Back in my academic days I had pounded into me the necessity of crediting all my quotes and thoroughly documenting all sources. It was one of the few lessons I retained from college. So much so that today I look with squinting suspicion at any piece of writing that fails to provide proper references, such as newspaper articles that expect to enhance their credibility with the meaningless phrase, "According to one anonymous source...."

I have tried to maintain that tradition of academic thoroughness on this site. However, to avoid cluttering the pages with footnotes or long parenthetical references, I have resorted to a form of shorthand which is explained here.

NASA Photography

Identifying a picture can be a bit confusing. NASA originally catalogued its pictures with a 12-digit photo ID number, but for its various websites it used a shorter file number to conform to DOS's 8+3 limit. So for example this picture has an ID number of AS15-82-11057 and a file name of 10075727.jpg. Where known, I've put the pictures's ID number in the ALT tag, which you can see by running your mouse over the pic.

Original Photographs

Mary Bennett and David S. Percy, Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers (London: Aulis, 1999).

The illustrations in this book are sequentially numbered in each chapter, and I have followed the authors' system to identify their pictures in my ALT tags -- e.g. (ch. 1, ill. 26) means illustration (26) in chapter one.

A few of Percy's annotated NASA pictures appeared in his earlier article,

David Percy, "Dark Side of the Moon Landings," Fortean Times, January 1997

...which is also available online.

Unfortunately, for some of Percy's pictures I could not (yet) provide the original NASA source. Percy has the maddening habit of omitting the full reference numbers to the NASA pictures he uses. Worse yet, where he does cite his sources in the footnotes, he gives only the book title but not page number. Finally, his index is divided into different sections. Perhaps he thought he was being helpful, but the result is that the researcher must make four separate searches for each item. I shudder to think what my old professors would have done to it.

At least he does give notes and an index, which is more than I can say for the other book I've often cited:

Bill Kaysing, We Never Went to the Moon: America's 30 Billion Dollar Swindle! (Cornville, AZ: Desert Publications, 1981).

Of the 18 books he lists in his "Biblographly" on page 199, 14 are either general histories of Apollo and space travel or memoirs of astronauts. The other listed books have nothing to do with Apollo. There are a few specific references scattered throughout the book but no sources for most of his claims, leaving the reader no way to tell whether Kaysing is a sloppy researcher or a creative writer. And this is the book that other conspiracy buffs (Percy included) cite as gospel.

For an excellent book on critical thinking, I strongly recommend:

Vincent Ryan Ruggiero, Beyond Feelings: A Guide to Critical Thinking, Sixth Edition (Mayfield, Mountain View, CA: 2001).

Bill Kaysing also came out with a new edition of his book, which was published by Health Research Books of Pomery, WA in 2002. This edition of We Never Went to the Moon has been substantially modified, with different illustrations, updated material, some mistakes corrected, new ones added. (For example, Bibliography is now spelled properly--I thought he was joking--but now he says NASA stands for "North American Space Administration" [2002, p. 4]. In the 1981 edition he got it almost right as "National Aeronautic and Space and Administration" [p. 2].)

Because of these changes, quoted material does not always appear on the same page in both editions. Therefore, I use the same convention I use with Dark Moon: giving a year (1981 or 2002) to indicate which edition and which page the quote comes from. If no year is given, then the quote is the same in both books. HOWEVER, since most of this site was built before I saw the 2002 edition, some of the quotes with no year might be from the 1981 book only. This will be fixed as I find them (and the time to do them), but in the meantime I apologize for confusing those who do not have the 1981 book. I cannot help it if Mr. Bill keeps changing his story.

Motion Picture

Copyright and Fair Use

You are free to copy and use all of my pictures, as long as you give me credit (Thomas Bohn) and link back to this site.

Other pictures on this site are either linked back to their sources, or identified in the ALT tags. Graphics or photographs without any citations at all are either my own (and implied in the text) or in the public domain. If I have inadvertently used someone's work without proper credit, please write to me and I will either add the credit or remove the image.

Online Sources (and lack thereof)

Website links are provided throughout this site. However, although there are many hoax-promoting sites on the Net, including Bennett and Percy's own Aulis.com, I have seldom referenced or refuted them. I have several reasons for passing them by. For one thing, most of them are being systematically refuted by the erudite and indefatigable Jay Utah of clavius.org. Also, as Jay pointed out, web authors can easily change or delete their pages so that the rebuttal no longer applies.

But it's not so easy to change a book--not after it's been printed, sold, and dispersed by the thousands into the homes of its critics. That is why I quote so heavily from Dark Moon: the authors produced it, "ensured accuracy" in it, and must stand or die by its unchangeable contents. Furthermore, Bennett and Percy had a chance to fix their mistakes for the 2001 edition, but their editing was only minimal. For example, John Young's "jump salute" is now correctly identified as occurring during Apollo 16 on page 43--but not on page 354. I presume they are satisfied with the contents, and are willing to run the risk of looking like fools in print. At least one can admire their courage.

And it must be admitted they are braver than I. After all, I have the advantage over print writers. I can fix my mistakes as fast as I find them, and then pretend they never existed. Who said life was fair?

Links

So if you want to study the arguments of the Apollohoax claimants, as well as their rebuttals, then you could do worse than start with Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy site. Along with a detailed rebuttal of Conspiracy Theory this site has a good list of links to sites on both sides of the argument. But the best feature of the site is its lively, ongoing bulletin board featuring detailed discussions of Apollo minutiae. A great place to learn. Maybe I'll meet you there.