Debunking

Pareidolia

Hi,
today I will write about pareidolia a commonly seen phenomena. People often see familiar objects in completely random things, like rocks.

Clearly there is face in the upper middle part of the picture on the left. There is definitely sign of both eyes, of nose and mouth, thats more than one needs to SNice.svgrecognise face in something, consider the following one on the right. Do you see the black thick circle filled with yellow color, two ellipses and curved line extended in the ends? Yeah me too.

The point is that humans are great in recognizing (most often faces) in things that are actually not them. The first picture is photo of region Cydonia which is a area on Mars. It was taken in 1976 by Viking 1 and of course people thought that it was proof for extraterrestrial life! Well if you take enough photos of Mars there is high probability that some of the rocks there will resemble primitive faces.

Pick me! Some may bypass this pear for its blemished skin while others will see how eager it is to please

“I am the evidence of life on Earth, beware!”

Pareidolia does not happen only in images but also in sounds. For example there is a group of people who listen to so-called “ghost boxes” (sub category of ghost hunters). Ghost box is a box that is skimming quickly through radio channels. This creates lot of background noise and static noise with mix of what you can hear from the actual radio.. they say that the ghost can easily communicate through it.

Simplest explanation is of course that they just interpret extremely bad audio as some kind of words, plus if they listen for many hours they will eventually pop out something that will be an answer to your question, here is a link so you can consider for yourself, remember humans are great in interpreting random noise as actual words[1] (skip like 3 minutes for actual talk).

The story of the original Mars picture got stretched over many years. 2 decades after taking the picture, there was much better one taken by Mars Express as you can see below it was just the low resolution of Viking spacecraft.

There are many things that can trick us so it is not best to take the first explanation that we can think of, be sceptical and do not share if you do not know anything about it.

Dragallur

[1]The “answers” should be mostly made by random quotes from songs.

Smiley: By en:User:Mystìc – Originally created by en:User:Mystìc at en:Image:SNive.gif. Vectorized by Psiĥedelisto, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55079042

Pear: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3280816/What-photos-s-faces-suffer-facial-pareidolia.html

 

WTF? A conspiracy? 7) Perfect pictures

Hi,
it has been a long time since I posted about the Moon hoax but today I am returning. So I found that moon hoaxers think that Apollo must be faked because the pictures taken on Moon are strangely good.

Oh wow, that’s right. All of the pictures look like they have been taken by experts who had enough time to put everything right where they wanted. I mean look at it. Buzz saluting during Apollo 11 mission is perfectly placed in the image next to the “waving flag“. And yes there are tens of similar pictures and all of them are so good. OMG!

Fine, it took some time but finally I found the one you can see below.

I mean, ok clearly this picture is not good one, that is obvious since Armstrong steps out of the picture while it is taken.

I am really curious what would hoaxers say to this, it is from Apollo 11 archive. 

Next one is not good either, the lunar modul is cut on the right.

Fine there is clear mistake on the hoaxer’s side. They assume that they would see a bad picture in magazine? Or in TV? Really that is just so dumb!

Phil Plait on his bad astronomy says that in fox show about moon landing they called some NASA expert on Apollo cameras and they asked him if he knows why those pictures are so good. Well I can imagine that I would not be able to come up with answer right away while someone is recording me for TV show, while trying his best to put me down.

That is all for today.

Dragallur

 

WTF? A conspiracy? 6) No blast crater

Hi,
here it comes, here it goes. Today I will write about another part of conspiracy theory of Moon landing. I know it seems that the list of hoaxes is not ending. And yes it is very long and that is why this hoax is so popular, it seems that there is so many arguments that even if one or two are wrong there is another squad standing behind, it is TRUE. But it will be debunked, I promise!

Today I will talk about the “No blast crater” argument. To this one next picture relates and it is showing lander with circle on the place where should be blast crater.
When all Apollo landings landed it is assumed that they should left a huge blast crater behind since they would fell in great speeds. Also by the way the lander would not survive if it crashed with such a speed to create crater.
Here comes the question: How did NASA managed to not create blast crater?

They DID NOT go so fast when they were landing! As Phil Plait said:

When someone driving a car pulls into a parking spot, do they do it at 100 kilometers per hour?

Not only that they landed in small speeds but also the surface there is right under millimeters of dust hard rock and the gravity of Moon is much smaller (1/6).
The thing is that actually the lander had so big area of its “legs” that there was about 1,5 pound per square inch which is less than when the astronauts were walking on the Moon and that is why they were making footprints.

Some would say that footprints need water to form, but look at flour, it does not need it! It just stays in very steep shapes! This is called angle of repose. Things that have higher friction are able to have higher angle of repose. Also this is changed by gravity.

Dragallur

PS: I am going to make videos on YouTube. Today or in the weekend I will release probably first one so check it out (channel is ScienceAndRationality)!
1st picture: http://www.americanmoon.org/top10/index.htm
2nd picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_repose

WTF? A conspiracy? 5) Not parallel shadows

Hi,
here it comes, here it goes! Another debunking of the Moon hoax. As for now I already covered 4 “arguments” and you can check them on my other posts, just to see how silly they are.
Flag flapping in the breeze. Deadly radiation of Van Allen belts. Copied backgrounds of NASA images and Erased stars on the pictures + the prologue of those series.

So today I continue and this time I chose the argument of non-parallel shadows on the pictures by NASA.

As you can see on the picture which was taken on Moon the shadows seem very strange. The yellow lines clearly show that the light is much closer to the objects and the Sun would not cast such shadows. This clearly means that those photos are faked and we never went to the Moon.

Ok here comes the fun part again. The hoaxers forgot on thing named: perspective.
The thing is that the Moon is 3D while the photo is just two dimensional. This makes some strange things such as those shadows. Actually I found one debunker to have on his page this photo so, thanks to him. If you viewed this from birds view you would clearly see that those shadows are parallel but from ground and on picture it seems as the shadows head into different directions, so if you dont believe that the Earth is hoaxed you should be convinced. If not you can try it for yourself. Plus if there is some downhill it can be distorted even more.

Thats about it. Thanks for reading.
Dragallur

WTF? A conspiracy? 4) Identical backgrounds

Hi,
with one day pause I am coming with post about conspiracy theory of Moon landing. Yes again there is another “argument” by those hoaxers which I am going to crush to pieces thanks to awesome Phil Plait and his Bad Astronomy webpage.
This time lets focus on identical backgrounds on two images which were surely taken from very different distances and they must be faked because NASA was too lazy and they used same background twice.

Ok so here are the pictures from Apollo 15. On the first one where you can see more of those mountains there is no moonlanding apparatus and there is this rocky ground. While on the other there is the opposite but on both pictures there are same “backgrounds” used.
Fine here comes the debunktion. On Moon things stuff does not behave as one would execpt. On Earth we can judge distances by things around because we already know their size from experience, like house, shrub or car. But we dont have these things on Moon.
Once I was looking into the heart of Black Canyon in USA. It was one of the best things I have seen in my entire life and the same thing happened, I was not able to judge the distance.. it looked like that the bottom is 200 meters below me, but bottom of Black Canyon can be almost 700 meters (on the picture you can see the tallest cliff in Colorado, it was taken from wikipedia, thanks).

So there are no things by which you could judge the size of stuff which means that you dont really know how far it is + we also judge by the blur of the air. When there is stuff far away it is much less visible but on the Moon there is everything perfectly clear and you dont know if the rock is meter, 2, 200 or 10000 far away. Here is nice video which will blow your mind and show that you simply can not trust your eyes.

This means that the first picture is probably much closer to the mountains but still very very far away since they are on both pictures of identical size.

Dragallur
Check out the debunking of: Flag, Stars. And the prologue.