Before diving into this particular episode, I have to give the Ancient Alien Theorists credit on one thing: they don’t support the idea that the Moon Landing is a hoax.  Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

dr-tyson-and-the-tides The show opens with a discussion of the Apollo program, and includes comments from interviews with astronauts involved, most notably Buzz Aldrin.  It then moves on to a discussion of the role the Moon has played in human culture, and in the development of life on Earth. So far so good; the moon does have a gravitation effect on the earth, and stabilized and continues to stabilize the planet, making it more hospitable to life than it would be without it.  At about seven minutes into the episode, we might have a record for longest time without invoking the Ancient Alien Theory.

 

 

The show then addresses the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon Landing.  They make a point of saying it really did happen, so that’s one group of conspiracists they’ve lost.  After that, though, they go on to say that the astronauts encountered evidence of alien activity on the moon, and that this was covered up.  They invoke a two-minute gap in the public transmissions, during which time the astronauts supposedly reported seeing a group of saucers parked around a crater not far from their landing point.  This information comes from HAM radio operators who claim to have heard these transmissions.  Nowhere is the perfectly reasonable idea that there might be problems with transmissions between the Earth and the Moon.  Sometimes, it seems, one forgets that technology was not always as it is, and that making a long-distance phone call from one city to another was a process, much less transmitting radio signals from THE MOON.

The show then asks why the United States stopped going to the Moon, and why the Soviets never went.  The answer given is that the astronauts discovered aliens there, and it was decided on a governmental level not to continue because of this.  Or, there’s the real reason: The Space Race and the Moon Landings are part and parcel of the Cold War, and once that started to wind down, as it did in the mid-1970s, there was just no reason to spend the money anymore.  As for why the USSR never went to the Moon: once the United States had gotten there, the Soviets had no reason to go.[1]

The show then moves to a claim that the origin of the Moon is inexplicable.  Astrobiologist Dr. Paul Davies explains that when he was in school[2] the theory was that the moon was a captured object, and that this theory has been overridden by the now-current idea that the moon was formed when another planet collided with the Earth very early in its formation.  The viewer is left to believe that because new theories have come into being means that science cannot explain things, which is simply ridiculous.  We then see Dr. John Brandenburg claims that this “bizarre theory” cannot be true because the Moon is the perfect size to produce eclipses of the Sun, and thus it must be an artificial satellite.  He also claims that no other natural satellites of which we know have the same effect on their planets as does the Moon on the Earth.  This is an unsupportable claim with the amount of information we currently have: most of the other natural satellites of the Sol system orbit gas giants, which react differently than a rocky planet like the Earth.

After half a show of skirting around the issue, they finally get to the point: Ancient Alien Theorists believe that the Moon is an artificial body, created specifically for the Earth by extraterrestrials who sought to make the Earth more hospitable and/or to watch us from nearby.  The first bit of evidence given is excerpts from mythological texts and legends that claim to remember an era before the Moon.  This is self-contradictory: the show earlier discussed how life could not exist on Earth without the “calming” influence of the Moon’s gravity, thus how can human-created legends exist that claim to know of a time before the moon existed?

They then move to the idea that the Moon is a hollow space-station, and give various “proofs.”  They claim that the craters on the Moon are supposedly all about the same depth, and that this is impossible.  They’re right on the last part, that it is impossible; it’s also not true.  They claim that the craters cannot be any deeper because the Moon’s surface is merely a soil-deep covering over a hollow metal sphere.  The first problem with this is the idea that metal can’t be cratered, the second (and more important) is that the Moon is definitely not a hollow metal sphere.  Another supposed proof is that when the Apollo missions did seismic tests on the Moon, it “rang like a bell.”  This phrase comes from one of the NASA scientists who was working on the seismic tests during the Apollo 13 mission, and I’ll go out on a limb to say was not meant to be taken literally.  The seismic waves reverberated for over an hour in these tests, which is believed to be the effect of the crystalline structure of the rocks that comprise the Moon.  One thing it certainly doesn’t indicate is a hollow planetoid, in fact, it indicates a potentially much denser object than the Earth.

The show then moves to claims by Mikail Vosin and Alexander Shcherbakov, two Soviet scientists who published an article in 1970 claiming that the Moon is a spacecraft.[3] The article was published not in a scientific journal, but in Sputnik, a magazine which has been compared to Reader’s Digest.  This lends a careful observer to think that it was intended as a way to undermine American science and achievements with the general public in the USSR.

Next, there is a discussion of supposed artificial structures on the Moon.  This requires little comment beyond what has already been said about the supposed artificial structures on Mars: it is an example of Pareidolia, the phenomenon in which people see familiar patterns where none exist.  More evidence of supposed alien habitation is given in the form of flickering lights seen on the Moon’s surface.  An excerpt from the interview with Aldrin is shown in which he describes them as “flicker-flashes,” but says they did not investigate further because they “were on their way home.”  Though they remain unexplained, a recent article in the journal Nature explains evidence indicating they are gas eruptions.[4]  What they aren’t is some kind of alien skyline.  The show ends with the suggestion that aliens are living on the far (dark) side of the moon, but offers no evidence other than the logic of aliens keeping their bases out of sight.

Overall, this is not one of the more convincing episodes, at points it feels like they didn’t even try.

[1] I could write for pages about how unfortunate it is that money is found to spend on war (cold or hot) but not for the sake of knowledge for its own sake.  Instead, I’ll let Dr. Tyson explain in this lovely video: https://youtu.be/CbIZU8cQWXc.

[2] According to his Arizona State bio, he completed his PhD in 1970.  I hope new theories about astronomy and astrophysics have come into being in the last five decades.  See http://cosmos.asu.edu/curriculum-vitae.

[3] I was unable to find a link to the full text of this, if anyone can provide it (in English), please let me know.

[4] http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090513/full/news.2009.465.html