Last night the West Rand Astronomy Club had Vincent Nettman, Maropeng’s resident “astronomer”, present a talk on the lunar moon landing conspiracy. I heckled but then I quickly had to leave as I was getting angry couldn’t remain calm anymore.
I posted a criticism on the club’s fb page dissing the presentation. Admin deleted my post. Walk away or troll? >:D
Vincent gives this talk to the public at Maropeng and at the Walter Sisulu Gardens
The club’s chairman and other members are believers of this nonsense hence why they allowed this.
I’d leave, its pointless attempting to bring your point across and they are incapable or unwilling to listen/understand. If it will make you feel better, troll a bit and insult their intelligence but ultimately its probably better to throw your hands up in the air and give it up as a bad job before you get annoyed enough to throttle someone for being an idiot.
In his book Bad Astronomy Phil Plait used a string of readily verifiable facts to dismantle completely the idea that the moon landing was faked. It is revealing that these guys seem so afraid of the truth that their only response to valid criticism is censorship.
You can try to make the above brief points once or twice. If your comments are again deleted, they’re too far gone and no amount of trolling will help. If you like and have the patience for it, start your own FB page explaining why the moon landing was not a hoax — and allow the loonies’ comments there when they start posting, which is sure to happen.
Nobody has ever gotten anywhere by trolling, the best a person can do is setup a blog post with debunking this and aim to have a top google listing when you search for any of there names. That helps at least get people that are on the fence to see there are people who don’t agree.
I never new we had moon landing deniers in this country. What is there take on why it’s fake?
A moonlanding hoax debunking site: http://www.clavius.org/
I have not bothered to read it and I doubt if any forum members will need to - the link is mainly for guests.
The West Rand Astronomy Club’s chairman, Kenny Nevill, as well as the speaker, Vincent Nettmann, now deny moon landing denial was ever promoted at their meeting. Here is a letter from Nevill to Nettmann earmarked for general publication:
Hi Vincent,
Thanks for your call.
I am forwarding this entire document to you as a result of the MAJOR problem that you are experiencing.
Sorry to hear about the Badmouthing that “our friend” is doing on the internet. He doesn’t have a clue as to what you said or how positive you are about the moon landing. Your approach to first show and say what the critics say and then your presentation that refutes their claims was fantastic. Your beautiful models of the entire spacecraft and your very graphic detailed description of how it was all possible was more than enough to convince and convert any sceptic that didn’t believe that man had landed on the moon.
What a pity that this person chose to walk out before hearing what was said. The fact that he ASSSUMES that he knows what the outcome was and the fact that he is totally wrong in his assumption is very sad indeed. What makes it worse is the fact that he is publically publishing his “assumption”. I feel that anyone that is not prepared to listen and learn can only do his own career a lot of harm. This is certainly going to bite him in the back.
The entire meeting of 26 people will support you.
Thank you once again for your presentation, it was thoroughly enjoyed by all.
I can assure you that you are welcome to the WRAC anytime and we would love to see more of your presentations in future.
Have a fantastic day.
Take care
Kenny Nevill
Nettmann further denies that this talk has ever been presented at Maropeng or elsewhere, though he acknowledges that the hoax theory has been mentioned in some talks, but not presented as fact.
The only evidence I present is anecdotal and I did walk out of the presentation when I couldn’t bare it anymore.
When Kenny introduced the talk he made a disclaimer that the presentation was biased and that Vincent doesn’t “necessarily” believe in the moon landing conspiracy.
The part of his presentation that I observed was poor. He started off with a history of space flight and said something along the lines of “I found an interesting point recently brought up by the conspiracy theorists that animals were sent into space before humans but animals were not sent to the moon before humans”. He left it at that.
He then goes through the list of the conspiracy claims without any analysis or the refutations as he goes along. His presentation could well go through some or all of the points afterwards with a refutation. When I challenged each claim as he brought them, he did not once indicate to me that he would get to the refutation part later.
Finally I mentioned that several of the claims were refuted by MythBusters, he immediately, and passionately, responded that MythBusters were wrong. I decided at that stage not to listen to him anymore.
And that’s my anecdotal evidence. Apparently I am outnumbered 26 to 1.
Well I guess there is a lesson in that, If you going to be at a talk like this, Make sure that you have somebody with you to corroborate or some other evidence and you should probably be cool headed enough to stay till the end.
