One of the problems with the ‘common man’ is that he is really very stupid. Such persons not only do not know but do not know that they do not know.

I recently heard somebody discussing the Bible. They explained to the dinner guests that some passage “used to be in the Bible” but ‘they’ (some religious authority) had it removed.

So I asked how ‘they’ had achieved this feat, since, due to the absence of word processors before about 1970, it would require a massive effort to hunt out each Bible and change the text. Naturally, the text could be altered and reprinted and published but the original text would still exist in the original Bibles.

I asked the speaker if he thought that the moon landings were faked. “For sure!” he said. So I said that I assumed that some people knew that they were faked and these persons, maintaining their silence all these years, were part of a conspiracy. “Absolutely!” he said. So I said, okay, putting aside funny shadows on rocks and who took the photo and why is the flag waving when there is no atmosphere on the moon . . . putting aside this, would he then assume that thousands of amateur astronomers, the staff of South Africa’s Hartebeesthoek tracking station, the staff of Australian Parkes Radio Telescope and similar facilities knew that the whole thing was faked in a studio and have kept mum about it?

Oh, he said, what do you mean? So I explained that the Apollo 11 crew had to transmit electronic signals to the US and sometimes the US was not on the side of the earth facing the moon and so the signals had to be routed through Parkes or Hartebeesthoek. If there were no signals, the staff of these facilities would have soon spoken up.

“Oh, no!” He explained: the Yanks had fired a rocket towards the moon and all the amateur astronomers had followed it on their telescopes. The rocket had indeed sent out signals but these and the images of the moon walks had been transmitted through a computer from the rocket – and picked up by Parkes or Hartebeesthoek. Okay, I said, so, given that a small video recording occupies about 15 MB, did they store it all on a video recorder? Yes, he said, exactly his point. So, how, I asked, did they transmit it to earth, 384 400 km away, in real time? Oh, he said, they had transmitters and stuff.

I tried pointing out that, at the time (1969), we had no such thing as digital manipulation of images; it would be enormously difficult to create a moonscape video from analogue signals and almost impossible with the technology of the time to store a realistic video and transmit it by means of any system to earth from a rocket moving at some speed. “That’s the thing!” he said and explained that the rocket was not, in fact, moving – it was stationary in orbit. Did I not know the term ‘geostationary satellite’? That is what the rocket was doing when the crew sent the video clip of the landing and moon walk, he said.

I tried to explain that geostationary satellites are actually travelling at a very high speed – about 3 000 m/s. By this time, the rest of the dinner party had enough of me arguing. After all, as I am over 60, I was clearly out of it, and arguing with a smart cookie who “knew stuff”. I had a final try. So, I said, the Yanks did not go and land on the moon in 1969? Nope, he said. Do they have the technology to do it now, 49 years later? Oh, yes, he said. Sure. So, I said, well, why do they not? Donald Trump would not agree, he said. So, there you have it.