There was some discussion in the Moon Hoax thread of The Unz Review. Commenter Sparkon presented one Apollo photo and commenter utu tried to debunk Sparkon’s claims by using well-know debunker arguments. Ron Unz closed the thread before I could comment the photo, so I comment here. The photo is this one, a quite famous one among Moon Hoaxers:
Photo AS14-68-9487
Continue shadows from the stones and the Apollo Lander, they do not converge to a point in the horizon. The line from the Apollo shadow intersects the lines from each of the rock shadows at a different point and these points are all on the Moon surface!
Well, that’s kind of odd, as odd as the WTC building collapse.
There is the perspective rule: continuing shadow from a single light source always leads to a single point in the horizon where all shadows converge. This point cannot be on the land surface, it must be in the infinity: the horizon is either in the sky or in the intersection of the land/water and the sky.
It cannot be that the dark part to the right of the lander is not the shadow of the lander because in that case the shadow of the lander is missing, which is impossible. It cannot be that the surface is very uneven, because the Moon lander would not have landed on a very uneven surface. It is also impossible that there were two light sources since then everything would have two shadows. Thus, the only conclusion is that the lunar module has been added to this photo. It is a photographic forgery and it is from NASA.
Let us look at how one group of debunkers explain this photo:
They assert that conspiracy theoreticians claim that there must be two light sources and then they go on busting this claim. For verifying that there were not two light sources they use a real size studio light, though the result follows simply by observing that there is only one shadow from each object. They notice that if the terrain is uneven, it may change the shadows, as naturally can happen. They claim that no conspiracy theoretician knows this obvious fact, meaning that conspiracy theoreticians must be morons. After these observations, which must be clear to anybody looking at the photo, they announce that the myth is busted. No word is said about the possibility of photographic forgery.
We have another debunker here
This debunker also claims that the Moon Hoaxers state that there must be two sources of light, but he notices the obvious: there is only one shadow from each object, so only one light source. At least he does not need a full size studio light for concluding this simple fact. Then he notes that shadows need not be parallel in a photo because of the perspective, a truth that everybody knows, but he wants to show photos of this effect. He mentions that the stones are on a higher terrain, which is a bit interesting, but does not change the fact that the shadows do not converge correctly. Both the Lander and the stones are on quite horizontal terrain. Though the Lander is on a lower terrain, the shadows still should converge to the same point if the effect is caused by the perspective. The only way to have the shadows of the stones converge to another point than the shadow of the Lander is that the stone shadows are not on even terrain and this causes us to misjudge the directions of the shadows, but the terrain is horizontal. He also asks why NASA would have made a so complicated setup as he believes is necessary, and still would have made a so simple error. He does not come to think that photographic forgery is a rather simple trick to do, nothing so complicated, but it often results to an error in shadows. He does not have other arguments, but nevertheless claims that he solved the issue. We notice that he did not consider photographic forgery.
As a final example, let us look at the comments by Phil Plait, astronomer and a Ph.D, worked in NASA looking at stars. He briefly comments nonparallel shadows:
There is nothing in his text what was not said in the other two debunker posts which I already commented. Especially, he does not consider photo forgery as a possibility.
These suffice as examples of debunker claims concerning this particular photo.
The debunkers have the habit of presenting the claims of their opponents in a wrong way and then debunking them, as is visible from the first two examples, but to debunk this particular Apollo photo, they should show that the photo is not a photographic forgery. Yet, it seems to be exactly that.
As the shadows do not converge to a single point in the horizon, the effect in AS14-68-9487 is not an effect of perspective. The shadow of Apollo cannot be anything else than the shadow of Apollo, as otherwise the shadow of Apollo is missing. As there is only one shadow for each object, it is not multiple light sources. As the landing place of the Lander cannot be too uneven and the shadows of the stones are on even ground, it is not the effect of uneven terrain. There remains only one possibility: the Lander is added to the photograph. It is a very simple and crude photographic forgery. I already debunked one such forgery done by the USA, the Buchenwald man. Photo forgeries from those times very often have small errors because technology was not so developed at that time. These errors are typically in the shadows or the the placement of the added object with respect of the other object.
It would be good if NASA had original films of Apollo landings made at that time, but they reused the tapes and overwrote them. No money for new tapes, I guess. I would imagine the Congress would have given them some dollars to buy new tapes and to leave the Moon landing tapes to stay in some shelf for future generations, but no, they overwrote them and destroyed much of hard evidence of Moon landings. Today we have the photos, and at least one of them is a forgery, and the Moon stones, and at least one of them is a forgery, and the Apollo crew eyewitness statements, but they also have a problem: some astronauts gave rather strange statements concerning the Moon landings.
To conclude from this post, NASA has forged at least one Apollo photo. This is a small step for humanity but a medium size step for verifying if the Moon Hoax conspiracy theory is true. I will continue, looks good so far, or bad, which ever way you see it.