That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mendacity

Dr. Neville Thomas Jones, Ph.D.

An old Chinese proverb states that a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. This means that it is conceivable that not correcting an initial step in the wrong direction might lead someone a very long way off course. Who knows what dangers and pitfalls await those that leave the narrow path and stumble around in the darkness? Being misled is one thing, but wilful acceptance of lies and deceptions can lead only to destruction.

Say, for example, that no one had ever landed upon the Moon. We could speculate as to why such a lie would be foisted upon the world in the first place, but more important would be what could possibly be behind its long-term defence? Would not the same agency of the United States government have to pile, of necessitity, more and more layers of deceit on top of one another, so that we can all witness the 'development' of its 'abilities' and the continuence of the high esteem many people have for it? As Sir Walter Scott wrote, "Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!"

Following on from the Apollo programme, NASA has soaked up quite staggering amounts of money on other projects, too, like 'solar system' probes, virtual reality(?!), erasing and then re-doing Moon landing footage(!) and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

NASA regularly releases images purportedly obtained with the HST, such as this one of "an exploding star," that occupies most of the front page of The Independent newspaper of 04-02-2005. Interestingly, though, this picture, like many others, is a fake ...

Figure 1: An alleged HST image of an alleged "exploding star," released by NASA, and very prominently featured by the British newspaper, The Independent, on 4th February, 2005. (For a full-sized, 258 kb, version, click here.)

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is a 2.4-metre reflector and has an angular resolution of about 60 milli-arcseconds, at visible wavelengths, in the absence of the Earth's atmosphere. This picture, as displayed, could not possibly have been taken with such an instrument. The 'stars' shown would not be points at all, but each would be what is called an Airy pattern (a bit like an archery target), due to diffraction.

A charge-coupled device (CCD), used to capture images on the HST, could never detect anything of the claimed orange-coloured cloud of debris, let alone the extremely fine detail depicted. Due to the inverse square law of light propagation, there would be nothing like enough energy left after a journey of 20,000 light-years to register on the semiconductor material of a CCD. The telescope would need to be precisely pointed at this supposed object for many decades to accumulate sufficient photons for this amount of detail and, of course, noise (of which there are four different types that affect a CCD), and the movement associated with the expansion of the 'cloud', would render any image obtained completely useless.

Although there are other absurd discrepancies (what light source would cause the shadow areas, for instance?), these few facts should be enough to indicate that this NASA picture does not represent reality. And, in this respect, I note some observations made in New Scientist recently (2005) about the extensive manipulation (perhaps even, generation) of images. There is no doubt that "a picture paints a thousand words," but those words can be fiction, as well non-fiction.

NASA is the main producer of science fiction:

• Men on the Moon
• Water on the Moon
• Water on Mars, Titan, Jupiter, ...
• Life on Mars
• Planets around other stars
• Extraterrestrial aliens
• Comet photography
• Asteroid-smashing saviours of the world
• Space telescopes
• Strange, disappearing Moon rock
• Gravity slingshots

And much more, ad nauseam.