# data[].attributes.body
Made by: Natalie Rochefort, working individually

# data[].attributes.body
Definition: The Mystical Energy red flag is used by people such as new age practitioners who use the word "energy" as a way to heal themselves or others. This type of healing has no scientific support or has any merit.

Connection:

The idea of mythical energy can be found in the practice of energy healing, such as Reiki. The idea that using a light touch on a person will transmit a spiritually guided life force energy to them. Thus, healing them. It is important to be skeptical of such claims; that using using a light touch can heal a person by sending energy into their body to help aid them. Using the critical thinking process can help guide a person through the claim that Reiki can heal a person. A Reiki practitioner does not require any specific training or credentials and there are no scientific claims which supports the claims that Reiki does work.

# data[].attributes.body
Definition: The Confirmation Bias red flag is when people seek out information which will coincide with their own beliefs and ignore all other relevant information which does not support their belief or outcome which they already have in mind.

Connection: Nostradamus was a physician and astrologer in the 16th century. He has become well known for his predictions of future events. He was able to see into the future and created a collection of all the events he saw. Many people believe any rely on all predictions provided by Nostradamus. They focus on the predictions that seems to have some connection to modern day events which occurred, but ignore all the missed predictions he made. A lot of his predictions can be misinterpreted to coincide with events which happened in our history.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
10 Nostradamus Predictions That Haven't Come True Yet

# data[].attributes.body
Description: Red Herring red flag is used when a person will use irrelevant information in a conversation to divert you from the logical flow of the conversation. It is used as a form of distraction from the original topic at hand.

Connection: Red Herring is popular among conspiracy theorists who use irrelevant information to distract others from the truth. As depicted in the picture below, one of the most popular conspiracy theories out there is that man never walked on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission. It is said that the picture below is a hoax which was staged by NASA in a large studio. These conspiracy theorists have a large arsenal of information to steer a person away from the topic of something that happened in our history, which is the truth and try to distract them with the information they have. Space is littered with stars, so why aren’t there stars in the picture? The big moon rover would have never fit into their small landing module. There’s no crater that should have been created by the powerful engine of the module. The film from the camera would have melted by the suns rays at 280 degrees F. There’s multiple angled shadows in the picture which proves that there were multiple light sources, such as in a studio. The American flag is waiving in the “lunar” wind.

# data[].attributes.body
Definition: The red flag, Proof by verbosity is done by throwing out large quantities of information to give the appearance that it’s well researched and true. Providing a large quantity of information does not make it true.

Connection: Similar to red herring, proof by verbosity is another favourite of conspiracy theorists who throw out a large amount of information that gives a false appearance that they look well researched, so what they’re saying must have some legitimate merit.

The video below discusses one of the most prevalent modern-day myths, global warming. It does a good job at depicting that providing large quantities of information does not mean it is legitimate.

This is a topic that you cannot avoid. If we're having several days of freezing winter weather, then the global warming disbelievers will be out in full force on social media saying that, "if global warming is real, then why is it -20 for the next few days." Providing all this information does not make it true. There are so many sources out there who claim and support this idea. It’s very misleading to the general population, especially when people in authority are denying the facts, such as the President of the United States.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Common misconceptions about climate change. Check out Audible: http://bit.ly/AudibleVe References below: For CO2, sea levels, Arctic sea ice, Antarctic and Greenland land ice: http://climate.nasa.gov Satellite data shows that ground-based stations underestimate recent warming: Cowtan and Way, 2014 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.2297/full For papers published on climate change during the 1970's, see Peterson, 2008 http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf For solar and temperature data see NASA GISS, PMOD: http://www.acrim.com/tsi%20monitoring.htm Krivova et al.

# data[].attributes.body
Definition: Ancient Wisdom red flag is the belief that our ancestors ancient practices and beliefs are legitimate and and have more merit than modern day practices. Most of these practices are unethical and they have no scientific foundation to support the claims.

Connection:  This video refers to the topic of ancient wisdom by discussing the belief that the world was going to come to an end on December 21, 2012 as predicted by the Mayan Calendar. Many people believed that this ancient civilization had the knowledge to make predictions about the future and relied upon the belief that the world was going to come to an end. Doomsday was to happen on December 21, 2012 and was linked to the end of one of the cycles in the ancient Mayan calendar at the winter solstice in 2012. This date is the last date of the Mayan calendar, which is a 400-year long calendar. This is only the end of that calendar and then a start of a new one. It is important to apply skepticism as I did above by indicating that this was not the end of the calendar and a new one starts after this. By using logical rational and doing research, it is easy to find scientific claims which helps to refute the claim that the world was suppose to come to an end.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
DoomsDay 2012 - Historical Documentary - Part 1 [THE END OF THE WORLD?]

# data[].attributes.headline
Post #7: Reason for Belief: Emotional Connections

# data[].attributes.subject
Post #7: Reason for Belief: Emotional Connections

# data[].attributes.body
Definition: Our emotions can blind us from the truth and lead us to believe in something that we subconsciously want to believe in.

Connection: The image below represents the belief of life after death. When a loved one passes away our emotions can lead us to believe in the afterlife, which gives us comfort knowing that they’re in a beautiful place and one day we’ll join them. There are many stories of near death experiences where people have said that they have crossed over to the other side and have seen heaven when they died and were brought back to life. Having a strong religious faith does contribute to the belief in the afterlife since this is a fundamental part of a lot of religions. Looking at other alternative solutions can explain why people have near death experiences where they see heaven. There is no scientific information to support such claims, but there is information that refutes such claims such as, trauma to the brain which causes hallucinations.

# data[].attributes.headline
Post #8: Reason for Belief: Unexplained 

# data[].attributes.subject
Post #8: Reason for Belief: Unexplained 

# data[].attributes.body
Definition: When something we cannot fathom and goes beyond our grasp of knowledge and understanding, we deem it as the unknown. We seek to find truth in the unexplained and try to make sense of the unknown.

Connection: This website, which is also a radio show, dedicates itself to the unexplained and paranormal. It covers topics such as, UFO’s, alien abductions, life after death, ghost encounters, etc. They have experts on the show as well as people who have experienced first hand encounters with the topic at hand.

Users can call in and share their stories of first hand experiences with the supernatural or submit videos and pictures of the supernatural and unexplained. Being superstitious to begin with makes you more susceptible to believing that something you cannot explain, such as an object in the sky that you do not recognize or an image in the woods in the middle of the night, is the works of something more sinister than something more rational. Often images of ghosts have been contributed to a trick of the light.

Coast to Coast has dedicated itself to the supernatural and unexplained and fuels those who are believers in the paranormal.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Coast to Coast AM: The Best Paranormal News Show

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Get news about the weird and bizarre on Coast to Coast AM from radio host George Noory every night!

# data[].attributes.headline
Post #9: Reason for Belief: Patternicity 

# data[].attributes.subject
Post #9: Reason for Belief: Patternicity 

# data[].attributes.body
Definition: Humans are naturally inclined to seek patterns in objects. Our mind seeks patterns in meaningless objects which gives us the perception that there is an image in that meaningless object.

Connection: The image below depicts how our mind seeks an image in a meaningless object. When this cinnamon bun is placed next to ET, you can’t help but notice the uncanny resemblance.

# data[].attributes.body
I chose to evaluate the Apollo Missions to the Moon.

Define the Problem (extraordinary claim): Was the Apollo moon landings staged?

Gather the Information: Information to support the claim:
1.       The flag in the Apollo moon landing mission appears to be waiving. The moon has no air, so there is no wind to create movement with the flag.
2.       In the picture where the module landed, there should be a crater in the moon from it’s landing due to the force.
3.       In the videos and photographs of the landing on the moon, there seems to be light coming from all directions when the light source should only come from one direction, the sun. The multiple sources of lights suggest that these lights were from a studio.
4.       The astronauts had to pass through the Van Allen radiation belt. The levels of radiation would have killed the astronauts.
5.       In one of the images of the astronaut, there is a reflection of an object that’s hanging by a rope or wire.
6.       The image of earth from the moon shows no stars.
7.       In one image there is a rock with a perfectly symmetrical letter C engraved onto it. This must be a stage prop turned accidentally the wrong way.
8.       One of the first pieces of evidence is a book called, We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, published in 1976 by Bill Kaysing. The book made many allegations, and began discussions of the Moon landings being staged. The book says that the chance of a successful manned landing on the Moon was calculated to be 0.0017%.
9.       In 1980, the Flat Earth Society claimed NASA faked the lunar landings. They claimed they were staged by Hollywood with Walt Disney sponsorship, based on a script by Arthur C. Clarke and directed by Stanley Kubrick.
10.   One of the main theories is that the Space Missions were faked as a race with Russia to put man on the moon first.

Evaluate the Evidence: The evidence is strictly conspiracy theories. No creditable proof or sources has emerged. With every information that comes forward to prove it’s a hoax, NASA will disprove it with a multitude of facts backed by science and logic. The conspiracies are all over the place and different conspiracy theorists have their own theories on it. There’s inconsistency with that.   It is also hard to believe that after several decades, that a personnel staff of 400,000 that worked on all the missions over a decade never claimed that it was faked. You couldn’t keep a secret with that many people.  Kaysing, had no knowledge of rockets. He’s a former US Navy officer and had a Bachelor of Arts in English. The only connection he had to aircraft engines, was being a technical writer for a company that built F-1 engines for the Saturn V rocket.  The Kubrick allegations have no merit. They’re strictly just claims. Fans of Kubrick and his films have “linked” connections from his films to the Apollo 11 mission. They’re searching for meaning in something that isn’t there.

Recognize Assumptions, Emotions, Biases: When looking at a lot of the well-known conspiracy theorists and their stances on why the Apollo mission is a hoax, you see a pattern of a lot of them being journalists with no creditability in the topic at hand. The missions happened in the time of Nixon with the Watergate scandal and Vietnam. The American people already had a huge distrust in the government. People were already distrusting the government and all it takes is these journalists to write an article or book on the missions being staged to light a fire. This is playing on people’s emotions and lack of understanding and knowledge of NASA and what they do. Publishing a book makes a person seem creditable, even though anyone can write a book.

Synthesize Evidence. Identify Alternative:
Alternative 1: The Apollo Missions were staged. Man, never walked on the moon. This is supported by multiple sources with no training with NASA or any creditably in the topic.
Alternative 2: The Apollo Missions to the moon really happened. Man, did walk on the moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, were the first people to walk on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission.

Select Best Alternative: After evaluating all the evidence, I conclude that the Apollo Missions did take place and man walked on the moon during the Apollo 11 missions.

Source:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The theory that the moon landings were hoaxed by the US government to assert their victory in the space race over Russia, is something which has grown in popularity over time.

Recent polls indicate that approximately 20% of Americans believe that the U.S. has never landed on the moon. After the Apollo missions ended in the seventies, why haven't we ever been back? Only during the term of Richard Nixon did humanity ever land on the moon, and after Watergate most people wouldn't put it past Tricky Dick to fake them to put America in good standing in the Cold War.

In this list I have presented some of the proposed evidence to suggest that the moon landings were hoaxes. I tried to include NASA's explanations to each entry to provide an objective perspective.

Conspiracy theorists have pointed out that when the first moon landing was shown on live television, viewers could clearly see the American flag waving and fluttering as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted it. Photos of the landing also seem to show rippling in a breeze, such as the image above which clearly shows a fold in the flag. The obvious problem here is that there's no air in the moon's atmosphere, and therefore no wind to cause the flag to blow.

Countless explanations have been put forward to disprove this phenomenon as anything unusual: NASA claimed that the flag was stored in a thin tube and the rippled effect was caused by it being unfurled before being planted. Other explanations involve the ripples caused by the reaction force of the astronauts touching the aluminum pole, which is shown to shake in the video footage.

The claim goes as follows: had NASA really landed us on the moon, there would be a blast crater underneath the lunar module to mark its landing. On any video footage or photograph of the landings, no crater is visible, almost as though the module was simply placed there. The surface of the moon is covered in fine lunar dust, and even this doesn't seem to have been displaced in photographic evidence.

Much like the waving flag theory, however, the lack of an impact crater has a slew of potential explanations. NASA maintains that the module required significantly less thrust in the low-gravity conditions than it would have done on Earth. The surface of the moon itself is solid rock, so a blast crater probably wouldn't be feasible anyway - in the same way that an aeroplane doesn't leave a crater when it touches down on a concrete airstrip.

On the moon there is only one strong light source: the Sun. So it's fair to suggest that all shadows should run parallel to one another. But this was not the case during the moon landing: videos and photographs clearly show that shadows fall in different directions. Conspiracy theorists suggest that this must mean multiple light sources are present -suggesting that the landing photos were taken on a film set.

NASA has attempted to blame uneven landscape on the strange shadows, with subtle bumps and hills on the moon's surface causing the discrepancies. This explanation has been tossed out the window by some theorists; how could hills cause such large angular differences? In the image above the lunar module's shadow clearly contradicts that of the rocks in the foreground at almost a 45 degree angle.

In order to reach the moon, astronauts had to pass through what is known as the Van Allen radiation belt. The belt is held in place by Earth's magnetic field and stays perpetually in the same place. The Apollo missions to the moon marked the first ever attempts to transport living humans through the belt. Conspiracy theorists contend that the sheer levels of radiation would have cooked the astronauts en route to the moon, despite the layers of aluminum coating the interior and exterior of the spaceship.

NASA have countered this argument by emphasizing the short amount of time it took the astronauts to traverse the belt - meaning they received only very small doses of radiation.

After photographs of the moon landings were released, theorists were quick to notice a mysterious object (shown above) in the reflection of an astronaut's helmet from the Apollo 12 mission. The object appears to be hanging from a rope or wire and has no reason to be there at all, leading some to suggest it is an overhead spotlight typically found in film studios.

The resemblance is questionable, given the poor quality of the photograph, but the mystery remains as to why something is being suspended in mid-air (or rather lack of air) on the moon. The lunar module in other photos appears to have no extension from it that matches the photo, so the object still remains totally unexplained.

In order to support claims that the moon landings were shot in a studio, conspiracy theorists had to account for the apparent low-gravity conditions, which must have been mimicked by NASA. It has been suggested that if you take the moon landing footage and increase the speed of the film x2.5, the astronauts appear to be moving in Earth's gravity. As for the astronaut's impressive jump height, which would be impossible to perform in Earth's gravity, hidden cables and wires have been suggested as giving the astronauts some extra height. In some screenshots outlines of alleged hidden cables can be seen (the photograph above supposedly shows a wire, though it is extremely vague).

One compelling argument for the moon landing hoax is the total lack of stars in any of the photographic/video evidence. There are no clouds on the moon, so stars are perpetually visible and significantly brighter than what we see through the filter of Earth's atmosphere.

The argument here is that NASA would have found it impossible to map out the exact locations of all stars for the hoax without being rumbled, and therefore left them out - intentionally falling back on an excuse that the quality of the photographs washes them out (an excuse they did actually give).

Some photographs are high-quality, however, and yet still no stars are shown. Certainly eerie, considering you can take pictures of stars from Earth in much lower quality and still see them.

One of the most famous photos from the moon landings shows a rock in the foreground, with what appears to be the letter "C" engraved into it. The letter appears to be almost perfectly symmetrical, meaning it is unlikely to be a natural occurrence. It has been suggested that the rock is simply a prop, with the "C" used as a marker by an alleged film crew. A set designer could have turned the rock the wrong way, accidentally exposing the marking to the camera.

NASA has given conflicting excuses for the letter, on the one hand blaming a photographic developer for adding the letter as a practical joke, while on the other hand saying that it may simply have been a stray hair which got tangled up somewhere in the developing process.

The cameras used by astronauts during the moon landings had a multitude of cross-hairs to aid with scaling and direction. These are imprinted over the top of all photographs. Some of the images, however, clearly show the cross-hairs behind objects in the scene, implying that photographs may have been edited or doctored after being taken. The photograph shown above is not an isolated occurrence. Many objects are shown to be in front of the cross-hairs, including the American flag in one picture and the lunar rover in another.

Conspiracy theorists have suggested NASA printed the man-made objects over a legitimate photograph of the moon to hoax the landings - although if they really planned on doing this, then why they used cross-hairs in the first place is a mystery.

The two photos from the Apollo 15 mission shown above clearly have identical backdrops, despite being officially listed by NASA as having been taken miles apart. One photo even shows the lunar module. When all photographs were taken the module had already landed, so how can it possibly be there for one photo and disappear in another? Well, if you're a hardcore conspiracy theorist, it may seem viable that NASA simply used the same backdrop when filming different scenes of their moon landing videos.

NASA has suggested that since the moon is much smaller than Earth, horizons can appear significantly closer to the human eye. Despite this, to say that the two hills visible in the photographs are miles apart is incontrovertibly false.

This loose extension of the popular conspiracy theory states that acclaimed film director Stanley Kubrick was approached by the US government to hoax the first three moon landings. There are two main branches of this somewhat implausible theory: one group of believers maintain that Kubrick was approached after he released 2001: A Space Odyssey (released in 1968, one year before the first moon landing), after NASA came to appreciate the stunning realism of the film's outer-space scenes at that time; another group contends that Kubrick was groomed by the government to film the moon landing long before this, and that 2001: A Space Odyssey was a staged practice run for him.

So what evidence might support such claims? Well: apparently, if you watch The Shining (another Kubrick picture), you can pick up on some alleged messages hidden by Kubrick to subtly inform the world of his part in the conspiracy. The most obvious is the child's Apollo 11 shirt worn in only one scene. Another supposed gem is the line written on Jack Nicholson's character's typewriter: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy", in which the word "all" can be interpreted as A11, or Apollo 11.

If you aren't convinced yet, Kubrick made the mysterious hotel room in the film number 237. Guess how many miles it is from here to the moon: 238,000. So divide that by a thousand and minus one, and you've got one airtight theory right there.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
10 Reasons the Moon Landings Could Be a Hoax - Listverse

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The theory that the moon landings were hoaxed by the US government to assert their victory in the space race over Russia, is something which has grown in popularity over time. Recent polls indicate that approximately 20% of Americans believe that the U.S. has never landed on the moon.