Taken Somehow By Surprise

Not Exactly Rocket Science

52 i. And that he wouldn’t swear—or couldn’t, for those who insist on reading so far into something that they fall out the other side— is the kind of proof the We-Never-Went-to-the-Moon crowd can’t get nearly enough of. For years their hopes have been riding on those glaringly obvious pictures, the whole world finally seeing things their way: the Apollo missions were accomplished as planned on a soundstage in Out-of-the-Way, Arizona. Or maybe New Mexico. But it turns out there were a few unfortunate complications. Notice the flag that ripples in a breeze where there’s no atmosphere. The telltale casting of shadows and light—so many and too much, a geometry of the impossible. Even the way the dust rises and falls too fast is a sign of the wrong kind of gravity at work. And no stars appear in this improvised sky, although the astronauts can’t stop looking up and talking about them. Perhaps the fault is not in the set-designer’s stars, but in the strangely uncorrected shooting script itself. Meanwhile, a preposterous empty bottle suddenly rolls across the lunar floor in the raw-feed transmissions beamed into Not Exactly Rocket Science The LAPD is investigating a complaint that retired astronaut Buzz Aldrin punched gadfly filmmaker Bart Sibrel in the face after being asked to swear on a Bible that he had, in fact, been to the Moon. A cameraman with Sibrel captured most of the sidewalk altercation. —ABC News story 53 Australian TVs before anyone with NASA had time to pick it up and go ballistic. In a Houston minute, that was edited out of the mix. And undoubtedly by now, a whole lot of people are thinking it would be so much easier just to go, unmistakably, to the Moon. ii. Aldrin’s in town to talk about his experience on the Moon. Apparently he was dogged all day, poked and prodded with a Bible— not the first time in history someone’s been on that kind of mission. Sibrel’s in the audience, calling him a liar, a coward, a thief for taking money to speak on a subject he knows nothing about— not even close to the first time that’s been perpetrated, either: in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon—“Exposing the Hoaxed Moon Landing!”—Sibrel himself swears we’re about to see archival NASA footage proving the crew of Apollo 11 never left Earth orbit but placed a color transparency of a smaller Earth in their window, then filmed it to simulate an actual journey to the Moon! Not exactly rocket science, but still: how could something that ingenious possibly not fly? When I was ten and armed with my newfangled Polaroid Swinger, I shot a dead bee through the windshield of my father’s Chevrolet. A minute later, it was a flying saucer buzzing the skies over Newark, and thank God no one cared enough, in fact, to pull a Bible on me. iii. I’ve studied the purported L.A. video. I’ve seen the afternoon sun bearing down on them both, and their shadows never once fail to appear in all the right places. Sadly, it’s really Los Angeles. 54 I can’t believe Aldrin’s been reduced to selling the same old story in the City of Angels—how could he not, eventually, lose his cool? And there I was, cheering him on. How could his hair not get mussed up in the hot-air breeziness of a place with so little atmosphere, it might as well be the Moon? But we have a larger problem: Sibrel says he was struck so hard that he actually saw stars—yet they’re nowhere to be seen. I’ve looked for them every time, and I’m afraid it only gets worse. I’ve watched Aldrin throw that punch again and again. I’ve tried slowing it down and speeding it up, turning it into one blurred flurry of punches. I’ve examined the footage frame by frame, and I’ll swear: that punch never really landed. Think flying saucers over New Jersey, not Zapruder filming in Dallas. Think Cassius Clay in Lewiston, Maine, and Liston sprawled flat on the canvas, but without their subsequent payday after the cheering stopped. No wonder all charges were quietly dismissed by...