Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Moonspiracy Theories


Forty years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin left the safety of their Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), the Eagle, and stepped out onto the surface of the…Hollywood soundstage.

WHAT??!!??

Since 1969 a number of people have come forward and offered a variety of theories that Armstrong and Aldrin did not land on the moon and that NASA faked our nation’s milestone in space. Having looked at all available evidence I’ve discovered many hoaxes in the moon-landing-was-a-hoax field. Here are four:


Perhaps the quickest moon landing hoax theory to be debunked was the one taken at Crater National Park and touted by Bob Jennings, former soup kitchen entrepreneur and chief of staff to Nevada Senator Harry Reid, who claimed the moon landing was faked because a “NASA photo” showed a discarded Marlboro pack he said belonged to one of the hoaxers while Jennings himself forgot to Photoshop out the moon from the sky of the “moon”.


Fisher Bartholomew, a former security guard from the Goddard Space Flight Center janitorial supplies warehouse, claimed to have built his own mock-up of the LEM in a desert in New Mexico to show that it could be done. But closer examination of the photo shows it was actually taken in a vacant lot near a K-Mart in Mormontown, Utah using trick photography and toys bought during that day’s Blue Light Special.


Buddy Ebsen Jr, son of the famed “Beverly Hillbillies” star and a one-time Elvis impersonator, claimed to have overheard Neil Armstrong bragging they deceived the world at a Denny’s in Fresno and uses the light and shadow dimensions on the above photo to argue the moon landing was a hoax. But the photo actually shows Ebsen, in full Elvis costume, giving hoax to his own hoax claim.


Perhaps the most disgusting of the moon landing hoaxes is this doctored photo by “Buster” Solzhenitsyn, a former Cincinnati 7-11 cashier and illegal Russian immigrant seeking to damage the Capitalist winners of the Cold War’s Space Race, who claims Buzz Aldrin drank so much Tang that he urinated on the set of the soundstage moon because he’d been holding it for so long in the unmanageable space suit that he could not wait to get to the bathroom.

Next 50 Years: The Men Landing on Mars Was A Hoax Theories Debunked