Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 13:46:06 -0800 (PST)
From: Samuel Lubell <samlubell at yahoo.com>
Subject: [WSFA] NASA hires PR guy to say that men landed on moon
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

>From the Miami Herald.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/4400099.htm

NASA fighting back to confirm that U.S. really flew to
moon
BY SETH BORENSTEIN
sborenstein at krwashington.com

WASHINGTON - More than 33 years after the United
States landed men on the moon, NASA is spending more
than $15,000 to convince people that it really did
happen and that the space agency didn't make it all
up.

Stubborn conspiracy theorists claim that NASA's six
Apollo-program moon landings were faked. After decades
of belittling and ignoring them, NASA has decided to
fight back. It hired James Oberg, a Houston-based
former aerospace engineer and award-winning author of
10 books on space, to confront skeptics point by
point. Many scientists already have done that on the
Internet, but skeptics remain unconvinced.

''Ignoring it only fans the flames of people who are
naturally suspicious,'' Oberg said Tuesday in an
interview.

Last year, Fox television twice broadcast a show
entitled Conspiracy Theory: Did We Really Land on the
Moon?, and NBC's Today show staged a debate on the
topic. Last month, Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the
moon, punched a conspiracy theorist who had been
pestering him to swear on a stack of Bibles that the
landing was real.

After the Fox show first aired, NASA put out a
one-paragraph press release titled Apollo: Yes, We
Did.

Yet a 1999 poll found that 11 percent of the American
public doubted the moon landing happened, and Fox
officials said such skepticism increased to about 20
percent after their show, which was seen by about 15
million viewers.

Stephen Garber, NASA's acting chief historian, said
Oberg's 10-chapter, 30,000-word monograph ``is not
going to convince the people who believe in these
myths. Hopefully, it'll speak to other people who are
broad-minded.''

The book will expose ''space myths writ large [and
will] look at some of these broader issues of how
these myths get initiated and promulgated,'' Garber
said.

Oberg ''has got one hell of a job ahead of him,'' said
skeptic Ralph Rene, a New Jersey carpenter who said he
is self-taught in physics and has self-published two
books. One book claims the moon landing didn't happen;
the other criticizes Isaac Newton's grasp of physics.
``I could care less what they do.''

''It's a real shame that it has to be done,'' said
Sonoma State University astronomy Professor Phil
Plait. He runs the badastronomy.com website, which
debunks space myths, including the moon-hoax theory.

''It's beneath NASA's dignity to give these twinkies
the time of day,'' Plait said. ``The problem is, if
you ignore a problem, it doesn't go away.''

But confronting conspiracy theorists usually doesn't
convince them either, said historian Gregory Camp,
author of Selling Fear: Conspiracy Theories and
End-Times Paranoia.

''The true believers in that kind of thing already
have the answers -- at least in their eyes,'' Camp
said.

''It's incredible that a book like that has to be
written,'' he said.

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