Apollo 11 corner reflector
Hard science data is typically no barrier to enduring belief for the conspiracy theorist. Nevertheless, this engineer tries, tries again.
“As I went to Bonner, I met a pig without a wig, upon my word and honour.”
-Mother Goose rhyme
Upon my own word and honor, I once met an engineer, a living and breathing, bipedal, mammalian being, seemingly well educated in the sciences, who insisted that the entire Apollo space program was a fake and that nobody had ever actually landed on the moon.
I told him how when Armstrong and Aldrin were at Tranquility Base, they installed a set of corner reflectors that are still there and which are still operational. NASA and other groups send pulsed laser beams to the reflectors, which bounce those beams right back from whence they came. Measurements of the round-trip transit times tell how far away the reflectors are, and thus how far away the moon is, to extreme accuracy.
The reflector illustration is seen in Figure 1, a screen shot from a Neill deGrasse Tyson clip on YouTube. Notice the landing legs of the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) to the image’s upper left.
Figure 1 The enduring presence of corner reflectors on the Moon also validates a past human presence there.
Much to my further astonishment, my colleague never even heard of corner reflectors. Let’s have a look.
Just for jollies, I made a corner reflector of my own out of some aluminum foil. I photographed the thing using a supplemental flash from lots of different orientations. The flash reflection was always returned right back at me as well as to the camera, no matter the crudeness of my handmade foil arrangement (Figure 2).
Figure 2 Flash illuminations returned by a homemade corner reflector mimic the behavior of those on the Moon.
The underlying geometry can be illustrated in a two-dimensional sketch (Figure 3).
Figure 3 Geometry illustrates the underlying principles of a corner reflector’s function.
Clearly, these reflectors were put there by human beings, not by little green men or bug-eyed monsters (Figure 4), so this guy started thinking that maybe the Apollo program was for real after all.
Figure 4 An example bug-eyed monster, this one Mars-originated, but often Moon-inhabiting (and Bugs Bunny-bothering).
That said, however, he was still not one-hundred percent certain of the Apollo program’s existence. And he was conversely still quite confident in the concepts set forth in Erich von Däniken’s “Chariots of the Gods?”, because space alien visitors were an acceptable and logical explanation for so many other things…
Sigh.
John Dunn is an electronics consultant and a graduate of The Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (BSEE) and of New York University (MSEE).
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