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The Truth About the Moon Landing

by Thomas Herbrich

I have been working with image montages and photo manipulations for decades. I’m interested in conspiracy theories and how they come about.
The mother of all conspiracy theories is the MOON LANDING. Were they on the moon – or was it all staged in a studio? I don’t like all the theories about it, so I made up my own: Yes, they were on the moon! But they had forgotten the camera cable!
This is of course all nonsense, and I have tried to take it to the extreme. So I made my theory about the moon landing as absurd as possible – and yet many believed this nonsense, yes wanted to believe it!
I tell my theory with photos of my (fictional) uncle Stanley Herbrich, who was supposedly at NASA, and from whose estate I want to have learned everything.
Uncle Stanley is portrayed by my brother Markus Herbrich.

herbrich-shows.com

PREFACE

My uncle, Stanley Herbrich, was one of the most important employees in the history of NASA. He alone saved NASA from what would have been the biggest fiasco in their history.
I’m talking about the first Moon landing by Apollo 11 on July 20th, 1969. Did the Americans really land on the Moon, or was it all just staged in a studio?

The simple answer is: both!

Stanley Herbrich is the key figure behind the most incredible story which the NASA has kept secret for forty years. Stan’s legacy finally reveals the true facts about the Moon landing.

Thomas Herbrich

Stanley Herbrich was an old friend of Wernher von Braun, and worked as a NASA director for special tasks. Wernher von Braun left to Stanley Herbrich.

Countdown

What not many people know is that Stanley invented the countdown. In the early days, rockets were launched with a prior warning of “Here we goooo!”, whereupon everyone immediately ducked for cover .
Stanley came up with the idea of counting down from 10 to zero through a loudspeaker, so that everyone would know in good time when to run for cover. And that’s how it’s still done today.

The super-fuel

Stanley Herbrich develops super fuel in 1965.
Thanks to his experiences as a Chicago barkeeper in the 1940s, he managed to concoct some extraordinarily explosive high-power fuels. These made the flights to the Moon possible in the first place!

Microscoping lunar surface

Stanley Herbrich searching for “lunar craters” with his microscope.

In early 1968 Wernher von Braun was chairing an emergency session on cartography. “Our budget is still lacking 1.1 billion dollars for the mapping of the back side of the Moon, as Congress has commissioned us to do. Who the f..k is interested in the back side of the Moon?

This was Stanley Herbrich’s big moment. “I’ll give you photographs of the back of the Moon, there’s no need to actually send anyone up there!” Hold on a moment … how on Earth (excuse the pun!) was he going to do that? We can only see the front of the Moon from here – what does the back even look like?

Stanley opened his folder and unveiled his photos. “Here are some pictures of the back side of the Moon.” And indeed, there they were – dozens of pictures of craters like you could see on the Moon … yet every single one previously unseen by mankind. Stanley had done it! Von Braun opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate the occasion – another first.

Before I reveal the tricks my uncle used … can you remember the pictures of the back side of the Moon? Probably not! That, you see, was exactly NASA’s intention, and Stanley did his job perfectly. To be honest, he simply faked the photos.

What he needed for the pictures was a rough surface, ideally grey and full of craters. And where better to find all this than on the rusty varnish of his old Dodge behind the shed of Freddy’s barber shop? Up close, the varnish looked exactly like the famous lunar craters. With his old school microscope, Stanley made hundreds of “Moon photos” which served as ideal image stock for the NASA cartography team.

They made a wonderful atlas of the “rear side of the Moon” – i.e. the damage in the Dodge’s paintwork – and Congress was satisfied. This saving alone made the financing of the Moon landing possible at all!

Start of Apollo 11

On 16 July 1969 was the big day: the launch of Apollo 11! No one yet knew of the disaster that lay ahead for NASA…

Wernher von Braun calling

On July 18th, 1969, Wernher von Braun called Stanley: “Ooops, Stan, we have a problem!” (This was later misinterpreted as “Houston, we have a problem!”).
“You know there’s this TV camera on board the shuttle for broadcasting the Moon landing? Well, would you believe it? They forgot the damn cable for it.”

No cable, no pictures. At the most important stage of the Apollo programme – at one of the most important events in history, in fact!

The camera cable

 

Stanley gets the call from from Wernher von Braun

“Stanley, you need to get us pictures of the Moon landing – you have exactly 16 hours time. We’ll broadcast your footage along with the live voice transmission. But remember, this all has to stay absolutely top secret!!!”

The lunar lander

My uncle knew the lunar lander, ‘Eagle’, so well from his daily work, he could reproduce it by heart. Due to the limited time available to him, he had to revert to using household articles for his model: an old pan, some aluminium foil, a couple of tins, and four big spoons.

As it was, the model didn’t even vaguely resemble the lander, but what the hell? Up to that point, no-one from the general public had ever seen the real thing. Stanley had a sandpit brought to a remote NASA airhouse, and in a matter of just a few hours he’d built his moonscape model.

Footprint of the first man on the Moon

The “footprint of the first man on the Moon” is a very symbolic picture. Wernher von Braun insisted upon having it. Stanley first took a photo of a single footprint. He took a rubber boot from his garden shed, got himself lifted into a huge sandpit with a digger, and rammed the boot into the ground.

Et voilà – a picture of the footprint of the first man on the Moon. Due to the secrecy of the project, he told the digger operator that the photos were for a rubber boots commercial.

The astronaut

Stanley’s biggest problem was getting hold of an authentic-looking space suit – an old beekeeper’s overall finally did the trick. This scene was photographed at a children’s playground. Stanley successfully got rid of unwanted onlookers by telling them he was after the “killer bees”.

As expected, Wernher von Braun also had a deeply symbolic idea for this scene. The astronaut was to ceremoniously hoist the American flag on the Moon – after all, “even Columbus hoisted the Stars & Stripes on Manhattan Island”. So Stanley hoisted a flag on his broom, keeping it in place with clothes pegs as there was no wind that day.

Prepared for TV

Was my uncle really ever aware of the consequences of this Big Cheat? When it comes down to it, the only thing everyone at NASA was interested in was to keep the mishap of the forgotten cable a secret. That his work was to later inspire the wildest conspiracy theories was far from Stan’s mind at the time. After all, they really did land on the Moon!

All photos were enlarged and brought to the Mission Control Centre. Stan took the oldest TV-camera he could find and filmed his Moon pictures. Nice and slowly, with the odd tremble for added authenticity.

Nine years later, a brand new photo of Stanley turned up. It was taken on April 15, 1981 by astronaut Robert Crippen from the Space Shuttle he was in at the time. According to the photo,Stanley Herbrich was sitting in a passing spaceship belonging to another nation.
Rumour in the astronaut world had it that Stanley Herbrich had become head of the Greek space station. So he was now working for the Greeks, commonly known as the ‘Party People of Space’!