I have no idea if they really did or not, but I do know for a fact that many of the images they published regarding that mission were totally fake and/or doctored.
There have been rovers for a long time, I think people will soon land on Mars, so I think they have definitely been on the moon.
I was in the transmission studio on that day here in the UK and their is some truth in what you say. But you have to remember that hundreds of thousands of people were standing around for hours waiting for the transmissions to be screened on the Eidophor screens all over the world. They were expecting to see a narrated programme over a 2 hour period, rather than just a few shots and some distorted voices. To any production company this is the norm, so many library shots and recent pre launch images were included and inserted for continuity. To us, that was never denied, but the usual bunch of conspiracy theorists homed in on what most people would have realised was continuity material and they tried to discredit the entire mission. Their was a short time delay between the live images being received and transmitted by NASA, but for anyone with some common sense, the reasons would have been quite obvious. They would not have transmitted any sensitive details of the landing module operating system and needless to say they would not have continued the transmission if things had gone catastrophically wrong. With hundreds of people involved in the mission, can anyone actually believe that they were all involved in some type of hoax and every one of them have taken their secrets to the grave,? This is a cover removed image of the projectors used to bring the images to the public that day.
Good grief, what an unrecognizable mess of....something or other! As for the "out there" theories....I'll leave that to others to piddle with. I got a copy of the Life Magazine issue with the moonshots in it. They were amazing, if not a bit hinky. As a child, though, nobody ever said anything about any "continuity material". In fact, you're the first person I've heard mention such a thing. They should've known that using phoney images would generate decades of blather and just been honest. Adults are not children and, contrary to what government types think, most of them don't need lied to or "protected" from the truth. Neither do their children. Both of these ideas are, oddly enough, adult fantasies.
Continuity is simply not leaving the screen blank and holding the audience attention. We take it for granted every time we watch television or go to the theatre. Even when you see a report of a plane crash, you will see a picture of the plane, but obviously no one was up there filming the plane 5 minutes before it crashed, it is simply a library shot of a similar plane owned by the airline in the air. In the case or the moon landing, the commentators were keeping the audience up to date prior to the transmission. Therefore, due to the timeline the audience were fully aware that the background pictures were simply showing them the module and the astronaut's prior to the launch. Some of THOSE pictures were the ones later used to discredit the landing, but the audience watching the program took it for granted that the pictures were obviously not from the moon 30 minutes before the module landed. If you had been there on the night, I am sure that you would have been disappointed to simply have seen a few minutes of disjointed picture and 2 hours of blank screen. One picture from the actual landing was criticized for the way that the American flag painted on the module was lit, when the module was in front of the sun. The pictures released to the press the following day had been cleaned up from the actual transmission, so the flag could well have been highlighted to keep the Government happy.
At the time I was only aware of the minor delay in transmissions due to distance and speed of light. To some these days even that would be way too much "dead air space" and an opportunity to start yammering, kinda' like the idiot behind you blowing his horn because the light just turned green and you're not already in motion. To me it's just the normal flow of conversation. I've never listened to their comms directly, but I'd expect a delay or "blank space" of a few seconds at minimum from the moon. What I never noticed was the flag lighting you mentioned. I did, however, notice that curious absence of those crosshair markings in some photos that are placed there by the camera or it's lense and appear over objects in the field of view at regular intervals. When a person appears obscuring those marks should be it makes me wonder why. A flag they planted that appears to be blowing in the breeze is interesting, as there is no breeze on the moon. If they'd caught that alleged motion on video instead of a still photo I'd be inclined to say it was hinky indeed. It could easily be just the way it looked after being planted and "posed" for the camera. It could easily have just drawn back into its' natural folds or bends. Footprints is another matter, as I've heard someone say you can't get such clear, crisp footprints in dust without moisture, which was also said not to exist on the moon. <yawn> We saw video, however grainy, of those footprints being made. Again, I wasn't there. Shadows and lighting of some objects was mentioned as possible evidence. Again, I wasn't there to examine it. It was a fascinating mission. It still is. I keep hoping they do it again. I'd love to mount a dish and point it out there just for fun. Other amateurs routinely link up with satellites in long eliptical orbits. It seems an expensive hobby to me with little practical application in my life, so I'm not likely to bother. I've got other things to do.
I was thinking about it the other day driving with the moon shone brightly in the still daylit sky - must've been 2:30 PM or something. And anyway, I was thinking about my grandad. He was born in 1918 & died in 2005 or so, and so that went down when he was 50 or so... What a fucking accomplishment! Holy shit! That's huge! I cannot fathom something we take so utterly for granted today in July of 1969! It's immeasurably cool, and simply amazes me to think about. Outer space! I was driving along and I couldn't help but to point at the motherfucking thing... It's just incomprehensible that we flew a rocket to the moon, landed, put up a flag, and flew home. It's truly amazing.
