Wagging the Moondoggie: a masterwork of propaganda

Yeah, they lie every waking breath ... but when a rare, superficially implausible event happens they'll make you think it's a lie because they want to control everyone's minds as much as possible

Neil Armstrong talks us through the final 3 minutes of the landing of the Eagle showing the footage taken from the Eagle against Google Moon imagery.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“When I first got into 9/11 activism, I had a theory that there would be about 10% of the population who would automatically assume that the govt did it, even if they didn’t have any evidence and about 10% who would never believe it, no matter how much evidence they got.” — Gerard Holmgren, A Theory

---

Dave McGowan is particularly known among the community of analysts of government/media lies for two works: Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon (2014) and Wagging the Moondoggie (2009), however, even among those who respect his work, he is recognised as “limited hangout”. In his post on his website, Moondoggie: Nobody went anywhere

Mark Tokarski

states:

I say “is” a spook, as he is said to have died on 11/22/15. That’s a spook date.

McGowan, who is sporting what I think of as a shit-eating grin in the photo above, ran a website called Center for an Informed America, or CIA for short. No comment.

What I will show in this post is that his “hangout” is, in fact, extremely limited and highly misleading and in the case of Wagging the Moondoggie there is no hangout at all because, in fact, the extraordinary achievement of the moon landings really happened and everything Dave McGowan says on the subject can be shown to be either a lie, misleading or irrelevant - nothing he says on the subject debunks the reality of the moon landings. Unlike the first prominent moonhoaxer, Bill Kaysing, who we are told was Head of Technical Publications at Rocketdyne but says things that no person in that capacity would have said and is clearly a cartoon character, the nature of Dave’s propaganda is much more subtle and superficially credible (I was certainly persuaded by it as my first point of research on my moon landings journey). Anyone who is well-informed, however, will recognise it as p-r-o-p-a-g-a-n-d-a!

First, let’s have a cursory look at his “truth mixed with lies” propaganda common from agents on 9/11 and the Boston Bombing. Bolded text highlights the lie part of Dave’s analysis.

September 11

One question that has gone unanswered is how a plane was able to penetrate so deeply into the Pentagon’s airspace – even after two other planes had already plowed into the World Trade Center towers.

It was still nearly thirty minutes before the first plane would plow into the WTC and there were already very clear indications that this wasn’t a normal day for air traffic in America; two civilian passenger planes had been hijacked simultaneously, an unprecedented occurrence, and yet no action was immediately taken to avert the tragedy that was to come.

Any 9/11 analyst worth their salt knows that 9/11 was a demolition job (fully evacuated as per standard protocols) and there were no passenger airliners. Anyone who says there was even one passenger airliner is clearly not a good analyst or controlled opposition … and it is obvious that Dave McGowan is way too savvy to be such a poor analyst. Dave pushes planes all the way through his many-parted analysis.

Boston Bombing

The most disturbing of those images, by far, all involved a guy who had reportedly just had both of his legs blown off. The most heavily circulated and iconic of those images are of the legless guy being rolled away from the scene in a wheelchair, his unbelievably graphic wounds uncovered and on full display for the waiting cameras [see image].

How crazy would it sound to suggest that that did not happen by accident — to suggest that not only were his injuries staged, but that they were specifically designed for that high-profile wheelchair ride? Pretty crazy … right? After all, I have in the past been rather critical of other researchers who have alleged that the victims of high-profile mass murders are actually actors. Nothing, it seems to me, could possibly serve to better alienate and offend the general public than attacking the victims as being part of the conspiracy. But what if the evidence is so overwhelming that it simply cannot be ignored?

I need to be very clear here in stating that I am not arguing that no one was injured in the attack and that there was no real suffering. That undoubtedly was not the case.

Oh, please. Cut the crap. Of course, no one was injured - it was your standard anti-terror drill pushed out as real like 9/11 (minus building destructions) and it looked as if they were throwing fake blood around from paint pots.

Moving on.

Wagging the Moondoggie

I am not well-versed enough in the Apollo program to do exposure of Wagging the Moondoggie justice but fortunately there are two guys who do justice at least to the first two parts. “Sensible Site” provides an analysis of Part I of the 14-part series while another blogger analyses Parts I and II. I will simply add a brief comment on an item or two from each of the Parts III to VII and XIV to show conclusively that Wagging the Moondoggie is in its entirety just hot air, lies and clever propaganda.

The unnamed blogger’s analysis is most instructive in that he helpfully applies a category to each piece of text, clearly showing how the propaganda has been built. Essentially, the labels he applies are:

• Meaningless rhetoric (features prominently)

• Logical fallacies featuring:

  • poisoning the well - a preemptive attack against one's opponent in the hopes of discrediting them and their argument before it is presented. It is often associated with logical fallacies because it uses irrelevant information to weaken an opposing argument.

  • begging the question - an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion, instead of supporting it.

  • bare assertion - a claim that is presented as true without support, as self-evidently true, or as dogmatically true.

  • appeal to incredulity - the arguer presumes that something cannot be true because it seems untrue to them.

  • false equivalence - equivalence is drawn between two subjects based on flawed or false reasoning.

• Poor research / inaccuracies / lies

Excerpt from Analysis of Part I below (blogger’s comments in bold):

The first thing that I discovered was that the Soviet Union, right up until the time that we allegedly landed the first Apollo spacecraft on the Moon, was solidly kicking our ass in the space race. It wasn’t even close. The world wouldn’t see another mismatch of this magnitude until decades later when Kelly Clarkson and Justin Guarini came along. The Soviets launched the first orbiting satellite, sent the first animal into space, sent the first man into space, performed the first space walk, sent the first three-man crew into space, was the first nation to have two spacecraft in orbit simultaneously, performed the first unmanned docking maneuver in space, and landed the first unmanned probe on the Moon.

Now we begin. Basically a highly inaccurate statement. America was behind by a few months on all the Soviet achievements. However, they began to forge ahead in all the relevant milestones. First orbital rendezvous, first docking, first extended EVA etc. In addition, the Soviets were experiencing major setbacks with their heavy launch vehicle N1 [fascinating 15m video on the N1 rockets by Curious Droid; we might also apply the logical fallacy, cherry-picking].

Gemini VIII was launched on March 16, 1966, carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong (command pilot) and David Scott. They accomplished the first docking of two spacecraft in history, after rendezvousing with an unmanned Agena vehicle launched earlier the same day. Shortly after docking, one of the Gemini's attitude control thrusters malfunctioned and the combined vehicles began to buck. The crew undocked from the Agena, but the spacecraft began to roll wildly, eventually reaching one revolution per second. Armstrong and Scott used the Re-entry Control System to stop the roll; mission rules then forced them to make an emergency landing in the Pacific less than twelve hours into a three-day mission. Armstrong’s laconic words: “A lot of unexpected things happen and usually they're not the ones you practice.”

Everything the U.S. did, prior to actually sending a manned spacecraft to the Moon, had already been done by the Soviets, who clearly were staying at least a step or two ahead of our top-notch team of imported Nazi scientists. The smart money was clearly on the Soviets to make it to the Moon first, if anyone was to do so. Their astronauts had logged five times as many hours in space as had ours. And they had a considerable amount of time, money, scientific talent and, perhaps most of all, national pride riding on that goal.

This is basically either very poor research or a lie. America were well ahead in the Moon landing race.  The Soviets also had their own “imported Nazi scientists”! Poisoning the well.

And yet, amazingly enough, despite the incredibly long odds, the underdog Americans made it first. And not only did we make it first, but after a full forty years, the Soviets apparently still haven’t quite figured out how we did it. The question that is clearly begged here is a simple one: Why is it that the nation that was leading the world in the field of space travel not only didn’t make it to the Moon back in the 1960s, but still to this day have never made it there? Could it be that they were just really poor losers? I am imagining that perhaps the conversation over in Moscow’s equivalent of NASA went something like this:

Meaningless rhetoric and expanding on his poor research/probable lie. Multiple begging the question. The absence of reoccurrence is not evidence of a hoax.

Excerpt from Analysis of Part II (blogger’s comments in bold)

And the weird thing about those shadows is that, in the very same NASA article, it says that “because the sun was so low to the horizon when the images were made, even subtle variations in topography create long shadows.” And yet while it is perfectly obvious that there are more than just “subtle variations” in the lunar topography in the images, the alleged lunar modules are the only things casting the long shadows.

In imagery returned by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) the item pointed to is the descent stage of a LEM to the right of which is a long shadow. Seriously, who is going to fake a white dot with a long shadow? (We also have as indicated in the caption of the headlining photo Neil Armstrong talking us through the footage showing the final 3 minutes of the landing by the Eagle against Google Moon imagery.)

By far the largest thing on the surface, so why wouldn’t they. Meaningless rhetoric. Begging the question.

Even if we give NASA every benefit of the doubt and assume that the images have not been amateurishly Photoshopped and that the indiscernible white dots are indeed something of man-made origin, the most likely culprit would be those Soviet robotic probes mentioned by Space.com, which presumably did land on the Moon. A number of those probes, which were part of the Apollo-era Luna Program, were very similar in size and shape to the lunar modules – certainly enough so that images of much higher resolution would be required to make a definitive judgment.

Bare assertion. The landing sites match exactly to what is claimed. The LROC pictures also show features that the Apollo team could not possibly have known about. Yet these show up on all the 6 landing films.

Actually, after studying the image above, of one of the alleged Luna probes, I’m going to have to say that the Soviets were lying their asses off almost as much as NASA was. There is no way I’m going to buy into the notion that the Soviets sent a freeform abstract sculpture, which appears to have been constructed by Fred Sanford and Granny Clampett, on a 234,000 mile journey from the Earth to the Moon. Careful study of the central area of the photo, however, does reveal why the spacecraft were known as ‘probes.’ I wonder if they were capable of performing docking maneuvers?

Meaningless rhetoric. Begging the question. The appeal to incredulity.

According to NASA, Japan and India have also sent unmanned orbiting spacecraft to the Moon in recent years, as has China. As with the ESA’s and NASA’s orbiters, they too have failed to return any images of Earthly artifacts left behind on the surface of the Moon. If the hoax ‘debunking’ websites are to be believed, by the way, the reason that no one has returned to the Moon in thirty-seven years is because we pretty much already tapped that celestial body for all the information it had to offer. There’s really, you see, nothing much left to see there.

Meaningless rhetoric. Begging the question. The Japanese Selene mission, shows topography that is identical to Apollo images! In addition, thanks to efforts from individual researchers, it can be determined that there is evidence of human activity visible in the images sent back by Japan, China and India. Note that it doesn't claim to have found equipment as the resolving capabilities aren't good enough, just evidence of where astronauts disturbed the ground. It's noticeable in the Chinese images that the more disturbance there is the easier it is to pick it out. Apollo 11's site, for example, is only just discernible if you squint a bit, whereas the later missions are much more obvious.

http://onebigmonkey.com/apollo/sights/landings.html
http://onebigmonkey.com/apollo/sights/landingsa15a.html

A ‘debunking’ article posted by ABCNews.com, for example, quoted Val Germann, the president of the Central Missouri Astronomical Association, as saying, “There’s no reason to go back … Quite frankly, the moon is a giant parking lot, there’s just not much there.” I wonder why it is then that just about everyone seems to want to send unmanned probes there, or to train enormously powerful telescopes on the Moon’s surface? What could they possibly learn about the “parking lot” from those distances that our astronauts didn’t already discover by actually being there?

Meaningless rhetoric. Begging the question.

Some True Believers also claim that what was dubbed the Lunar Laser Ranging experiment also proves that we really went to the Moon. As the story goes, the astronauts on Apollo 11, Apollo 14, and Apollo 15 all allegedly left small laser targets sitting on the lunar terrain (one of them can be seen in the official NASA photo reproduced below), so that scientists back home could then bounce lasers off the targets to precisely gauge the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

According to the ‘debunkers,’ the fact that observatories to this day bounce lasers off the alleged targets proves that the Apollo missions succeeded. It is perfectly obvious though that the targets, if there, could have been placed robotically – most likely by the Soviets. It is also possible that there are no laser targets on the Moon. In December 1966, National Geographic reported that scientists at MIT had been achieving essentially the same result for four years by bouncing a laser off the surface of the Moon. The New York Times added that the Soviets had been doing the same thing since at least 1963.

Bare assertion. There is not one scrap of evidence to support unmanned probes to the areas visited to plant laser reflectors. The laser reflectors return an accuray within fractions of a millimeter. The surface bounces were random and had variances of tens of metres!

My comments (in bold after quoted text if there is any) taking a point or two from each part 3-7 and 14

Part III

If it proves not to be the case that this space radiation “showstopper” is a new development, then I suppose that the only explanation that we are left with is that we did indeed have the technology to shield our astronauts from radiation back in the 1960s, but at some time during the last four decades, that technology was simply lost.

False implication: If radiation wasn’t a concern in the Apollo program it makes no sense that it should be a problem now.

The reason that is given for it being problematic now is not concern for people but for the much more delicate instruments. See Van Allen Belts questions. Regardless, hypothetically, it is not unreasonable that the strong impetus to go to the moon at the time may have meant that they concerned themselves less with radiation than now. How many things are done with massive amounts more of safety concern than they used to be?

Part IV

Even if our fine astronauts could have captured all of those images, the film would have never survived the journey in such pristine condition. Even very brief exposure to the relatively low levels of radiation used in airport security terminals can damage photographic film, so how would the film have fared after prolonged, continuous exposure to far higher levels of radiation? And what of the 540°F temperature fluctuations?

In fact, some photos seemed to show signs of radiation impact although it’s not certain. ChatGPT explanation for both temperature and radiation survival of film.

Part V

Stars are not the only thing missing in the Moon photos. Also conspicuously absent is any indication that the lunar modules actually landed in the locations in which they were photographed. Specifically, there is no crater visible under any of the modules, despite the fact that NASA’s own artist renderings clearly showed the presence of a substantial crater. Also, not a speck of dust appears to have been displaced by the 10,000 lb reverse-thrust engine that powered the alleged descent.

False implication: Stars should be seen in the photos. The astronauts were on the moon at lunar dawn and just as we can’t see stars during earth day apart from the sun, stars couldn’t be seen in the lunar photos either due to the extreme brightness of light on the lunar surface necessitating reduction of the aperture in order to capture objects on the lunar surface.

False implication: A crater should be visible. Whatever NASA’s own artist rendered, scientifically there is no expectation of a crater but, in fact, a faint radial exhaust pattern can be seen the extreme subtlety of which is completely unexpected from fakery.

Inaccuracy: Minute amounts of dust can be seen on the landing pads in high res photos with the magnifier (the extreme subtlety of which would not be expected of fakery) but in any case not much dust would be expected.

Part VI

This part is essentially a rubbishing of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) project. LCROSS was a robotic spacecraft operated by NASA whose mission was conceived as a low-cost means of determining the nature of hydrogen detected at the polar regions of the Moon. Its high impact in October 2009 doesn’t seem to register greatly in images. Regardless of the fact that insufficient understanding of what the impact should look like may be the reason for a sense of anomaly what needs to be kept in mind is that we know NASA lies because the alleged Challenger disaster is the most brazen psyop of all time with six of the seven alleged astronauts walking around with either the same name or the name of an alleged sibling - who could easily be an “identical twin” - so whether the LCROSS project is real or not is not relevant to the moon landings. We need to judge the moon landings purely on the evidence for the moon landings.

Part VII

This part contains more of Soviet moon race firsts, however, as mentioned in the commentary on Part 1, the Soviets weren’t first on the critical steps to actually land on the moon and probably their biggest issue was their N1 rocket. While he may be much despised for his Nazi connections, I think that Wernher von Braun’s extreme enthusiasm and charisma had a lot to do with the success of the US space program. In the fascinating 15m video on the N1 rockets by Curious Droid mentioned earlier which I deem compulsory viewing if you have any real interest in the moon landings it seems that politics played a significant role in the Soviets’ failure to get to the moon first.

Part XIV

This part is full of the “meaningless rhetoric” pointed out by the anonymous blogger in Parts I and II. It focuses on three items:

• a planned mission to send astronauts to the far side of the moon, not to land but to hover stationary in relation to the moon’s orbit around the earth

• a planned unmanned exploration of the moon for rare materials

• alleged atom and hydrogen bombs explosions in the Van Allen radiation belts

The planned mission to send astronauts to the far side of the moon and the planned unmanned exploration of the moon for rare materials have not occurred to date.

As we know that both the hydrogen and atom bomb have never been shown to exist and that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fire-bombed just like Tokyo and many other Japanese cities, we have no reason to believe that any testing necessarily occurred.

The entire part says nothing of import in relation to the actual moon landings of 1969-1972. It is all completely irrelevant material.

Conclusion

While Dave McGowan does write some relevant and important truth on 9/11 and on the Boston Bombing (although, unsurprisingly, nothing that no one else is saying) while mixing it with important lies there is ZERO evidence of a single, relevant item in Wagging the Moondoggie that says astronauts didn’t land on the moon. Not one.

I always keep an open mind, however, so if you’ve got one, let me know. And if you haven’t, I think it’s wise to ponder:

• why Dave mixed truth with lies on the subjects of 9/11 and the Boston Bombing (and no doubt other subjects) but was seemingly unable to mix in any relevant truth into his lies on the moon landings

• why the fact that the first moonhoaxer, Bill Kaysing, is a cartoon character who couldn’t possibly have been who he was said to be has remained undetected for 50 years

• why no disbeliever of the moon landings has made any comment on the article I posted specific to the debunking of the film, American Moon.

Suggested materials

• Apollo 11 interactive

• Apollo 17 in real time

• Apollo Flight Journal

• Apollo Lunar Surface Journal

• Apollo missions audio communications