Moonstruck

Ten years ago, Jay Windley was stuck on a bus with his fellow members of the Utah Symphony Chorus. They were headed from Salt Lake City to Jackson Hole, Wyo., for a routine performance. But it wasn't long before Windley was annoyed (and not by his singing bus mates). He was perturbed by the man sitting next to him, the one insisting that American astronauts have never landed on the moon, despite the abundant photographic and physical evidence provided by the Apollo lunar landings—the first of which reached the moon 40 years ago this week. "He was spouting all this hoax nonsense," Windley says. "And he was clearly wrong, but I didn't have the research at that time to say that."

When Windley got back from his choral excursion, he founded clavius.org, a small Web site on which he has spent the last 10 years trying to prove the moon-landing deniers wrong. On the site, as well as on message boards that feature responses from astronomers, academics, and interested high-schoolers, Windley and his crew make their way through hoax myths, debunking them one by one. If deniers argue that the flag planted on the moon shouldn't be waving back and forth, then debunkers explain the theories of inertia as it applies to rippling fabric. Another argument—that the stars are missing from the backgrounds of the photographs—is easily explained: the exposure on the camera wasn't long enough to catch them. Sometimes, hoax believers argue that those astronauts who weren't ready to participate in the conspiracy were killed off. To that, the debunkers point out that NASA used a variety of consultants, contractors, and outside engineering firms, enough people that surely some word of a conspiracy would have leaked out, had there been one.

read more at http://www.newsweek.com/id/207149