Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

This morning I gave a talk to a large group of retired business people: they specifically requested my ‘Did we really go to the Moon?’ presentation.

From the start the audience (average age 70+) was, to say the least a little hostile! After ten minutes, one attendee got up and left, shouting that I was a disgrace for ‘..questioning the bravery of the Apollo boys’
(Not, of course, that he’s ever met any of them!) As a matter of fact, I had quite specifically said that the American Astronaut corps was / is made up of brave, skilful pilots, many of them combat veterans. I never criticise them or their role in the alleged landings.

After an hour of total silence we had questions: OMG! It was a triumph of prejudice and irrationality over carefully-constructed and evidentially supported argument. No-one could come up with a single credible piece of evidence that the Moon landings had taken place... One chap kept shouting down my statement that laser beams were 'bounced' from the Moon well before 1969: he claimed he was an expert. I've just sent the chairman a link to accounts of Russian and US experiments that succeeded in using the lunar regolith to reflect both laser and radio beams in 1962.