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Dark Moon, 1999, copyright page
(omitted from the 2001 edition)

    The incompetence of the Apollo deniers is not limited to misreading photographs. They often misreport well-known historic facts, seldom check the rumours they repeat, and frequently contradict themselves. This page is a collection of some of their mistakes. Not all of them are connected with Apollo. But if I think a mistake is funny, interesting, or illuminating, then I will put it here. This catalogue is not comprehensive by any means, but it will get longer.

    That's His Story and He Ain't Sticking To It

    Did Bill Kaysing ever watch the lunar landings? You decide.
    Three decades ago, when the world watched the Apollo landings, Bill Kaysing was watching too. (Conspiracy Theory, "Did We Land on the Moon?")

    I watched none of the moon "landings." (Kaysing, We Never Went to the Moon 1981, p. 6; 2002, p. 7)

    That's His Story Part II

    According to Bill Kaysing, the Apollo astronauts never left the earth.
    The Apollo 11 vehicle, or Saturn 5, was sent out of people's sight, and then it was jettisoned into the South Atlantic, where all of the six [sic] that were launched now reside. There were no astronauts, of course, on board. (Nardwuar interview)
    According to Bill Kaysing, the Apollo astronauts did leave the earth.

    For the Conspiracy Theory show, he says he believes the astronauts lifted into orbit, waited several days, then splashed down in the ocean "as shown on film."

    According to Bill Kaysing, the Apollo astronauts might have gone to the moon.

    [A] trio of men supposedly made the quarter million mile journey between earth and its satellite. Now whether this journey was made or not, a great many people witness the failure of their leaders.... (We Never Went to the Moon, 2002, p. 70; emphasis added)

    English Lit

    According to David S. Percy, the shadows in the lunar images indicate the astronauts used multiple light sources.
    Varying shadow lengths within any given picture or TV scene imply either more than one light source placed in close proximity, or tampering with the shadows at a later stage of the image processing. (Dark Moon, p. 25; emphasis in original)
    According to David S. Percy, the shadows in the lunar images indicate the astronauts used only one light source.
    Given the angle of the Earth in relation to the Sun and the Moon--surely we should expect to see two shadows... for each object, not one--but this was not the case (Dark Moon, p. 514, n. 5; emphasis in original)

    Putting His Boot in It

    A box entitled "Moon marks" on the bottom of page 48 of Dark Moon presents this alleged discrepancy:
    In a 1994 TV interview, Aldrin related that each time he placed his foot on the surface of the Moon the dust flew upwards and outwards in perfect arcs, all equidistant from his feet, unhindered by any atmosphere. Yet we have no clear signs of this movement of dust on any photograph, nor in the recorded TV material when the astronauts are moving about [emphasis in original].
    Charlie Duke's left footBennett and Percy should have looked a little harder. There's an excellent example in the photograph of Charlie Duke standing next to the Rover on the rim of Stone Mountain (the one on which a piece of hair on the film vaguely resembles a lopsided C). The picture was snapped at the very moment that his down-stepping foot is shooting up a perfect bloom of rock and dust around his ankle.

    It shouldn't have been too hard to spot; it's reproduced three times on page 42 of Dark Moon.

    Blowing It Hot and Cold

    David Percy claims that the temperature extremes on the moon's surface would play hob with photographic film and make picture-taking nearly impossible. But spacecraft and spacewalkers in near-earth orbit get just as much sunlight as the lunar surface, and they get the same variation in temperature as they circle between full sunshine and earth shadow every 90 minutes. Yet Percy believes the Gemini and Shuttle missions were real, and page 27 of Dark Moon features a couple of spacewalk photos which he accepts as authentic.

    How does he explain this contradiction? He doesn't even try.

    Radiant Dazed and Confused

    Chapter Three of Dark Moon claims that the radiation of outer space would make a 12-day jaunt to the moon positively lethal to astronauts and their cameras. Later in Chapter Twelve, David Percy accepts the picture of the Cydonian "face" on Mars as an authentic photograph taken from the Viking orbiter which survived a ten month journey through outer space, under the full blast of solar flares all the way, without frying its electronics, solar cells, or on-board cameras.

    How does he explain this contradiction? He doesn't even try.

    Tales from Nether-Nether-Land

    On page 7 of We Never Went to the Moon Bill Kaysing asked, "Why did the Dutch papers, circa 1969, question the authenticity of the moon landing?"

    The answer is simple: They didn't.

    Dutch newspaper describing historic first landing on the moon
    The headline of this Dutch newspaper reads, "Armstrong and Aldrin land safely. FIRST STEPS ON THE MOON."
    Dutch newspaper recounting astronauts' triumphant return from the moon
    The headline of this Dutch newspaper reads, "SEISMOMETER ON MOON FOUND TO OVERHEAT. Apollo astronauts return to earth."
    Dutch newspaper extolling magnificent photos from the moon
    The text of this Dutch newspaper reads, "The new photos and films of the lunar expedition of Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, released yesterday by NASA in Houston, are much clearer than the television transmission of their historic moonwalk."

    In the Nardwuar interview Kaysing admitted he had never seen any doubting Dutch newspapers. But that didn't stop other whistle suckers from repeating this rumour without, of course, bothering to check it out (e.g. Dark Moon, p. 289).

    The stepmother of all conspiracy theories: Howard Hughes, the Flying Boat, and the sinister significance of a typographical error (it says here)

    Follow the Lieder

    I will never forgive David Percy for this. My childhood hero, Tom Lehrer, was misquoted on page 198 as singing, "The rockets go up / And where they come down / Is not our concern / Says Wernher von Braun." And Percy has the effrontery to say this hash is "Well versed." The actual--and funny--lyrics go this way:
    "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
    "That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
    (Source: That Was The Year That Was, Reprise Records R/RS 6179, 1965. Lyrics over here.)
    To this injury Percy adds the insult of misspelling "Lehrer." Some might find that significant. It means "teacher."

    Flub Dub

    It would seem that the very pressing and present desire to continue to invest in SDI technology--backed publicly by President Reagan--and pursued unofficially thereafter--is not motivated so much by the threat of an approaching meteorite, but military fear of ET. It is entirely apropos this that Reagan dubbed this technology "Star Wars". (Dark Moon, p. 467, emphasis added)
    Au contraire, it is entirely inapropos. If there is one thing everyone agreed on during the controversy over the Strategic Defense Initiative, it was that its popular term "Star Wars" did not originate with Ronald Reagan. He never used it when he made his proposal for a missile defence system on 23 March 1983. And a year later he still didn't use it. Whoever first gave the SDI the nickname "Star Wars" is a mystery lost in the tangle of time (which means I haven't bothered to find out), but it quickly caught on, since it implied something farfetched, expensive, fantastical, and aggressive. Small wonder that Reagan hated the term. In a speech on the 10th anniversary of SDI he quipped, "If it weren't for George Lucas, maybe we would have been off to a better start."

    Gay Bashing

    A photograph of the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay on page 210 of Dark Moon carries the caption, "The aircraft that carried the two A-Bombs to Japan." Actually, the Enola Gay (named after the mother of its commander, Paul Tibbets) carried only the first atomic bomb, to Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945. The second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki by the Bock's Car, which was flown by Col. Charles Sweeney. (Because Sweeney's own plane, the Great Artiste, was filled with monitoring instruments, he borrowed the plane assigned to Frederick Bock. Thus the name.) This bit of common knowledge can be found in any standard history of the atom bomb, such as The Making of the Atomic Bomb which is cited on page 516, notes 51 and 53 of Dark Moon.

    Suitable for Framing

    In a literal example of suiting the facts to fit the argument, Bennett and Percy write that an astronaut in an "inflexible" pressure suit and PLSS could not possibly have bent down enough to take the "earth over the flag" picture (Dark Moon, p. 45). Then on page 389-90 they wonder why astronauts in those same inflexible suits did not leap 6 feet off the ground.