"Theyde melt into a black ash:" Why you can't trust Facebook friends as sources

I like to think I have a little rebellious streak in me. There's something about my character that doesn't lend itself toward believing people just because I'm told to, or (even worse) because I just should. When a person is well-liked by a large group of people, I instantly become wary of him or her, and my first inclination when someone tells me about their heroes or idols is to figure out why said persons should not be idolized. I like controversies and I love when something runs against common thought or practice.

But even I'm not crazy enough to think we faked the moon landing.

When I logged onto Facebook today, I was greeted by one of my acquaintances from high school posting, and I quote,

The moon landing never happened...at least on the moon.

Perhaps stemming from a brief past addiction to badastronomy.com, or perhaps coming from a childhood spent dreaming of becoming an astronaut (or Indiana Jones) when I grew up, I decided to look at some of the dozen or so comments to this post.

The first several were sort of a self-congratulatory back-and-forth between the person who posted this originally and a like-minded individual. Let me include a brief sample of this:

(Like-minded individual): Welllll its true ha. We were in such a huge rush to beat the Russians for the landing of the moon we could of done ANYTHING to make it seem like we did it first

(My acquaintance): Oh yeah. I have pages of proof just like that of how it was all a hoax just so we could win the cold war. :)

"Welllll I declare that before this decade is out we shall beat
the Russians for the landing of the moon ha." --JFK

A couple of posts later, my acquaintance backs up some of his claims with the following:

Yeah I bore people all the time and get into heated arguments about how it never happened. It took so much gas and such a huge craft just to get there. Then ALL that was left was a tiny capsule...which we are supposed to believe could make it back the same way it came? Not to mention the radiation...the fact if Niel was the first on the moon who was filming him?...or how bout the fact that his primary job was acting...and how come the footage of it mysteriously vanished...?

Now, let me pause to give a quick back-story. The guy who started this whole Facebook thread is someone I knew in junior high and high school. I recall that he was pretty smart, fairly funny, and quite popular. He is currently a Marine serving in Japan. While I was surprised to see him bring up the so-called "Apollo moon hoax," it is certainly not out of character for him. What was out of character, though, was the fairly rational response added to the thread from another of my high school acquaintances:

A. The flag was made to look as if it was waving. Was it waving in the video? B. there was a camera on the outside of the ship that filmed the guy climbing out. C. outer space is full of........nothing! Hence, once something starts floating a certain direction it will keep going at the same speed until something stops it. All the ship needed was a little boost to get it going and then it could go all the way. I'm still not convinced that it was fake.

An adequate rebuttal, especially since the person who wrote will forever be remembered for stealing a bag of chalk from the high school baseball field and throwing it on people's fences before putting some in a mailbox, leading to the HazMat team and several police cruisers being called in to investigate what was assumed to be anthrax. The policemen were able to trace it all back to him by rolling down their windows, sticking out their heads, and following the trail of thrown chalk dust all the way back to his house. Remember--this is our voice of reason.

His post, to no one's surprise, was not well received, and was followed by a lengthy diatribe citing 1960s-era camera rigging technology (and the assumed insufficiency thereof) and solar radiation ("In the 1960's they thought if you wore aluminum foil with the shiny side out you would be safe because it would reflect the radiation waves. This turned out to be false because by the 70's 100's of thousands died at uranium mills all across the world." ). He concluded by saying,

Radiation is too strong for any man made suit or ship. And it is SO strong in space that if any man were to pass through it they wouldn't just die immediately theyde melt into a black ash. Yet the first moon landing says they survived going there and coming back?

A cunning blow, made all the more impressive by its refusal to give sources.

The thread is still on-going, and perhaps in the comments section I'll post some updates to it. However, if you actually do have questions about the supposed moon hoax, I would direct you instead to an article on the Bad Astronomy blog, where astronomer Phil Plait discusses this topic in-depth.