Adam ruins the Moon landing hoax

TruTV’s Adam Ruins Everything is back and host and my spirit animal Adam Conover lays waste to some of the more common arguments from Moon-landing deniers, pointing out that it would have been far more difficult, if not impossible, to fake the landing on TV than to simply go to the Moon:

Transcript:

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ADAM CONOVER (HOST): Okay, explain to me one more time: Why do you think the moon landing was faked?

MELINDA (DENIER): We’re both skeptics, right? So think about it skeptically. There’s no way NASA had the technology to go to the Moon. They just filmed it on the sound stage. That would have been way easier.

ADAM: Yeah, that’s what conspiracy theorists think, but the truth is faking the Moon landing in 1969 actually would have been harder than just going to the Moon in the first place. Here, I’ll show you.

MAN: Fake Moon landing, take one!

STANLEY KUBRICK (DIRECTOR): All right, in this scene, you’re on the Moon and it’s real and were fooling America, and ACTION!

MELINDA: See? Stanley Kubrick just shot a guy jumping around on set, and then they played it back on TV.

ADAM: Sorry, but given the filmmaking and lighting technology at the time, that actually wouldn’t have been possible.

MELINDA: Right! The lighting! Look at how bright it is. Look at these shadows! This was clearly shot in the studio.

MARK SCHUBIN: Actually, creating that lighting would have been essentially impossible in a studio.

ADAM: Melinda, meet Mark Schubin. He’s a forensic motion picture analyst and an Emmy-winning life fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.

SCHUBIN: Thanks, Adam. Using image forensics, I can tell you the light source we see in the Moon footage is actually parallel sun rays with no diffusion. If you look at the photos from the Apollo mission, you can see that all the shadows are parallel, because the light source is 93 million miles away.

ADAM: But if you try to recreate that same photo using studio lighting, the shadows diverge.

MELINDA: Huh.

SCHUBIN: Back in the 60s, the only way to recreate that effect would be to build a wall of millions of laser lights so close together they’d be like pixels on a TV screen.

KUBRICK: No, no, no, no, no! This lighting is all wrong! I need lasers! Beautiful lasers!

SCHUBIN: But lasers back then were big and costly. So rigging together that many of that size would have required an enormous apparatus that probably would have cost more than the entire Apollo project.

KUBRICK: Perfect! This is great. Now we just need millions of these lasers.

MAN: Oh, uh, I don’t know if that’s in our budget … or the country’s.

KUBRICK: Honestly, Peter, you make me furious.

SCHUBIN: And, in those days the only lasers that were practically available were red.

ADAM: Which means the color photos we have from the Moon landing would have been impossible.

ANDY WARHOL: I can’t shoot in red light! It makes this Moon look like a bordello.

KUBRICK: Correction: We need millions of ultra-rare multicolored lasers.

MAN: How do I explain – I mean, that’s not even a remotely –

KUBRICK: [mocks Peter’s complaints] Go back to film school, Peter!

SCHUBIN: Now, today we could recreate the correct lighting with computer graphics

ADAM: But in 1969, those didn’t exist.

MELINDA: Hmm.

SCHUBIN: I’ve asked my colleagues in forensics and a movie production, and given the parallel light rays and the detailed color photos, we just cannot think of any way they could have faked the Moon landing with the technology they had at the time.

MELINDA: Hmm.

ADAM: Thanks, Mark. [To Melinda] Convinced?

MELINDA: Maybe that’s what they want you to think! What if NASA secretly created a computer graphics and just kept it from us for 40 years?

ADAM: Well, then an astronomical number of people would have had to keep that secret. Like over 400,000 NASA employees …

NASA WORKER #1: You want all 400,000 of us to keep our mouths shut?

KUBRICK: Yes, please.

NASA WORKER #2: Good luck. We love gossip.

ADAM: Scientists from Australia, Spain in England, who said they independently picked up the Moon landing transmission from space …

ENGLISH MAN: And why would we lie for you? You’re always making fun of our Vegemite.

ADAM: And the Russians, our Space Race rivals, who had every reason to prove us wrong!

RUSSIAN MAN: It’s been 50 years and we haven’t even claimed that you faked it. You beat us fair and square this time, but we’ll get you back … in 2016.

MELINDA: Well, where’s the tangible proof that we went to the Moon, huh? There isn’t any.

ADAM: Actually, there is! While the astronauts were on the Moon, they laid out a reflective material called retroreflectors. So today, when an observatory on Earth aims a high-powered laser at them, it bounces right back.

KUBRICK: Cut! Cut! Shut it down! This is impossible!

MELINDA: Oh, no no no, wait! It still could have been faked! All you’d have to do is secretly develop computer graphics technology decades ahead of its time, convinced multiple governments to lie on our behalf, and then somehow get retroreflectors to the Moon without actually going there! You can do that, right?

KUBRICK: Forget it, lady. It’d be easier to put a man on the Moon.

For more, check out my favorite Moon-hoax-debunking video, where a film expert explains in precise detail all the ways in which faking the Moon landing using the era’s film technology was categorically impossible:

Transcript:

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S.G. COLLINS: This is why the moon hoax would’ve been impossible. Take one.

TITLE: MOON HOAX NOT

S.G. COLLINS: Did people go to the Moon in 1969? I’m not totally sure. I wasn’t on the Moon then.

Did they fake going to the Moon? No, I’m pretty sure they didn’t, because they couldn’t.

Some people say that in 1969, people were incapable of sending a man to the Moon, but that they were capable of staging the whole thing in a TV studio. In fact, the opposite is true. By the late 1960s, they did have the technical ability – not to mention the requisite madness – to send three guys to the Moon and back. But they did not have the technology to fake it on video.

Now, please understand: I’m not saying this to defend the honor of the United States. The U.S. Government lies all the time about all kinds of things, and if they haven’t lied to you today, maybe they haven’t had coffee yet.

So, it’s easy to believe the Apollo program was a lie, too, especially if you weren’t alive then and if you don’t know much about the technology profiles of the day. You see, the later you were born, the more “all-powerful” movie magic seems. Nowadays, it would be very easy to fake a Moon landing and we seem to have forgotten how to do it for real. Back then, it was the other way around. Really.

CAPTION: The apparent omnipotence of special visual effects increases linearly with your date of birth.

S.G. COLLINS: Ever since the 1920s, engineers were trying to improve liquid-fueled rockets and their guidance systems. They wanted to go to outer space; the people who were paying for it wanted better bombs. By 1943, Wernher von Braun’s people already had a fully functional rocket called the [unclear], later known as the V-2. After the war, the German rocket scientists went to work for two rival superpowers, who then went to insane lengths to outdo each other on the world stage. It was a global dick-wagging contest on a scale never before seen in human history. It’s fair to say that technology growth in the Cold War was mostly a competition in aerospace, rocketry and weapons science. That was the kind of engineering that people strove to excel in. And by the mid-’60s, limited space travel was a possibility, I think.

Meanwhile, film technology had gotten wider and television was still busy trying to be in color.

Now, here’s where the stories diverge. In one version, the Americans waste $20 billion to send three guys to the Moon, plant the plaque that says, “WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND,” and then go home to bomb Cambodia. In the more tantalizing version, NASA at some point realizes they just can’t. So, to avoid humiliation, they hire Stanley Kubrick to produce and direct a Moon landing telecast. You know, he did such a great job with 2001 (A Space Odyssey).

Years later, once the Apollo astronauts are starting to collect Medicare, some people get a lot of attention by pointing out flaws in the photographic evidence for Apollo. When you listen to them, they seem not to know very much about photography, or video, or lighting, or even perspective, and I think they’re hoping you don’t, either.

So, we should’ve seen stars in the sky? No, we shouldn’t. The camera was set to expose for broad daylight. If they were exposing for stars, then this picture would’ve looked more like this: [intensely overexposed Moon landing photo with visible stars in sky]

Hmm. Flag’s waving in the breeze? No, it isn’t. It’s wriggling in the vacuum after they let it go.

The shadows diverge unrealistically across the landscape? No, they don’t. Go outside sometime and see how shadows work.

They obviously used multiple light sources in this picture, right? No, they obviously didn’t. I’ve been shooting in a studio for about 30 years now. I know what to look for. When you shine two lights at something, you get two shadows. So this [photo of astronaut on the Moon with one shadow] would’ve looked more like this: [same photo altered with faint second shadow] But it doesn’t, ’cause this stuff was shot with a single light source. And if that light was anywhere near the action, you would’ve seen a fall-off in brightness across the terrain. You don’t, because the light source was 150 million kilometers away, too far away for the inverse square law to make a difference. Get it?

Etc., etc., blah blah blah.

The thing is, all these discussions are ignoring one simple point: In 1969, it was not yet possible technically to fake what we saw on TV. Why are people missing this? I think maybe they forget how primitive video was in 1969. I mean, it was an amazing achievement in electronics, but there was a lot they couldn’t do. Let me try to explain that.

TITLE CARD: IRRELEVANT HERRING BREAK

S.G. COLLINS: The pivotal claim for the Apollo hoax theory, without which it all falls apart, is that what we saw on TV was slow-motion footage of astronauts running around in a film studio. ’Cause if it wasn’t slow motion, it couldn’t have happened on Earth, right?

Let’s talk about how slow motion works in film and video. There are two ways to make motion slow. One is you shoot it at normal speed and play it back slow, and the other is you shoot it fast and play it back normal. The second way is called overcranking. It looks smoother and more realistic because we’re sampling natural motion at a higher frame rate.

But that means we would’ve had to shoot it on film using high-speed film cameras, right? Why? Because in 1969, there were no high-speed video cameras yet. The electronics just weren’t there.

Some people did have magnetic disc recorders that could capture normal-speed video and play it back slow. [Caption: Ampex HS-100 magnetic disc recorder] They used it for sports replays and could record up to 30 seconds. Play back at 10 FPS and you got a whopping 90 seconds of slow-mo.

I’m sticking with 10 frames per second because that was the video frame rate for Apollo 11. They had a non-interlaced slow-scan TV camera specially made for them by Westinghouse. All the later missions were using regular NTSC cameras running at 29.97 FPS. That would be three times harder to fake. I’m trying to make this easy.

Keep in mind that when people today watch documentaries about the Apollo missions, they’re looking at the highlights. They’re looking at short clips cut together. And short clips are much easier to fake. But in July 1969, 600 million people, including me, were all staring at a continuous lunar telecast that went on for a long time. It was actually pretty boring sometimes. At 16 minutes into the EVA, they turned on the video camera. Four minutes later, you get your “one small step” frame, then Aldrin climbs out and they move the camera onto a tripod and proceed to do all their Moon-walking, flag-planting, photo-snapping and rock-picking. Then, Armstrong climbs back up into the lander and it’s over, by which time the video camera has been running for 143 minutes.

So, if we’re faking this with electronic slow-mo at 1/3 speed, we only need to record about 47 minutes of continuous live action video. Well, that’s a lot more than that Ampex disc recorder could hold. But NASA is special. Maybe they have a big disc recorder, right, in 1969. Okay, how much bigger? 95 times bigger? I don’t know, man. I mean, government agencies are powerful, but they’re not God.

Then again, they are NASA. Maybe they did have some special way to overcrank video in 1969 for an hour and a half. Maybe they had some top-secret high-speed electronics that the rest of the world never knew about. [Caption: Are they omnipotent or aren't they?]

Oh, wait a minute. No, you guys said that the navigation computers were too slow. I guess we can’t have it both ways. I mean, you can’t be fast and slow at the same time, right?

Wouldn’t it be easier to shoot this on film? I mean, in 1969, we already knew how to overcrank film. For Apollo 11, we only need to shoot 30 FPS and play it back at 10. Okay, let’s try that. I’d recommend you shoot on 35 mm to minimize the film grain. That’s what Kubrick would’ve done. Now, let’s see. Normal 35 mm runs at 90 feet per minute, but since we’re shooting at 30 FPS, it’ll be 112,5 feet per minute. We need 47 minutes of original film, so that’s about 5,300 feet. And of course, there’s no such thing as a film magazine that big. (Volkswagen?) But, if you shoot thousand-foot loads (it’s about that big), then you can do it in five mags.

Um … oh, wait, I can do this. You don’t want to see the splice marks where you put the reels together, ’cause then everybody would know it was a fake. And remember, we’re shooting for TV, so it’s 1:33 aspect ratio and not 1:85. So, that means you have to do A & B rolls. You have to cut the negative into A & B rolls and print them onto a 5,300-foot fine-grained interpositive, then cut an “answer print” in the film lab. And when you’re done, make sure everybody that works in the film lab dies mysteriously in a car crash.

Now, you just need to find a custom-designed telecine that can transfer your 5,300-foot “answer print” to video at 10 frames per second, pin-registered, of course. How hard can that be?

Of course, you need to be absolutely certain that in all that splicing and printing and transferring, none of the most common film artifacts have gotten onto your giant print: No base scratches, no emulsion flakes, no gate weave, no grain, and not one single fleck of dust, ’cause any one of those things will instantly betray that this is a hoax.

Okay, so you do that, and then you do it again for five more lunar missions. Only, those later missions, you have to play back at 30 FPS, meaning you have to shoot at, like, 60 FPS. Twice the torque, twice as many splices to keep clean, twice as much of a chance that the film’s gonna break in the camera.

You think maybe it would be easier to just go to the Moon?

Hmm. I don’t really know if that’s possible. Like I said, I wasn’t on the Moon in 1969 and neither were you. I can tell you that in 1969, it was not possible technically to fake what we saw on TV. Sorry. Kubrick or no Kubrick.

Why does any of this matter? Well, my concern is with the fate of knowing. Seeing the difference between what we can know and what you wish for. Because that’s what puts the sapiens in Homo sapiens. Without that, you’re just another Homo.

The urge to believe drives people to trade in part of their soul in exchange for the comfort of being a rebel. Okay … but that step from knowing that you’ve been lied to to believing that everything else is a lie is a big step. Once you’re forced to hypothesize whole new technologies to keep your conspiracy possible, then you’ve stepped over into the realm of magic. It demands a deep and abiding faith in things you can never know. It’s like you need to cling to your belief system with all your might against the overwhelming evidence of your own rational mind, and some people do.

What’s dangerous about that is that it blinds you to the real conspiracies that authorities are perpetuating on you right now. As we speak. Things that are a lot more important than whether some guys went to the Moon. I’m not America, but if I were, I would much rather have you be questioning Apollo 11 and not questioning the PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War, the financial industry bailouts, and the right to indefinite military detention without charge. Those things are real.

Thank you for watching. Excellent, my cheque came from NASA …

Of course, no video is likely to sway people who are capable of the mental gymnastics needed to deny reality so thoroughly. But they can help rational people hone their arguments for the next time they encounter conspiracists.

(via Friendly Atheist)

Edit (10/29/17 @ 4:43 PM ET): Small typo fixes.