Hot take: I tried to fact check a big moon landing claim myself and it fell apart

I kept seeing people online say the flag in the moon landing photos looks like it's waving, which is impossible without air. So I got a small flag and a pole and tried to set it up in my backyard to see how it would hang. I spent about two hours trying different ways, even using a wire to hold it out like they said NASA did. The thing is, when I took pictures, the flag looked totally limp and boring, not like the rippled one in the Apollo photos at all. My friend who was helping said, 'Maybe you just need a bigger shake when you plant it.' That got me thinking. I looked it up and found that the ripples are there because the flag was stored tightly and the astronauts messed with it to unfold it, so it stayed bent. My whole 'gotcha' test actually showed me how my own quick idea was wrong. Has anyone else tried to test a famous conspiracy claim and had it backfire like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_sarah2d ago

Wasn't there a thing about shadows on the moon not being parallel? My buddy got super into that one. He set up two lamps in a dark room to act like suns and used a toy astronaut. He took a ton of pictures, getting all worked up. Then he realized his own lamps were in different spots in the room, so of course the shadows went weird. He felt like a total dummy because his own test setup was the problem, not the NASA photos. It totally changed how he looks at that stuff now.

max8082d ago

Yeah that's a classic one. I tried to do the same thing with a golf ball and a flashlight once. Spent an hour trying to make the shadows line up perfectly. Then it hit me, the sun is super far away, my flashlight was like two feet from the ball. Totally different. Felt so dumb. Makes you realize how easy it is to mess up a simple test.