This controversy reminds me of an astronomy professor of mine. He was semi-obsessed with showing that the moon landing was not faked, to the point of conspiracy-nut enthusiasm, despite supporting the status quo. He’d go off on long anecdotes in class about how he saw some light at such and such a latitude at a certain time, which showed unquestionably that there must have been a man-made vehicle at such-and-such a point. Then, he said one thing that stuck with me: if it were faked, that means there are at least hundreds, more likely tens of thousands, of low- and mid-level government employees who are keeping their lips absolutely, perfectly sealed.
That was all the argument I ever needed to hear to dissuade me from crackpot government conspiracy theories. Once an event reaches a certain magnitude of size, cost, and planning, P:Everyone stays quiet rapidly approaches zero. The payoffs and probability of a guilty conscience are simply too high with a large enough N.
Then, he said one thing that stuck with me: if it were faked, that means there are at least hundreds, more likely tens of thousands, of low- and mid-level government employees who are keeping their lips absolutely, perfectly sealed.
I’ve always disliked this argument. We do know of programs with tens of thousands and more employees who have kept quiet and regard their silence as a great and honorable accomplishment.
They are the employees of the US federal government’s black budget, a >$50 billion annual sink about which the public knows next to nothing whatsoever, and probably never will because records are easily destroyed when they are secret.
If we are lucky, we may get some bare descriptions of what happened, decades after the fact. For example, you’ve heard of the sick abuses of MKULTRA (which we only know even this much about because the coverup missed some documents), but MKULTRA was only one of many projects being run by the CIA technical division. What do we really know about the MKULTRA programs overseas, like MKCHICKWIT or MKDELTA? Where are all the whistleblowers there, hm? And these were some of the most evil programs around, literally direct descendants from the Nazi medical torture experiments. If ever there was something to whistleblow on, poisoning an entire French town with LSD would be it.
And then there’s the spy satellites, in their endless billions of dollars and thousands of engineers & programmers. The KH-13 in 1995 was thought in the open literature to be >2 billion USD, ballooned to >4 billion by 2007 and who knows where it is these days? (By the way, just part of the full software set was estimated at >3 million SLOC; how many programmers worked on that and have kept utter silence?)
So, I regard it as an extremely weak piece of evidence. Not non-zero, but so close as to be almost entirely irrelevant and outweighed by anything else.
I believe my principle stands. Your counterexamples are very different in several important dimensions.
You are forgetting context. This is not a covert operation, centered principally around CIA agents or other professionals committed to stealth and secrecy. Nor is it on some issue so obscure that you would have trouble getting a journalist to understand it if you leaked. This is a massive operation that would have involved a large number of scientists and technicians (and just civilians, generally), with several major observable events (i.e. the launch). I’m sure it also involved numerous corporations who had to build materials and keep some form of records. If any one of the doubtless hundreds of important players had come forward with any substantial, credible evidence or testimony demonstrating that the whole thing is a ruse, I imagine it would not have been hard to find a willing medium to communicate such.
Also, programs like MKULTRA have almost no visible effects. That is, no one working on MKULTRA would see it on TV with their family. No one involved would really realize that a ruse was being pulled. This is not at all true of something like a moon landing; numerous civilians would probably be aware of the fact that the government was trying to pull a fast one. It’s much easier to keep something secret when the people involved don’t know it’s newsworthy.
In other words: is it likely that there are particular government programs about which the public remains entirely ignorant? Yes. For any specific, conspicuous, high-profile government program or event involving large numbers of civilian participants, is it likely that the government managed to fool the public and then maintain perfect silence? No, no it is not.
This is not a covert operation, centered principally around CIA agents or other professionals committed to stealth and secrecy.
? A fake moon landing would be the very blackest of black programs/SAPs. Of course the people working on it would be committed to stealth and secrecy.
This is a massive operation that would have involved a large number of scientists and technicians (and just civilians, generally), with several major observable events (i.e. the launch).
I’ve already pointed out that the satellite programs like KH-13 involved at minimum thousands of scientists/technicians/civilians. So your point must solely be ‘my heuristic is valid when there is high profile media coverage’.
But what about the constant media coverage of nuclear explosions and the media assurance to civilians that there was nothing to fear, even though the scientists suspected or knew that the fallout really was dangerous? (You may remember the settlements made a few years ago to Nevadans). High profile events (nuke tests aren’t subtle), thousands of involved civilians, etc. Yet...
I’m sure it also involved numerous corporations who had to build materials and keep some form of records.
Yes, no doubt the corporations who consume $50 billion every year in the black budget, and who have consumed similar amounts every year since the Cold War started, have kept meticulous records. For all the good that has done the rest of us...
This is not at all true of something like a moon landing; numerous civilians would probably be aware of the fact that the government was trying to pull a fast one.
A Noble Lie as part of the Cold War against those genocidal atheist Communist foreigners. Where were all these civilians blowing the whistle in things like the Tuskegee experiments? (Murdering a bunch of black people would seem to not need be broadcast on TV before someone says to themselves, ‘Hey! Isn’t this insanely cartoon-cackling evil?’) The Tonkin Gulf? How many of the Plumbers (all civilians, all cognizant of their criminality) blew the whistle?
For any specific, conspicuous, high-profile government program or event involving large numbers of civilian participants, is it likely that the government managed to fool the public and then maintain perfect silence? No, no it is not.
I feel as if this is a good example of disagreements being dishonest. I’ve stuck only to highly mainstream, well-established conspiracies and systems of evil in just America, and haven’t even touched upon the ones which haven’t been definitively proven (even though basic logic tells me that some of them are probably true), but your position remains the same as ever. Someone is being intransigent here.
On review, I will admit my original point was framed somewhat imprecisely. I did not mean to imply that it is highly unlikely that the government can manage to keep any large projects secret. I meant (as I think was obvious from the context) that it is very unlikely that the government would be able to keep something as large-scale, civilian-intensive, public, and high-profile as faking a series of moon landings secret for four decades. This probability is particularly low considering the alternative of, “They just did it.” As my original point was a rather offhand comment, I did not bother going into this level of detail.
Someone is being intransigent here.
I will confess to not really giving a damn about the details up to now, because I thought my point was rather obvious. I see there’s a bit of an inferential gap. In short, I think you vastly underestimate the prior improbability of your own claim, and vastly overestimate the relevance of your counterexamples, all of which are substantially different on numerous dimensions. I’ll spell things out in greater detail.
[Having taken two minutes to look at wikipedia, there does seem to be rather solid evidence of its veracity, what with the fact that there is experimentally observable apparatus on the moon where Uncle Sam says we landed. That’s besides my point, since it was strictly on the implications of massive government conspiracies being unlikely.]
There are pretty much exactly two possibilities: (1) the events are true as they were told to us, or (2) there was an elaborate conspiracy involving, on the one hand, whoever faked the actual video, and, on the other hand, whoever built all of the equipment to fake the launch, and every single significant person involved to this date has remained dead-silent. Other evidence is of course relevant to the ultimate question, but I’m sticking to my specific claim.
It seems fair to assume that if the moon landing were not technically feasible, some reputable scientist would be able to point this out. Therefore, if it is technically feasible, the simpler explanation is that things happened as claimed—what’s the benefit of faking it, and burning enough money to actually do it, when you could just actually do it? The conspiracy theory requires, in addition to a massive, complex conspiracy, the total silence of people who would likely have realized the equipment they were making would not work, or who were not actually making equipment.
People wouldn’t be driven to blow the whistle due to moral concerns—they’d be driven to do so for pure self interest. They’d become rich and famous if they had credible evidence. This is absolutely not the case for any other conspiracy you have named. That is an enormous distinguishing fact that you haven’t appreciated. None of the examples you gave were such that people stood to become rich or famous by blowing the whistle. And the Cold War is over, and still no one came forward, so patriotism is a pretty unlikely explanation.
More importantly, every single one of the counterexamples you’ve given is a non-story. It’s a lot easier to convince my spouse I’m not cheating by saying nothing than it is to do so by explaining on how I went on a luxurious tour across South East Asia, complete with video and tchotchkes. In every example you cite, it isn’t that the government told us a story that happened, and that then got proven wrong. It’s that the government didn’t tell us there was a story, and then people figured out there was. (And how long did “Nuclear testing is perfectly harmless” last in practice?) There was no serious public question of, “Is the government honestly studying syphilis, or is something else going on?”
Getting the government to run a conspiracy of this magnitude with no credible leaks of any kind, despite massive personal incentives to leak, requires a whole lot of things to go exactly right. Actually landing on the moon, after developing a robust space program and spending enough money to develop landing on the moon and launching giant rockets into space and having videos of people landing on the moon, is not nearly so unlikely.
“The government, in the case of a very large and public project with substantial corroborating evidence, has in fact lied to us and the whole thing is fabricated” is an extraordinary claim that requires substantial evidence in the absence of major leaks. Or, at least some evidence. Without clear and powerful supporting evidence, it is rational to assume this claim is wrong, because it is really, really complicated and requires a lot of things to go right.
I don’t think any of your counterexamples contradict that.
An even more unassailable bit of evidence, for me, is that Russia never claimed it was a fake, despite having the obvious capacity to verify (just by training their best telescopes on the landing site, and probably a dozen other ways) and the obvious benefit to them if they could show America had faked it.
No conspiracy short of a One World Government could have pulled off a fake moon landing— and if a conspiracy were powerful enough to orchestrate a fake Cold War, one wonders why they would have even bothered with PR stunts.
Once an event reaches a certain magnitude of size, cost, and planning, P:Everyone stays quiet rapidly approaches zero.
I wonder if there is data/examples supporting this, e.g. a list of failed conspiracies due to someone not being able to stay quiet (or any other relevant reason). Of course we’d also need a list of successful fairly large conspiracies too..
Well there is the case of Kurt Sonnenfeld who was the official FEMA videographer at ground Zero. He has fled to Argentina and published a book about the whole issue:
http://www.voltairenet.org/article160666.html
As a historical example you have Israel’s nuclear program and there was exactly one whistle blower, Mordechai Vanunu and he was hunted down and thrown into prison for that. So imagine the amount of people involved in a nuclear program and yet you find only one who speaks out. The thing is, people who are in the know also know why they have to keep quiet and the consequences they will face if they do otherwise.
Lets imagine that some hypothetical government agent starts speaking, how could he prove his point? And even if he could wouldn’t that speak against him because if he was involved why didn’t he say so earlier or do something against it? He probably would be dismissed as another lunatic.
EDIT:
There is also the ringworm affair that happened in the 40s and 50s in Israel and is still controversial and a lot of people have kept quiet about it for decades.
It doesn’t outright deny it but mentions that the israeli government has paid compensation to those affected and it has a link to this article which goes more in depth about the whole issue:
Maddox mentioned the same thing in his rant against the 9/11conspiracy.
I respect the point-by-point rebuttals people make, but do they work? Maybe to keep people away, but how effective are they at making someone stop believing something ridiculous? In my experience, not very. And when people get fanatical in the direction of truth, that seems to make others cautious of believing it too. Did you have any classmates that ended up believing the moon landing was a conspiracy?
Who is to say that those employees were actually involved in the conspiracy? They were just being used by the conspiracy! Flight controllers receiving “telemetry” from a computer/simulation in a basement somewhere, unbeknownst to them, etc.
The 100s of low level employees involved weren’t a problem—hell, the 10s of thousands of them weren’t. They bought the story just like the rest of us! :P
This controversy reminds me of an astronomy professor of mine. He was semi-obsessed with showing that the moon landing was not faked, to the point of conspiracy-nut enthusiasm, despite supporting the status quo. He’d go off on long anecdotes in class about how he saw some light at such and such a latitude at a certain time, which showed unquestionably that there must have been a man-made vehicle at such-and-such a point. Then, he said one thing that stuck with me: if it were faked, that means there are at least hundreds, more likely tens of thousands, of low- and mid-level government employees who are keeping their lips absolutely, perfectly sealed.
That was all the argument I ever needed to hear to dissuade me from crackpot government conspiracy theories. Once an event reaches a certain magnitude of size, cost, and planning, P:Everyone stays quiet rapidly approaches zero. The payoffs and probability of a guilty conscience are simply too high with a large enough N.
I’ve always disliked this argument. We do know of programs with tens of thousands and more employees who have kept quiet and regard their silence as a great and honorable accomplishment.
They are the employees of the US federal government’s black budget, a >$50 billion annual sink about which the public knows next to nothing whatsoever, and probably never will because records are easily destroyed when they are secret.
If we are lucky, we may get some bare descriptions of what happened, decades after the fact. For example, you’ve heard of the sick abuses of MKULTRA (which we only know even this much about because the coverup missed some documents), but MKULTRA was only one of many projects being run by the CIA technical division. What do we really know about the MKULTRA programs overseas, like MKCHICKWIT or MKDELTA? Where are all the whistleblowers there, hm? And these were some of the most evil programs around, literally direct descendants from the Nazi medical torture experiments. If ever there was something to whistleblow on, poisoning an entire French town with LSD would be it.
And then there’s the spy satellites, in their endless billions of dollars and thousands of engineers & programmers. The KH-13 in 1995 was thought in the open literature to be >2 billion USD, ballooned to >4 billion by 2007 and who knows where it is these days? (By the way, just part of the full software set was estimated at >3 million SLOC; how many programmers worked on that and have kept utter silence?)
So, I regard it as an extremely weak piece of evidence. Not non-zero, but so close as to be almost entirely irrelevant and outweighed by anything else.
I believe my principle stands. Your counterexamples are very different in several important dimensions.
You are forgetting context. This is not a covert operation, centered principally around CIA agents or other professionals committed to stealth and secrecy. Nor is it on some issue so obscure that you would have trouble getting a journalist to understand it if you leaked. This is a massive operation that would have involved a large number of scientists and technicians (and just civilians, generally), with several major observable events (i.e. the launch). I’m sure it also involved numerous corporations who had to build materials and keep some form of records. If any one of the doubtless hundreds of important players had come forward with any substantial, credible evidence or testimony demonstrating that the whole thing is a ruse, I imagine it would not have been hard to find a willing medium to communicate such.
Also, programs like MKULTRA have almost no visible effects. That is, no one working on MKULTRA would see it on TV with their family. No one involved would really realize that a ruse was being pulled. This is not at all true of something like a moon landing; numerous civilians would probably be aware of the fact that the government was trying to pull a fast one. It’s much easier to keep something secret when the people involved don’t know it’s newsworthy.
In other words: is it likely that there are particular government programs about which the public remains entirely ignorant? Yes. For any specific, conspicuous, high-profile government program or event involving large numbers of civilian participants, is it likely that the government managed to fool the public and then maintain perfect silence? No, no it is not.
? A fake moon landing would be the very blackest of black programs/SAPs. Of course the people working on it would be committed to stealth and secrecy.
I’ve already pointed out that the satellite programs like KH-13 involved at minimum thousands of scientists/technicians/civilians. So your point must solely be ‘my heuristic is valid when there is high profile media coverage’.
But what about the constant media coverage of nuclear explosions and the media assurance to civilians that there was nothing to fear, even though the scientists suspected or knew that the fallout really was dangerous? (You may remember the settlements made a few years ago to Nevadans). High profile events (nuke tests aren’t subtle), thousands of involved civilians, etc. Yet...
Yes, no doubt the corporations who consume $50 billion every year in the black budget, and who have consumed similar amounts every year since the Cold War started, have kept meticulous records. For all the good that has done the rest of us...
A Noble Lie as part of the Cold War against those genocidal atheist Communist foreigners. Where were all these civilians blowing the whistle in things like the Tuskegee experiments? (Murdering a bunch of black people would seem to not need be broadcast on TV before someone says to themselves, ‘Hey! Isn’t this insanely cartoon-cackling evil?’) The Tonkin Gulf? How many of the Plumbers (all civilians, all cognizant of their criminality) blew the whistle?
I feel as if this is a good example of disagreements being dishonest. I’ve stuck only to highly mainstream, well-established conspiracies and systems of evil in just America, and haven’t even touched upon the ones which haven’t been definitively proven (even though basic logic tells me that some of them are probably true), but your position remains the same as ever. Someone is being intransigent here.
On review, I will admit my original point was framed somewhat imprecisely. I did not mean to imply that it is highly unlikely that the government can manage to keep any large projects secret. I meant (as I think was obvious from the context) that it is very unlikely that the government would be able to keep something as large-scale, civilian-intensive, public, and high-profile as faking a series of moon landings secret for four decades. This probability is particularly low considering the alternative of, “They just did it.” As my original point was a rather offhand comment, I did not bother going into this level of detail.
I will confess to not really giving a damn about the details up to now, because I thought my point was rather obvious. I see there’s a bit of an inferential gap. In short, I think you vastly underestimate the prior improbability of your own claim, and vastly overestimate the relevance of your counterexamples, all of which are substantially different on numerous dimensions. I’ll spell things out in greater detail.
[Having taken two minutes to look at wikipedia, there does seem to be rather solid evidence of its veracity, what with the fact that there is experimentally observable apparatus on the moon where Uncle Sam says we landed. That’s besides my point, since it was strictly on the implications of massive government conspiracies being unlikely.]
There are pretty much exactly two possibilities: (1) the events are true as they were told to us, or (2) there was an elaborate conspiracy involving, on the one hand, whoever faked the actual video, and, on the other hand, whoever built all of the equipment to fake the launch, and every single significant person involved to this date has remained dead-silent. Other evidence is of course relevant to the ultimate question, but I’m sticking to my specific claim.
It seems fair to assume that if the moon landing were not technically feasible, some reputable scientist would be able to point this out. Therefore, if it is technically feasible, the simpler explanation is that things happened as claimed—what’s the benefit of faking it, and burning enough money to actually do it, when you could just actually do it? The conspiracy theory requires, in addition to a massive, complex conspiracy, the total silence of people who would likely have realized the equipment they were making would not work, or who were not actually making equipment.
People wouldn’t be driven to blow the whistle due to moral concerns—they’d be driven to do so for pure self interest. They’d become rich and famous if they had credible evidence. This is absolutely not the case for any other conspiracy you have named. That is an enormous distinguishing fact that you haven’t appreciated. None of the examples you gave were such that people stood to become rich or famous by blowing the whistle. And the Cold War is over, and still no one came forward, so patriotism is a pretty unlikely explanation.
More importantly, every single one of the counterexamples you’ve given is a non-story. It’s a lot easier to convince my spouse I’m not cheating by saying nothing than it is to do so by explaining on how I went on a luxurious tour across South East Asia, complete with video and tchotchkes. In every example you cite, it isn’t that the government told us a story that happened, and that then got proven wrong. It’s that the government didn’t tell us there was a story, and then people figured out there was. (And how long did “Nuclear testing is perfectly harmless” last in practice?) There was no serious public question of, “Is the government honestly studying syphilis, or is something else going on?”
Getting the government to run a conspiracy of this magnitude with no credible leaks of any kind, despite massive personal incentives to leak, requires a whole lot of things to go exactly right. Actually landing on the moon, after developing a robust space program and spending enough money to develop landing on the moon and launching giant rockets into space and having videos of people landing on the moon, is not nearly so unlikely.
TL;DR of my other response to this:
“The government, in the case of a very large and public project with substantial corroborating evidence, has in fact lied to us and the whole thing is fabricated” is an extraordinary claim that requires substantial evidence in the absence of major leaks. Or, at least some evidence. Without clear and powerful supporting evidence, it is rational to assume this claim is wrong, because it is really, really complicated and requires a lot of things to go right.
I don’t think any of your counterexamples contradict that.
An even more unassailable bit of evidence, for me, is that Russia never claimed it was a fake, despite having the obvious capacity to verify (just by training their best telescopes on the landing site, and probably a dozen other ways) and the obvious benefit to them if they could show America had faked it.
No conspiracy short of a One World Government could have pulled off a fake moon landing— and if a conspiracy were powerful enough to orchestrate a fake Cold War, one wonders why they would have even bothered with PR stunts.
I wonder if there is data/examples supporting this, e.g. a list of failed conspiracies due to someone not being able to stay quiet (or any other relevant reason). Of course we’d also need a list of successful fairly large conspiracies too..
Guy Fawkes
Well there is the case of Kurt Sonnenfeld who was the official FEMA videographer at ground Zero. He has fled to Argentina and published a book about the whole issue: http://www.voltairenet.org/article160666.html
As a historical example you have Israel’s nuclear program and there was exactly one whistle blower, Mordechai Vanunu and he was hunted down and thrown into prison for that. So imagine the amount of people involved in a nuclear program and yet you find only one who speaks out. The thing is, people who are in the know also know why they have to keep quiet and the consequences they will face if they do otherwise.
Lets imagine that some hypothetical government agent starts speaking, how could he prove his point? And even if he could wouldn’t that speak against him because if he was involved why didn’t he say so earlier or do something against it? He probably would be dismissed as another lunatic.
EDIT: There is also the ringworm affair that happened in the 40s and 50s in Israel and is still controversial and a lot of people have kept quiet about it for decades.
You would expect a second whistleblower to step forward after the whistle has already been blown?
I don’t understand, why doesn’t Sonnenfeld just put up his video on the internet?
You might want to be careful citing Sonnefeld. But perhaps he’s being framed.
Wikipedia disagrees regarding ringworm.
You are probably talking about this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworm_affair
It doesn’t outright deny it but mentions that the israeli government has paid compensation to those affected and it has a link to this article which goes more in depth about the whole issue:
http://web.israelinsider.com/Views/3998.htm
Maddox mentioned the same thing in his rant against the 9/11conspiracy.
I respect the point-by-point rebuttals people make, but do they work? Maybe to keep people away, but how effective are they at making someone stop believing something ridiculous? In my experience, not very. And when people get fanatical in the direction of truth, that seems to make others cautious of believing it too. Did you have any classmates that ended up believing the moon landing was a conspiracy?
I sincerely doubt it, but I doubt anyone thought it was going in to the class. This was many decades after the moon landing.
Who is to say that those employees were actually involved in the conspiracy? They were just being used by the conspiracy! Flight controllers receiving “telemetry” from a computer/simulation in a basement somewhere, unbeknownst to them, etc.
The 100s of low level employees involved weren’t a problem—hell, the 10s of thousands of them weren’t. They bought the story just like the rest of us! :P