Tag Archives: Moon landing

4 Incredible Conspiracy Theories

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Conspiracy Theories is one of those phrases I really don’t like. It’s one that stops us thinking, one that condemns people with alternate ideas without even listening to what is being said. Here are four historical events, all of which have been questioned by various groups and individuals and may, or may not have happened in the way we think they did.

1969: The Moon landing

A conspiracy theory regarding the moon landing? It’s hard to believe I know but there are some that believe the moon landing was faked. Faked? How? Well back in the 80s there was a film called Capricorn 1 about a manned mission to Mars. In the film Nasa were worried about funding for the Space Programme and knew the oxygen breathing system on the mission was a failure so they sorted out a film studio, filmed the Mars landing; a fake Mars landing, and broadcast it as if it were real. On its return to earth the capsule lost its heat shield and the astronauts were burned up in the atmosphere. The thing is, the astronauts weren’t in the space ship so NASA were stuck with live astronauts who should have been dead.

OK, that was fiction but did Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin really walk on the moon? After all, they took thousands of photographs on the moon as well as cine footage. NASA also have 382kg of moon rock brought back from the Apollo missions and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken many recent photos of the landing sites. Well, of course they did but many experts will call attention to some of those pictures and explain that they were fakes because of various anomalies. On TikTok I recently watched a video in which a man swears his father was a security guard at a secret base where the moon landing was filmed. On YouTube there is a video where someone tries to get Armstrong to swear on the bible that he went to the moon. Neil Armstrong declined. Why? Because he didn’t go to the moon! Why did he retire from NASA so early? Was he ashamed about his continuing lies?

My personal verdict: Baloney. Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon in July 1969, an incredible feat of exploration and bravery.

1991: The World Trade Centre Attack

On 11th September 1991 terrorists crashed two hi jacked aircraft into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. I remember watching it live on TV and being horrified at what was happening right before my eyes. Within hours, according to a BBC report I read as part of my research, conspiracy theories were spreading across the internet: The US government was behind the attacks, George Bush knew in advance but needed a reason to invade Iraq. The twin towers were demolished by explosives placed at an earlier date and detonated.

Courtesy wikipedia

Building 7 was the cause of many conspiracy claims because of a BBC report announcing the collapse of the building when the building itself could be seen intact in the background behind the reporter.

At the time George W Bush didn’t really look that good as he was given the news of the attacks while on stage at a school event in Florida and didn’t look as though he knew what to do. In recent years I’ve seen a few interviews with Bush and found myself really quite liking the guy. His security staff were telling him to hide away but he insisted on flying back to Washington.

Personal verdict: Was Bush behind the attacks himself? Of course not. Did someone arrange for the twin towers to be detonated? No!

1997: The Death of Princess Diana

The recent death of the Queen was sad but it was expected. After all the Queen was 96 years old. The death of Princess Diana in 1992 was all the more shocking because it was unexpected. She was a young woman in the prime of her life. I remember getting up early one Sunday morning and after making a cup of tea, switching on the TV to hear the terrible news of her death.

Diana and her new man Dodi Fayed, the son of Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed had left the George V hotel in Paris and had been driven away at speed in an effort to get away from the paparazzi. In the vehicle were Diana and Dodi, their driver Henri Paul and Diana’s bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones. When her car accelerated through the Pont de L’Alma tunnel in the French capital, the driver lost control and crashed at high speed. All the occupants were killed except for Rees-Jones. He was the only one wearing a seat belt.

Soon afterwards the first conspiracy theories began to arise; had Diana been murdered? The thing is, why would anyone want to murder the princess? What was the point? She was hardly a controversial figure, she was well liked, even loved by the public. She had of course just divorced Prince Charles who was then heir to the throne. Would the royal family have really wanted her dead just because she was considering marrying a Muslim?

There were reports of a white Fiat Uno ahead of the Princess’s car and there were white paint marks found on the wreckage of the crashed car. There were also reports of a flash of white light before the fatal impact which could have blinded the driver causing him to crash. Not only that but an ex-MI6 officer revealed that MI6 officers were in Paris that day and there was a plan in the MI6 files detailing how to commit a murder and make it look like a car accident. The plan involved flashing a bright light and blinding the driver.

My personal verdict. There are a lot of things that have come to light that don’t make sense but at the end of the day I’d have to say Diana was probably sadly killed as a result of a traffic accident

1963: The JFK Assassination

OK, this is the big one, the conspiracy theory that’s the daddy of them all. I think it’s only fair to tell you I’ve been interested in the Kennedy assassination ever since I was a schoolboy. I’ve read many books, seen many documentaries and I’m even a follower of the JFK Lancer group that have organised research and debate on the subject for a very long time.

Did Lee Harvey Oswald shoot the president from the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas in 1963? Did he shoot officer JD Tippet while trying to get away? Personally, I’m not convinced he did. The report by the Warren Commission set up by President Johnson concluded that Oswald acted alone but the House Select Commission on Assassinations in 1978 decided that there were other shots fired at Kennedy from the grassy knoll. That was based on a recording from a motorcycle outrider whose transmit radio button was jammed on. Audio experts concluded that shots other than those from the Book Depository were fired.

Since then, many other experts have decided the audio evidence doesn’t add up but that’s the thing about this entire story, for every piece of evidence held up by experts that proves the conspiracy one way or another, other experts will refute that same evidence or interpret it in another way.  How many shots were there? From which direction? If Oswald shot the president, how did he get from the 6th floor of the Book Depository to the 2nd floor lunch room where he was seen by police officer Marion Baker? Who were the people on the grassy knoll with secret service ID when no secret service agents were at that location?

There are a thousand questions like that which need to be answered. The Oliver Stone movie JFK led to the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, passed by congress, which ordered the review and release of all remaining assassination records and files. I’m sure some people think that buried in the CIA archives is a memo ordering the assassination of JFK but sorry, that is never going to happen.

So, who was responsible for the murder of the president? The CIA? The Mafia? The military-industrial complex mentioned in the film JFK?

I’ve even read a theory that Kennedy was killed because he had been to area 51, seen captured alien space craft and alien creatures and wanted to reveal this to the world.

My personal verdict; Did Oswald shoot the president? I’m not convinced. Was the CIA or elements of the intelligence community involved? Absolutely.

What do you think?

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Remembering Apollo 11

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’m not one for writing topical blog posts. I pretty much write about whatever comes into my head but this week it’s the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, something that made a deep impression on me as a 12 year old boy in June, 1969.

There have been lots of anniversary programmes on TV about the moon shots and Apollo 11 and for me who was once obsessed by the Apollo missions they were all pretty interesting.

One was a programme I have seen before about Neil Armstrong which involved his friends and family talking about the late astronaut. Armstrong was a quiet man who took lessons at his local aerodrome and learned to fly before he could drive. He joined the US air force and became a pilot in the Korean War before returning home to study aeronautics at university.

Later he joined NASA and became an astronaut and apparently the first his family knew about it was when NASA introduced its new trainees on the television news.

Armstrong was a talented pilot who went from testing aircraft like the experimental X15 to become part of the manned spaceflight program and later from being an unknown astronaut to perhaps the most famous man in the world. Everyone wanted to meet the first man on the moon and perhaps get his autograph.

Later on he declined to sign autographs when he found that people were selling them on.

Armstrong resigned from NASA in 1971 and decided to take up a professorship at the University of Cincinnati.

He seemed reluctant to talk about Apollo 11 and I even remember back on the 25th anniversary, the BBC ran a documentary in which Buzz Aldrin did most of the talking, explaining how Neil landed the Lunar Module Eagle on the moon’s surface.

On the way down the Eagle’s computer kept throwing up ‘1201’ and ‘1202’ program alarms. Neither Armstrong nor Aldrin knew what that was but the controllers at mission control knew. The on-board computer which had less memory than a modern mobile phone, could not deal with all the data is was receiving. Armstrong switched over to manual flight, hopped the lunar lander over a rocky area then finally dropped down safely onto the lunar surface with only a scant few seconds of fuel remaining.

Anyway, getting back to July, 1969, I don’t know if you can imagine the excitement of a twelve year old boy, getting up for school one morning to find the TV on and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon when the usual TV broadcast at that time would have been the test card!

Those black and white ghostlike TV images enthralled me that July morning and how my Mother eventually managed to pack me off to school I do not know. Back then I was glued to the BBC transmissions about the Apollo programme and I was a great fan of James Burke who gave us concise updates on what was happening in space and at mission control.

Another BBC programme I saw recently was one about the BBC broadcasts of those days and James Burke himself looked back at film from the late sixties. Video tape was apparently in short supply at the BBC back then and most of his broadcasts were deleted but many of the filmed inserts, broadcast presumably when not much was happening live, were really interesting.

In one, Burke gets inside the cramped command module and shows us just how small it actually was. Apparently in zero g: weightlessness, it appeared bigger because then one could float off into a corner that was normally inaccessible and go to sleep.

In another Burke goes aboard a NASA plane which makes a steep descent creating a few moments of weightlessness which was important for astronaut training.

I often think about that day in 1969, watching the Apollo 11 crew on the moon. The images looked ethereal and ghostly as the two astronauts bobbed about in the low gravity of the moon. I used to wonder just what it was like for Aldrin and Armstrong and what it was like also for Mike Collins, waiting patiently orbiting above in the Command Module Columbia.

Collins must have been the loneliest man in the world just then.

Later in the Apollo program, the TV pictures improved enormously but it was the pictures and cine film that the astronauts brought back which were really amazing.

You might be forgiven for thinking that with the moon landing being 50 years ago, manned space exploration has gone on to bigger and better things. Not so. The Apollo program was incredibly expensive: 25.4 billion dollars according to a quick search on Google: Money that of course the US government could well use elsewhere and after Apollo 17 the moon landing programme was shut down.

Still, think about the spin offs in technology, not only rocketry but computers and electronics and so on. I once read that the secret to the US winning the space race was computer technology and that many calculations done by the Soviets were done by teams of mathematicians using abacuses!

The space race was also part of the cold war and although the Soviets seemed to excel in the early part of the 1960’s, it was the USA that finally put a man on the moon and that man, the first man, was Neil Armstrong who went from relative obscurity to the most famous man in the world. The only other person I can really think of with a similar fame was Charlie Chaplin, whose films, in the days of silent films, went all the way around the world.

One interesting thing to finish with: On one of the BBC documentaries, one of Armstrong’s friends, or perhaps it was his brother, remembered Neil as having a regular dream when he was a child.

Armstrong dreamt that he could float in the air by holding his breath! Quite an interesting dream for a future astronaut!

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