm very much fixated on Capital One One.
00:31:57
Speaker
Once you understand the lunar environment, a lot of these things make sense. Well, the thing that doesn't make sense. Where's the footage, Josh? Where's the actual footage? I don't know.
00:32:12
Speaker
You're asking me personally. I don't have it. Do you have it? I mean, but the thing is, nobody knows where it is. So one of the bugbears for the moon landing is that we've got the TV recordings of the landing on the moon. But the actual original tapes, the high definition tapes,
00:32:30
Speaker
they're no longer with us. And NASA thinks they may have been accidentally wiped, although they are kind of hopeful they'll turn up one day when someone takes inventory. But it is very annoying from a historical perspective. The high definition tapes are missing, which has led to people going, well, isn't that convenient? Isn't that very convenient indeed?
00:32:57
Speaker
Yes, now other evidence was brought up in a couple of documentaries from the early 2000s. There was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, released in 2001, and Astronauts Gone Wild from 2004, both by a guy called Bart Seabrill. Both available on Pornhub, I believe. Probably. They certainly sound like they should be. This is the guy, if you want to know, this is the guy who Buzz Aldrin punched in the face.
00:33:24
Speaker
if you've ever heard a story about that time Buzz Aldrin punched some guy, this is that guy, he was in the habit of walking up, he was a bit of a, who's the Veritas guy, James O'Keefe? Yeah.
00:33:39
Speaker
sort of a bit of an ambush. A provocateur. Ambush provocateur guy who was in the habit of going up to Apollo mission astronauts like and passing them a Bible and insisting that they swear on the Bible that they really went to the moon and he had apparently called Buzz Aldrin a coward, a liar and a thief to his face, prompting Buzz Aldrin to punch him in his face.
00:34:02
Speaker
So the claims in his movies, one of the main ones is that we can't have gone to the moon because astronauts couldn't have survived going through the Van Allen belt. Which is a belt in radiation around the Earth as opposed to a literal belt that encircles the Earth.
00:34:20
Speaker
Yes, so there are these multiple belts of radiation that encircle the earth, but I believe Dr James Van Allen, who discovered the Van Allen belts, who died... And very fond of wearing belts as well, I assume. He died also in the early 2000s, but after the publication of these movies, apparently he himself had said, no, that's not true, you could, because they're not hanging around in the Van Allen belts, like I think
00:34:46
Speaker
I read some figure about a satellite orbiting the Earth within the Van Allen Belt would receive a huge amount of radiation, but a spaceship going straight through them isn't going to receive anywhere near as much radiation to actually harm a human being. Plus, these people are in metal chairs. Yes, so there was some amount of radiation shielding on top of that as well.
00:35:08
Speaker
I think it's true. If you shot a human being into space without any protective measures, they would die probably as they transitioned through the Van Allen belt, but probably not because of the Van Allen belt, probably due to the lack of oxygen and the fact that it's so incredibly cold. But there are other claims.
00:35:30
Speaker
Some fairly sort of, I remember a few sort of very fiddly technical ones about how this footage that was shot from within the capsule looking out to the window into space into the moon or looking at the moon or looking at the earth are obviously not fake because of the
00:35:49
Speaker
the parallax or something between the window that it's looking through and what it's... They came up with this very sort of geometry-based explanation for why this shot can't be real, but essentially they wanted to claim that, yes, we'd went into space and we took footage from space, but we didn't go all the way to the moon. And so what you're seeing when this is supposedly footage on the way to the moon is actually footage taken from low orbit.
00:36:16
Speaker
and made to look further away. And there were also claims that supposedly they had secret footage of astronauts rigging up cameras to take this fake footage and what have you. But I think, what I find most interesting, I think, actually, I'm sorry, before we get into the final, but the Stanley Kubrick angle, we can't pass up the Kubrick connection. Yeah, we can't pass up talking about the Shining.
00:36:42
Speaker
This was another one where I wasn't 100% certain of the origin of it. Is it simply because Kubrick had already made 2001's Space Odyssey, which remember was made before we'd been up into space and used very clever, very advanced for the time special effects to show footage that was meant to be in space, which ended up being particularly realistic.
00:37:05
Speaker
Was it simply because he'd managed to realistically fake space footage from 2001 that people think he's the guy who they must have gone to for the moon landings? Or was there more to it than that? I'm actually not entirely sure why Kubrick got pinged. I mean, it might be, as you say,
00:37:23
Speaker
his space film compared to contemporary space films and the thing about when you start talking about 2001 you compare the cinematography of 2001 which
Kubrick's Involvement in Moon Hoax?
00:37:34
Speaker
i maintain is a very boring film but it's a very pretty film it's an incredibly pretty film
00:37:40
Speaker
And you compare it to its contemporaries, which have much more engaging plot lines, but also look like they're on card broad sets, and you can see the string when people are floating in zero G. And so I can see a kind of argument of, look at what he did. If someone was going to fake the moon landing footage at this time, Kubrick is the go-to person to do it.
00:38:07
Speaker
But many people often think that this is kind of a joke which has gone somewhat awry. That it wasn't a serious thesis, Kubrick faked the moon landing. It was more a case of, you know, if anyone was going to be able to fake moon landing footage, it would be Kubrick. And now I'm going to tell you an elaborate story as to how I imagined Kubrick would be in on this conspiracy.
00:38:30
Speaker
But it's not entirely clear it started off as a serious conspiracy theory where people say it definitely is the case Kubrick faked the moon landing. It sounds more like it was a pleasant what if, which is then taken on gigantic proportions to the point where people claim that The Shining is Kubrick's coded message about how he faked the moon landing.
00:38:53
Speaker
Yeah, supposedly people have gone over the shining with a fine-toothed comb and come up with all sorts of different interpretations. There's stuff about what is it, it's all about the American
00:39:08
Speaker
treatment of First Nations people and stuff like that, but then other people just claim that there are these various things that show that he was, it was his confession, essentially. He obviously knew he couldn't actually say that
00:39:27
Speaker
that come out and say, yeah, well, I did it. It was all a hoax. But his conscience, his conscience wouldn't allow him to remain silent. So he encoded the message of what he had done into his into his movie. But I think about The Shining.
00:39:42
Speaker
is it's probably one of the most over-analyzed films ever made by human beings. It really is. There might be films made by monkeys which have been similarly analyzed, but I'm not here to talk about those. No, no. Because there was a YouTube video I watched years ago talking about the impossible geometry of the Overlook Hotel. So if you actually spend time looking at the way that scenes transition and people walk into particular spaces, the Overlook Hotel makes no sense.
00:40:12
Speaker
as a kind of physical location. People walk left into what should be the outside, but there are corridors. U-turns are made into areas which are obviously outside locations, but there's more hotel. And people go, isn't Kubrick clever? He's giving you the suggestion of just how messy Jack's mind is at this time, and other people going,
00:40:34
Speaker
No, Kubrick liked fancy shots, but didn't really care about the rest of that stuff, so it's not a deliberate choice to make the Overlook Hotel have an impossible geometry. Kubrick just didn't think anyone would notice that they should have turned left not right in that scene.
00:40:52
Speaker
Yeah, I remember reading a website years ago by a guy who was seeking to explain every single thing that could be considered a continuity error or some sort of a mistake as being on purpose, entirely starting from the point of, Stanley Kubrick does not make mistakes.
00:41:14
Speaker
And so if something looks like a mistake, it's not a mistake. It's something he put there on purpose. I can't remember how he explained the shadow of the helicopter in the opening helicopter shot in the film. But yes, it was all a bit. The only one that actually almost made sense was there's a bit of a continuity era where at one point, Jack, the other famous typewriter on which with all work and no play stuff, at one point you see the typewriter and there's no paper in it. And then later on in the same scene, there's paper in the
00:41:40
Speaker
typewriter, which appears to be a continuity error, but then he will sort of kind of know that you see the hotel is feeding him paper, making sure that he'll continue writing and going insane. I was like, I could possibly give you that one, but certainly not the rest of it. And certainly not anything that would suggest that it's all a reference to him faking the moon landings, which is about where we end things. So I mean, one thing I find interesting about the moon landing conspiracy theories that doesn't apply to many others of them is how much
00:42:09
Speaker
positive refutation there is of them. I mean you'll see a lot of conspiracy theories, it's like here's the conspiracy theory, here are arguments against the theory itself, but with the moon landing there's stuff that says not just the theory itself is wrong, but here's independent stuff that proves it can't be right. There was at the time there was a great, why did I say at the time, a while at the time we first did this
00:42:35
Speaker
did this episode, there was a guy called S.G. Collins, a cinematographer, had a movie on YouTube. Oh, I remember the video. Yeah, and he talks about the amount of film you would need to film people in slow motion to fake the notion that they're weightless. You go, look, film canisters.
00:42:56
Speaker
in the 60s weren't big enough to fit that much film in them because the length of period we've got of astronauts dancing about in low-j on the lunar surface is actually quite a lengthy amount of time because it was being sent back as a video signal to Earth to fake that in a film camera, which you'd have to do at the time.
00:43:20
Speaker
The drums just aren't big enough. They would physically not be able to use this. Yeah, there are all sorts of technical reasons how the, you can see because the light in the footage is coming from the sun, all the shadows are parallel to one another. And so to produce the defect in a film studio, you couldn't do it with, you know, you'd need more that you can't just use a single light source because then you get diverging shadows, you'd essentially need to have a wall of lights.
00:43:44
Speaker
which would have been, at the very least, incredibly impractical. I don't think possible... Very, very hot. Very, very hot. Very, very hot. But, yeah, there's all this stuff about the fact that the motion of the astronauts at low moon gravity would not have been possible to fake with the technology of the time. Essentially, as you say, it would have required some sort of slow motion and various other techniques that just didn't exist then. So you basically get to the point where it's either
00:44:12
Speaker
you don't believe that we had the technology to go to the moon but you do believe we had secret filming technology that for some reason they'd kept under you know it's sort of like something had to have been faked and no matter which way you look at it so that yeah i find that interesting that um that that you can actually make a positive case for like i've never seen
00:44:38
Speaker
I've seen people arguing against, say, the 9-11 architects for truth, or whatever they are, their arguments that, oh, this shows that it must have been a controlled demolition, and people will argue against the thing that they say. But I don't think I've ever seen people go to the trouble of saying, this here proves that it was definitely a collapse due to...
00:44:54
Speaker
I mean, I guess you get some similarities with JFK conspiracy theory stuff. So there are people who are adamant that we can conclusively prove that Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shot and worked alone.
00:45:10
Speaker
But yeah, there is something interesting about the moon landing wand where there's so much ancillary evidence people bring to bear, such as the state of technology in the 1960s, the relationship between Russia and America and
00:45:26
Speaker
spying and infiltration going on there. They go, look, the stories you're telling about the faking of the moon landing just seem highly improbable given everything else we know of that particular time period. And so it does make it a really interesting case of, and I'm going to say it, moon landing, unwarranted conspiracy theory
Refuting Moon Landing Conspiracies
00:45:48
Speaker
here. I'm of the firm belief we've been to the moon because all of my Illuminati meetings are held up there.
00:45:55
Speaker
The other thing, of course, is the mirrors. There is stuff left on the moon. You can fire a laser up at the moon and it will bounce back off of a thing that we left up there. There are various conspiracy theories that go,
00:46:10
Speaker
We sent stuff to the moon, we just didn't send human beings to the moon. It's also a theory which I find personally interesting which is we faked the first Apollo mission. So we've been to the moon but the first one failed in some way and that required faking it so that the Soviets wouldn't take
00:46:33
Speaker
or at least wouldn't try to beat the Americans to the moon, but all the other missions have been successful. And that seems like something go, well, I mean, I still don't think it's true. I still think it's unwarranted, but it's at least it's a more interesting variation of going, well, we did get to the moon eventually, but the history of the Apollo program may not be as clear cut as it appears.
00:46:58
Speaker
So that's essentially a recap of all the stuff we've talked about the moon. But of course, with these back to the conspiracy episodes, we do like to see has anything actually changed since we last talked about it? And I don't know... Well, there was a Doctor Who episode about how the moon was a giant egg. Yes, there's been a bit of pop culture. What's the series you talked about before?
00:47:17
Speaker
for all mankind. There was that found footage film as a polo 19 about the final polo mission and what we brought back which I don't think either of us have watched. I have not watched it though, it didn't sound great. And of course there was a sequel to Moon Trap. Was there?
00:47:37
Speaker
Yeah, it's not very good. I can't imagine. There was Moonwalkers. Moonwalkers came out 2015, which would have been shortly after. I'm sure we probably mentioned it at the time. That was kind of fun. That's Ron Perlman, Ron Perlman and Robert Grint from Harry Potter.
00:47:52
Speaker
And it's about, essentially the CIA wants to hire Stanley Kubrick to fake the moon landing and these sort of, Ron Perlman's a CIA agent in charge of it and he sort of meets up with a bunch of sort of British conmen types who try to cobble together this thing and you know, can't get a hold of Kubrick so I get a mate of theirs who looks like Kubrick and it's all, you know, it's a comedy, it's all a bit of a farce. But it's just nice at the very end, they end up, they film it.
00:48:20
Speaker
They make this footage, but it all goes horribly wrong. And then the film ends with them sitting in a pub, watching the actual footage of the Apollo landings, going, look at that, we finally did it. Didn't we? Sounds a lot like alien autopsy. It's exactly like alien autopsy, but with Ron Perlman, who was from Alien Resurrection. So I can understand your confusion.
00:48:41
Speaker
It's true, I am very confused all the time. So yes, apart from some new popular culture, I don't know that there's really been any advances in the moon landing conspiracy theory, I wonder if... Well, you know, David Eich... David Eich's got stuff to say about the moon, but he's got stuff to say about everything. The moon is hollow. It's only nothing to do with human landings. And rebroadcasting a signal from Earth. But he also claims that John Carpenter was involved in faking the moon landings. Oh, well, that's an interesting... Because there was a John Carpenter...
00:49:09
Speaker
who worked as an effects artist in one of the Star Wars films, which is not the John Carpenter of the Thing fame. It's a different John Carpenter. But David Icke has never seen the same name being used for two different people. So he assumes that John Carpenter must be one and the same. He'd say, well, the Death Star looks an awful lot like the moon, ipso facto, John Carpenter involved in faking moon landings.
00:49:38
Speaker
Which means that Prince of Darkness is probably a confession. Yeah, we should rewatch Prince of Darkness and find all the moon landing stuff in it. Well, I mean we should just do that anyway. We should always rewatch Prince of Darkness. It's a great film. Apart from the rampant sexism by the main character who admits to being sexist, which makes it even worse. He admits to being a sexist almost the first time he meets the other main character. You go,
00:50:06
Speaker
Oh, the 80s was so weird. It was an interesting time. But yes, I do kind of wonder if this is one of the examples of the things that Lee Basham talks about, of where overtime kind of doesn't matter anymore in some cases. If it were conclusively proven that America faked the moon landings tomorrow,
00:50:27
Speaker
Would that have much of an effect at all on anything really? I mean, the Cold War's long gone. People who distrust the government probably already do and probably aren't going to distrust it anymore and other people probably... I can't imagine a great uproar if this conspiracy theory were to be proven true tomorrow.
00:50:48
Speaker
Speaking since we've had subsequent trips into space, we know Heather could. Like, oh, OK. Yeah, sure, we faked some lunar missions in the 60s. But, you know, I've got a space station now. Yeah. Although not for much longer.
00:51:02
Speaker
No, no. What are they doing? Is it being decommissioned or is it actually going to fall out of orbit? It's one of the things that has to be decommissioned eventually because it wasn't built to be used for as long as it has been. And now there's a big debate, especially given the war in Ukraine, about replacing the International Space Station because the crucial thing is the International Space Station, where international basically is just a coded term for Russia and America build a space station. But now Russia and America are not friends.
00:51:32
Speaker
and thus the international power to the International Space Station. And no one wants to take responsibility for funding the National Space Station. No. Doesn't... China has a space program, don't they? They do, yeah. India has a space program. The European Union has a space program. Even dear old Aotearoa with Rocket Lab has a space program. A program for sending things into space. Which aids and abets the American military. It does, yes. Yeah.
00:52:01
Speaker
So I guess there you have it, the moon, it's still there as far as you know. I mean we still haven't proven it wrong. Even though we actually did spend a large chunk of this episode saying we've got good evidence, very good evidence. But I'm just going to maintain the skepticism from the beginning of the episode. Yep, well fair enough. So that's this episode, our first face-to-face episode in quite a long time. Yeah, basically since
00:52:34
Speaker
So now we get to record our first in a long time face to face bonus episode for our patrons. And what a cavalcade of stories we have for you. Josh is going to talk about yet another podcast that is an hour podcast. We're going to have an update on MH370, the conspiracy theory that could end
00:52:55
Speaker
this podcast series forever. We're going to talk about how the platform, which is a very right wing radio network here in Aotearoa, New Zealand, may be a little bit too woke until our rival has emerged.
00:53:12
Speaker
There's an update on the Nord Stream pipeline that got blown up right about at the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis, which is a little surprising. We'll have to mention in passing the fact that Donald Trump has released a single, and that Fox is not doing particularly well in the Dominion trial, and then there's an MI5 update. Gotta have an MI5 update. But if you want to know exactly what that update is,
00:53:39
Speaker
You'll have to subscribe to our Patreon. Yes, you'll have to go to patreon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy and sign yourself up and become a patron, which has the added benefit, of course, of making you one of the best and shiniest and sweetest people in the world. Most luminous people. Actually, the luminosity is a bit of a problem at the moment. People are complaining they're too luminous at night. Attract moths. Their partners are finding it very hard to sleep with our patrons.
00:54:06
Speaker
We'll do something about that. We are working on fixing that, probably using some kind of homeopathic solution as delivered by psychic fields. But as well as that, of course, you get access to our bonus episodes. So I think that surely outweighs any loss of sleep or attraction of nighttime insects. Yes, yes. You'd think
Patreon Promotion and Bonus Content
00:54:28
Speaker
so. So that's the end of this episode.
00:54:31
Speaker
I could finish it by slapping your face in Morse code to spell out goodbye. That's just one of the many possibilities that have opened up to us now. I won't do that. Or I could just attach a peg to your nipple. I mean, you could do that also. That wouldn't really send a good message for saying goodbye. But it would have a reaction. It would have a genuine authentic reaction. And it's a reference to a Tony Slattery sitcom. Excellent.
00:54:59
Speaker
I'm just a jiggler. Oh god, I haven't seen that in a very long time. I suspect it probably doesn't hold up on rewatching. Uh, almost certainly. But anyway, let's not delve into that too long. Let's just call things quits. We went to the moon. Deal with it. Goodbye. Watch out for those moon snakes. The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself, Associate Professor M. Artnick Stentors.
00:55:26
Speaker
Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, Soylent Green is meeples.