One small step for man, one giant leap into stupidity for mankind.

I can’t fathom that people really believe the Apollo moon landings were faked. And I don’t know why people would even want to know, just because it is one of the greatest accomplishments in history.

On the American Patriot Friends Network, there is a menagerie of different theories explaining why and how the Apollo landings were faked. Well, let’s take a look at some of them.

One section of the site has “9 Space Oddities,” and this is where I will be doing most of the analysis. The claims range from “Where are the stars in this photo?” to “You can’t slice a golf ball in space.” Anyway, I’ll pick out a couple of these oddities and try my best to disprove them, if I can’t do it, then I guess we didn’t really land on the moon.

Here is the first point: “Apollo 14 astronaut Allen Shepard played golf on the moon. In front of a worldwide TV audience, Mission Control teased him about slicing the ball to the right. Yet a slice is caused by uneven air flow over the ball. The moon has no atmosphere and no air.”

Well, two things, first of all, a slice is caused by the way the golfer swings the club, if the player has an open club face or if he cuts across the ball, that will cause spin on the ball to move the ball from left to right (for a right-handed golfer). And two, they were only teasing him. He probably didn’t actually slice the ball.

“The moon landings took place during the Cold War. Why didn’t America make a signal on the moon that could be seen from earth? The PR would have been phenomenal and it could have been easily done with magnesium flares.”

He made a few claims here. Let’s go through them one at a time. Yes, the Moon landings did take place during the Cold War. He got that right. The second point is completely irrelevant because I’m sure 99 percent of Americans were tuned in to watch the landing on television so they wouldn’t really need to set off a flare. I don’t think PR was really an issue; it may just be because the event was on basically every front page of every newspaper in America the day after the landing. And I’m almost positive (by almost positive I mean 100 percent sure) that lighting magnesium flares on the moon would not be easy. Actually, it would be impossible, seeing as how you’d need oxygen to do that and there is zero oxygen on the Moon, but hey, where there’s a will, there’s a way!

“Text from pictures in the article said that only two men walked on the Moon during the Apollo 12 mission. Yet the astronaut reflected in the visor has no camera. Who took the shot?”

He really should have done his homework before he made this claim. There’s this thing on a space suit called the EVA, which goes over the helmet. It includes a visor to protect the astronaut’s eyes from the sun’s rays and also includes a camera built in. So there is his answer– the other astronaut took the photo.

Three strikes and he’s out. He was unsuccessful in his attempt to coerce me into believing the moon landings were faked.

To each their own, but I’m pretty sure that we got this one right. The moon landings definitely occurred, and we didn’t need magnesium flares to prove it, either!