PSA: I tried to fact check a moon landing hoax video and got a weird result

So last week, I watched this video claiming the Apollo 11 flag was waving in a vacuum. I spent an hour digging through NASA's own photo archives, frame by frame. The weird part? The specific image the video used wasn't in the official mission gallery at all, but it was on a bunch of conspiracy sites. Makes you wonder where they even got it. Has anyone else run into a 'source' that just doesn't exist where it should?

3 comments

3 Comments

simonp7611d ago

But what if the archives themselves aren't complete? Maybe that photo got pulled or misfiled by NASA ages ago, and the conspiracy sites are just using an old scan from a newspaper or something. It's not like government agencies have never lost records before. So one missing picture doesn't really prove the whole thing is fake, it just means the official story has a gap too.

kelly38511d ago

My own fact-checking skills are about as reliable as a chocolate teapot. I once spent an afternoon trying to verify a photo of a two-headed squirrel, only to realize I was looking at a bad photoshop of two regular squirrels on the same branch. It's wild how these images just appear out of nowhere and spread. Your find about the missing source photo is super telling. It really shows how these claims are built on shaky ground from the start.

evakelly11d ago

That two-headed squirrel story is a perfect example of how easy it is to get fooled. I read somewhere that a fake image can spread to thousands of people before the truth even gets its shoes on. It makes you want to just give up on believing anything you see online. Solidarity on the chocolate teapot fact-checking skills, honestly.