Opinion | Columnists
'Moon landing was a hoax'
Not many people remember where they were at the time when Neil Armstrong and 'Buzz' Aldrin landed on the Moon, but quite a few think it was a hoax and that the Americans made it all up.
- By Mahmood Saberi, Senior Reporter
- Published: 22:45 July 21, 2009
Not many people remember where they were at the time when Neil Armstrong and 'Buzz' Aldrin landed on the Moon, but quite a few think it was a hoax and that the Americans made it all up.
Six per cent of Americans at that time believed that it was all fake and 42 per cent of Britons thought it was a grand deception to push the Soviets out of the race into space.
Meanwhile in India, I knew one person who vehemently believed it could not have happened and that the pictures and the whole thing were simulated in a desert.
He was my nephew's tutor, a kindly old gentleman with a flowing white beard, and when my dad heard him try to debunk the landing, he got fired for his troubles.
I remember purchasing a very expensive, special issue of Life magazine, with mind-blowing pictures of the Moon taken from the Apollo spacecraft and man's first footprint in outer space.
The Moon landing did not inspire me to try and become an astronaut but it stirred up my interest in science fiction. (I recommend reading Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. It starts with this quote: "It is good to renew one's wonder," said the philosopher. "Space travel has again made children of us all." The book incidentally was written a decade or more before the landing).
Many years later I met Rakesh Sharma, India's first astronaut at an astronaut's conference in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. I also met my favourite author, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who inspired the movie 2001: The Space Odyssey and was the writer of Rendezvous with Rama and the Nine Billion Names of God.
It was Clarke's idea that geostationary satellites could be used to bounce radio signals to and from the Earth's surface. He was a radar specialist during the Second World War and had written up on his concept in a paper titled Extra-Terrestrial Relays - Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?
Clarke was to give a lecture at the conference, and it was packed. We expected him to talk about space, the new frontier or something like that, but he chose to speak on fractals.
Fractals are shapes that look the same at different magnifications and they occur in the texture of all surfaces. Check them out yourself, they look awesome and beautiful.
Aldrin was in Jeddah also, but some watch company got him to push their product, which seemed a little sad for such a historic figure. He was showing off his watch like Pierce Brosnan, the former Bond.
There is something about space travel that unfortunately drives the astronauts bonkers. Armstrong became a recluse and for years denied the rumour that he heard something, the sound of chanting on the Moon.
Aldrin battled for years with alcoholism and depression. According to legend, aliens were watching Armstrong and Aldrin as they explored the Moon. Aldrin is supposed to seen something on the third day of the mission, and people believe that he saw a UFO, an alien spacecraft and that NASA hushed it all up.
According to one website, Mike Conley's Tales of the Weird: Lunar or Looney, Aldrin also said in a TV documentary that there was "something out there", and it was close enough to be observed.
"The three of us weren't going to blurt out, 'Hey, Houston, we've got something moving alongside of us and we don't know what it is, you know?", he said.
Later he denied that he saw a UFO and said the strange object might have been a panel from the spacecraft that had got detached.
Others believe that it was Luna 15, an unmanned Soviet spacecraft launched only three days before Apollo 11.
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