Bad Astronomy

Take a ride on the Redding

I have some follow-up on my Moon Hoax talk in Redding, California last week.

First, there’s a thread on BAUT about it, which includes picture goodness from BABloggee Sabrina.

Second, Bruce Ross from Redding.com wrote an editorial about the talk the day after (I should have known he was a reporter; he was the only one there wearing a tie). He has nice things to say, which is cool… but he includes a funny bit from someone who was less than thrilled with my cold dose of reality:

Last night at the David Marr Auditorium, Phil Plait presented “science” as stand-up comedy with sarcasm, rhetorical comments and witticisms. He skewered other legitimate investigators and got chuckles from the innocent people in the audience – mostly members of the Turtle Bay Museum. What I observed was organized propaganda and centralized information.

How is it possible that in 2001 the FOX TV channel televised a believable program examining the unanswered questions surrounding the so-called moon landings and yet, today in 2007, FOX is clearly the Bush administration’s mouthpiece? Why has the government sent a representative out to local communities to debunk “the moon hoax hoax” when most people have not even heard of the “moon hoax”?

Just my thoughts…

I’m always amazed what people are capable of thinking. Calling Bart Sibrel and his ilk “legitimate investigators” is really, really funny. Maybe he missed the part where I went into detail about Bart’s ambushing of Buzz Aldrin and other astronauts to get them to swear on a Bible that they walked on the moon (I bet Walter Cronkite is green with envy over Bart’s investigatory acumen), or how so many Moon Hoax conspiracy theorists claim to be experts at photography but don’t understand anything about film, cameras, exposure times, framing, aperture settings, reflections, perspective, shadows… all those tiny tiny details.

As for my being organized, well, yeah. But propaganda? Funny, but what I presented were not only facts, but reproduceable experiments you can do at home (I modeled a moving flag by blowing on my belt, then swinging it back and forth: some propaganda!). The “centralized information” line has me a bit baffled, too. Does he mean evidence-based reasoning using facts, scientific protocols, and logical analysis? Color me guilty!

Oh well, you can’t please everybody, and, of course, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.