Vent: My uncle tried to convince me the moon landing was faked with a 90 minute lecture

Last Thanksgiving, my uncle cornered me after dinner and spent a full hour and a half going through his moon landing proof. He showed me 12 different YouTube clips about shadows and flag waving. The thing that hit different was when he said 'NASA admitted they lost the telemetry tapes' - I looked that up later and it's actually true in a technical sense. But then I found out the tapes were erased and reused for satellite data, not because the landing was fake. Has anyone else had a relative go this deep on a theory and actually make you question a small detail?

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2 Comments

jasonc509d ago

Wait, is that the thing about the tapes being reused? I used to be pretty sure it was all real until I heard that detail and it actually gave me pause for a second... I even went down a rabbit hole on it and found out that the whole "lost tapes" thing is way more boring than people make it sound. But then I stumbled on a documentary about how the Apollo 11 footage was broadcast in a different frame rate and that's why the flag looks weird, and it kinda clicked for me. So yeah, I get how one small fact can make you doubt the bigger picture for a bit.

the_alice9d agoMost Upvoted

Yeah I had a buddy who was super into the moon landing stuff, thought it was all a big cover-up. He spent like a whole weekend watching conspiracy videos on YouTube, totally convinced. Then he saw this old NASA engineer give a talk at a local library, just this normal guy in a cardigan explaining how they had to deal with all these weird technical problems. He said the engineer talked about the flag issue for a minute, just laughed and said "the frame rate thing gets everyone." After that my friend just kind of dropped it, said it was way less interesting when you actually understood the boring real reasons.