[quote]Bad: When the astronauts are assembling the American flag, the flag waves. Kaysing says this must have been from an errant breeze on the set. A flag wouldn't wave in a vacuum.
Good: Of course a flag can wave in a vacuum. In the shot of the astronaut and the flag, the astronaut is rotating the pole on which the flag is mounted, trying to get it to stay up. The flag is mounted on one side on the pole, and along the top by another pole that sticks out to the side. In a vacuum or not, when you whip around the vertical pole, the flag will ``wave'', since it is attached at the top. The top will move first, then the cloth will follow along in a wave that moves down. This isn't air that is moving the flag, it's the cloth itself.
New stuff added March 1, 2001: Many HBs show a picture of an astronaut standing to one side of the flag, which still has a ripple in it (for example, see this famous image). The astronaut is not touching the flag, so how can it wave?
The answer is, it isn't waving. It looks like that because of the way the flag was deployed. The flag hangs from a horizontal rod which telescopes out from the vertical one. In Apollo 11, they couldn't get the rod to extend completely, so the flag didn't get stretched fully. It has a ripple in it, like a curtain that is not fully closed. In later flights, the astronauts didn't fully deploy it on purpose because they liked the way it looked. In other words, the flag looks like it is waving because the astronauts wanted it to look that way. Ironically, they did their job too well. It appears to have fooled a lot of people into thinking it waved.
This explanation comes from NASA's wonderful spaceflight web page. For those of you who are conspiracy minded, of course, this doesn't help because it comes from a NASA site. But it does explain why the flag looks as it does, and you will be hard pressed to find a video of the flag waving. And if it was a mistake caused by a breeze on the set where they faked this whole thing, don't you think the director would have tried for a second take? With all the money going to the hoax, they could afford the film!
Note added March 28, 2001: One more thing. Several readers have pointed out that if the flag is blowing in a breeze, why don't we see dust blowing around too? Somehow, the HBs' argument gets weaker the more you think about it.
Bad: The program makes a big deal out of how well the pictures taken from the Moon were exposed and set. Every picture we see is just right, with the scene always centered perfectly. However, the cameras were mounted on the front of the astronauts' spacesuit, and there was no finder. They couldn't have taken perfect pictures every time!
Good ... and of course, no one claims they did. Thousands of pictures were taken on the Moon, and the ones you see will tend to be the good ones. If Buzz Aldrin accidentally cut off Neil Armstrong's head, you probably won't see that image in a magazine. Also, everything done on the Moon was practiced endlessly by the astronauts. The people working on the mission knew that these pictures would be some of the most important images ever taken, so they would have taken particular care in making sure the astronauts could do it cold. When fabled astronaut Story Musgrave replaced a camera on board the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, someone commented that he made it look easy. "Sure," he replied, "I had practiced it thousands of times!"
The program goes farther than this, though: they actually contacted the man who designed the cameras for the astronauts. When they asked him why the pictures were always perfect, he hemmed and hawed, and finally admitted he had no answer for that. This is hardly evidence that NASA must have faked the missions. All it means is that he couldn't think of anything while sitting on camera! I think this is pretty evil of the program producers to do this; a bit of editing on their part makes it looks like they completely baffled an expert.
Bad: Crosshairs were etched in the astronauts' cameras to better help measure objects in the pictures. However, in several images, it looks like the objects are actually in front of the crosshairs, which is impossible if the crosshairs were inside the camera! Therefore, the images were faked.
Good: This argument is pretty silly. Do the HBs think that NASA had painted crosshairs on the set behind the astronauts? I heard one HB claim the crosshairs were added later on, and NASA had messed up some of the imaging. That's ridiculous! Why add in crosshairs later? Cameras equipped with crosshairs have been used for a long time, and it would have been easy to simply use some to take pictures on the faked set. Clearly, the HBs are wrong here, but the images do look funny. What happened?
What happened becomes clearer when you look more closely at the images. The times it looks like an object is in front of the crosshair (because the crosshair looks blocked by the object) is when the object photographed is white. The crosshair is black. Have you ever taken an image that is overexposed? White parts bleed into the film around them, making them look white too. That's all that happened here; the white object in the image ``fills in'' the black crosshair. It's a matter of contrast: the crosshair becomes invisible because the white part overwhelms the film. This is basic photography.
[Note (added February 18, 2001): I have been informed by David Percy, a photographer quoted in the Fox show, that he does indeed believe that man went to the Moon, but he believes there are anomalies in the imagery taken which ``put into question many aspects of the missions'', which is a different matter. While I disagree that there are anomalies, I have edited out what is essentially a personal attack on Mr. Percy that I had here originally. It is an easy matter to let one's emotions get carried away when writing these essays, and I apologize to him and my readers for letting that get in. I make it a policy to correct Bad Astronomy based on facts, not personalities.]
[Note added June 29, 2001: Again, Ian Goddard's work has more about this, including images that show how crosshairs can fade out in a bright background.
[/quote]
[quote]Bad: A big staple of the HBs is the claim that radiation in the van Allen Belts and in deep space would have killed the astronauts in minutes. They interview a Russian cosmonaut involved in the USSR Moon program, who says that they were worried about going in to the unknowns of space, and suspected that radiation would have penetrated the hull of the spacecraft.
Good: Kaysing's exact words in the program are ``Any human being traveling through the van Allen belt would have been rendered either extremely ill or actually killed by the radiation within a short time thereof.''
This is complete and utter nonsense. The van Allen belts are regions above the Earth's surface where the Earth's magnetic field has trapped particles of the solar wind. An unprotected man would indeed get a lethal dose of radiation, if he stayed there long enough. Actually, the spaceship traveled through the belts pretty quickly, getting past them in an hour or so. There simply wasn't enough time to get a lethal dose, and, as a matter of fact, the metal hull of the spaceship did indeed block most of the radiation. For a detailed explanation of all this, my fellow Mad Scientist William Wheaton has a page with the technical data about the doses received by the astronauts. Another excellent page about this, that also gives a history of NASA radiation testing, is from the Biomedical Results of Apollo site. An interesting read!
It was also disingenuous of the program to quote the Russian cosmonaut as well. Of course they were worried about radiation before men had gone into the van Allen belts! But tests done by NASA showed that it was possible to not only survive such a passage, but to not even get harmed much by it. It looks to me like another case of convenient editing by the producers of the program.
Very, very Bad: Kaysing says that the Apollo 1 fire that killed Roger Chaffee, Ed White and Gus Grissom was no accident. Grissom was ready to talk to the press about the Moon hoax, so NASA killed him. Kaysing says NASA also killed other people who were about to blow the whistle as well.
This is so disgusting I have a hard time writing a coherent reply. Kaysing has no grasp of basic physics, photography or even common sense, but he accuses NASA of killing people to shut them up. That is a particularly loathsome accusation.
The utter bilge pumped out in this program goes on and on, and indeed, if you go to the HBs websites you can read more than any brain can handle. I have read literally dozens of things that ``prove'' the landings were faked, and each one is rather easily shown to be wrong by anyone with experience in such things. I think the problem here is twofold: we tend to want to believe (or at least listen to) conspiracy theories, and this one is a whopper. Also, the evidence is presented in such a way that, if you are unfamiliar with the odd nature of the vacuum of space and of space travel, it sounds reasonable.
But it isn't reasonable. Their evidence is actually as tenuous as the vacuum of space itself. I find it amazing that they are so willing to scrutinize every available frame of data from the astronauts, yet miss the most obvious thing right in front of them. Fox television and the producers of this program should be ashamed of themselves. Even worse, the Fox Family Channel broadcast a show just last year that was skeptical and even handed about the Moon Hoax! Amazingly, Mitch Pileggi hosted that program as well.
I'll end this on one more bit the HBs don't talk about. When Jim Lovell, two time Apollo astronaut and commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, was told about Kaysing's claims, Lovell called him a kook. Kaysing, ever the rational thinker, sued Lovell for slander. Imagine: Kaysing, who says that NASA murdered three men outright and arranged for the murders of others, sued Commander James Lovell for slander! After some time, a judge wisely threw the case out of court.
There are many websites about the Moon Hoax where you can read both the theories by the HBs themselves or what reality is like as told by people debunking the theory. I have a list of them on my Bad Misconceptions page.
[Note added February 23, 2001: the link for the USA Today article is now gone, so I have removed it.] Dan Vergano of USA Today had an article (with an interview of me) about the TV show on the USA Today website. The print version was in the Friday, February 16th 2001 edition.
Conspiracy Theorist Clyde Lewis has a website ready to believe you! But I wouldn't believe him.
FALLOUT FROM THE SHOW
February 17, 2001:
Well, the Fox Apollo show has struck a chord, it appears. I am receiving a lot of email from people, both for and against. The most noteworthy support was quite a surprise: NASA itself! That explains why I am getting tens of thousands of hits to this site. Another site linking here is Ground Zero, a rather typical hoax and conspiracy site that calls me ``an annoyed scientist'' (true enough) and says that people call me a ``weapon for science''. I kinda like the sound of that one!
What's funny though is how that site pulls out the same tired arguments that are easy to show wrong, yet stands by them dogmatically. For example, Clyde Lewis, the webmaster of the site, shows a photo of the flag waving and asks how it can be waving; I already showed how it can appear to wave on this page earlier. In his image, the bottom corner of the flag is not flat, which is most likely simply residual rippling from the astronaut's twisting the pole. Remember, without air, there is nothing to dampen the rippling, so the flag actually can appear to wave as if from a breeze for a few moments.
This is hardly evidence of a hoax. Lewis goes on and on, bringing out the radiation arguments, the no stars arguments, on and on, like these are either new or damning, when they are neither.
Of course, I am trying to debunk the conspiracy theorists, but unlike them, I want people to look at their evidence rationally and critically, and not swallow it whole. It'll choke you if you do.
Finally, one last note: If I weren't a hard-headed scientist, I'd wonder if some cosmic force were at work sometimes. I went to a website that creates anagrams, that is, rearranges letters in a word to spell other words. I put in "The Bad Astronomer", and one of the anagrams was MOON TRASH DEBATER. I think that's pretty cool. [/quote]
source: BadAstronomy.com
One of the many disinformation sites:
[url]http://www.clydelewis.com/dis/moonalice/moonalice.html[/url]
I was almost ready to type of a long, drawn out response, but copied and pasted a much better written one instead.
Yes, it is a very important subject to me. The space program and its achievements have fascinated me for all of my life. It's been one of those little points of reason in an unnecessarily complex and meaningless mess of government projects.
Most people will probably never really appreciate the amount of space program based contributions there are in the technology and medicine they take for granted everyday down here on Earth.
It's important, and it's been forsaken terribly...
considering it's an english attempt to pronounce an arabic name, I'd say you're both quite possibly wrong...
I had an arabic chemistry teacher say it was something more like "Ousama Bin Alladin" in it's original pronounciation.
Biggles<font color=#AAFFAA>The Man Without a Face</font>
[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by JackN [/i]
[B]Most people will probably never really appreciate the amount of space program based contributions there are in the technology and medicine they take for granted everyday down here on Earth.
It's important, and it's been forsaken terribly...
:( [/B][/QUOTE]
That's very true. I did a research project on this a few years ago, and the number of things that have come from the space program is simply enormous and reaches into every aspect of 1st world life, and even some aspects of 3rd world life now.
Hmm... Yea NASA has given us some interesting stuff - like heat resistant materials and the space race - but it's the independent labs and schools that get to send their experiments up on the rockets that come up with the best long term results, products, and benefits; not NASA itself. How long has it been since a human has been on the moon? Has a human been on another planet yet? Look how many NASA mars missions have failed because of techno geeks fudging numbers and happily collecting their paychecks. The Space Station has stagnated and it’s not a platform for moving beyond orbit – it’s a very expensive floating research lab with a short life span and no future – what a sad waste!
Even if we get a few huge breakthroughs that seem to make it worth while and a lot of pretty pictures of outer space I still think NASA is a bureaucratic nightmare. Just the way they are forced to pick their private contractors is a joke (anyone here who knows about govt contracts knows what I’m talking about). It would be interesting to do a study and see if had the money been spent on higher education or research park projects if there would have been better long-term results. What is the opportunity cost of NASA? It would be difficult to quantify the long-term benefits of things learned about space travel and life but that’s not what NASA is doing anymore – they have no direction. I suspect dollar for dollar land based research has far more benefit than NASA – at least the way NASA is doing things today. Things have stagnated and it’s time for a shake up – hopefully that will come in the form of government subsidized private businesses (sorry to all you socialists). NASA served its purpose, it’s time to let it pass and move on while maintaining the % of the budget spent on NASA redirected to private business and public research education.
I feel it is the military that deserves most of the credit for technological progress over the past half to full century. I’m not taking a shot at NASA as it was – but it’s not the future.
Comments
Good: Of course a flag can wave in a vacuum. In the shot of the astronaut and the flag, the astronaut is rotating the pole on which the flag is mounted, trying to get it to stay up. The flag is mounted on one side on the pole, and along the top by another pole that sticks out to the side. In a vacuum or not, when you whip around the vertical pole, the flag will ``wave'', since it is attached at the top. The top will move first, then the cloth will follow along in a wave that moves down. This isn't air that is moving the flag, it's the cloth itself.
New stuff added March 1, 2001: Many HBs show a picture of an astronaut standing to one side of the flag, which still has a ripple in it (for example, see this famous image). The astronaut is not touching the flag, so how can it wave?
The answer is, it isn't waving. It looks like that because of the way the flag was deployed. The flag hangs from a horizontal rod which telescopes out from the vertical one. In Apollo 11, they couldn't get the rod to extend completely, so the flag didn't get stretched fully. It has a ripple in it, like a curtain that is not fully closed. In later flights, the astronauts didn't fully deploy it on purpose because they liked the way it looked. In other words, the flag looks like it is waving because the astronauts wanted it to look that way. Ironically, they did their job too well. It appears to have fooled a lot of people into thinking it waved.
This explanation comes from NASA's wonderful spaceflight web page. For those of you who are conspiracy minded, of course, this doesn't help because it comes from a NASA site. But it does explain why the flag looks as it does, and you will be hard pressed to find a video of the flag waving. And if it was a mistake caused by a breeze on the set where they faked this whole thing, don't you think the director would have tried for a second take? With all the money going to the hoax, they could afford the film!
Note added March 28, 2001: One more thing. Several readers have pointed out that if the flag is blowing in a breeze, why don't we see dust blowing around too? Somehow, the HBs' argument gets weaker the more you think about it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bad: The program makes a big deal out of how well the pictures taken from the Moon were exposed and set. Every picture we see is just right, with the scene always centered perfectly. However, the cameras were mounted on the front of the astronauts' spacesuit, and there was no finder. They couldn't have taken perfect pictures every time!
Good ... and of course, no one claims they did. Thousands of pictures were taken on the Moon, and the ones you see will tend to be the good ones. If Buzz Aldrin accidentally cut off Neil Armstrong's head, you probably won't see that image in a magazine. Also, everything done on the Moon was practiced endlessly by the astronauts. The people working on the mission knew that these pictures would be some of the most important images ever taken, so they would have taken particular care in making sure the astronauts could do it cold. When fabled astronaut Story Musgrave replaced a camera on board the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, someone commented that he made it look easy. "Sure," he replied, "I had practiced it thousands of times!"
The program goes farther than this, though: they actually contacted the man who designed the cameras for the astronauts. When they asked him why the pictures were always perfect, he hemmed and hawed, and finally admitted he had no answer for that. This is hardly evidence that NASA must have faked the missions. All it means is that he couldn't think of anything while sitting on camera! I think this is pretty evil of the program producers to do this; a bit of editing on their part makes it looks like they completely baffled an expert.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bad: Crosshairs were etched in the astronauts' cameras to better help measure objects in the pictures. However, in several images, it looks like the objects are actually in front of the crosshairs, which is impossible if the crosshairs were inside the camera! Therefore, the images were faked.
Good: This argument is pretty silly. Do the HBs think that NASA had painted crosshairs on the set behind the astronauts? I heard one HB claim the crosshairs were added later on, and NASA had messed up some of the imaging. That's ridiculous! Why add in crosshairs later? Cameras equipped with crosshairs have been used for a long time, and it would have been easy to simply use some to take pictures on the faked set. Clearly, the HBs are wrong here, but the images do look funny. What happened?
What happened becomes clearer when you look more closely at the images. The times it looks like an object is in front of the crosshair (because the crosshair looks blocked by the object) is when the object photographed is white. The crosshair is black. Have you ever taken an image that is overexposed? White parts bleed into the film around them, making them look white too. That's all that happened here; the white object in the image ``fills in'' the black crosshair. It's a matter of contrast: the crosshair becomes invisible because the white part overwhelms the film. This is basic photography.
[Note (added February 18, 2001): I have been informed by David Percy, a photographer quoted in the Fox show, that he does indeed believe that man went to the Moon, but he believes there are anomalies in the imagery taken which ``put into question many aspects of the missions'', which is a different matter. While I disagree that there are anomalies, I have edited out what is essentially a personal attack on Mr. Percy that I had here originally. It is an easy matter to let one's emotions get carried away when writing these essays, and I apologize to him and my readers for letting that get in. I make it a policy to correct Bad Astronomy based on facts, not personalities.]
[Note added June 29, 2001: Again, Ian Goddard's work has more about this, including images that show how crosshairs can fade out in a bright background.
[/quote]
Good: Kaysing's exact words in the program are ``Any human being traveling through the van Allen belt would have been rendered either extremely ill or actually killed by the radiation within a short time thereof.''
This is complete and utter nonsense. The van Allen belts are regions above the Earth's surface where the Earth's magnetic field has trapped particles of the solar wind. An unprotected man would indeed get a lethal dose of radiation, if he stayed there long enough. Actually, the spaceship traveled through the belts pretty quickly, getting past them in an hour or so. There simply wasn't enough time to get a lethal dose, and, as a matter of fact, the metal hull of the spaceship did indeed block most of the radiation. For a detailed explanation of all this, my fellow Mad Scientist William Wheaton has a page with the technical data about the doses received by the astronauts. Another excellent page about this, that also gives a history of NASA radiation testing, is from the Biomedical Results of Apollo site. An interesting read!
It was also disingenuous of the program to quote the Russian cosmonaut as well. Of course they were worried about radiation before men had gone into the van Allen belts! But tests done by NASA showed that it was possible to not only survive such a passage, but to not even get harmed much by it. It looks to me like another case of convenient editing by the producers of the program.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Very, very Bad: Kaysing says that the Apollo 1 fire that killed Roger Chaffee, Ed White and Gus Grissom was no accident. Grissom was ready to talk to the press about the Moon hoax, so NASA killed him. Kaysing says NASA also killed other people who were about to blow the whistle as well.
This is so disgusting I have a hard time writing a coherent reply. Kaysing has no grasp of basic physics, photography or even common sense, but he accuses NASA of killing people to shut them up. That is a particularly loathsome accusation.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The utter bilge pumped out in this program goes on and on, and indeed, if you go to the HBs websites you can read more than any brain can handle. I have read literally dozens of things that ``prove'' the landings were faked, and each one is rather easily shown to be wrong by anyone with experience in such things. I think the problem here is twofold: we tend to want to believe (or at least listen to) conspiracy theories, and this one is a whopper. Also, the evidence is presented in such a way that, if you are unfamiliar with the odd nature of the vacuum of space and of space travel, it sounds reasonable.
But it isn't reasonable. Their evidence is actually as tenuous as the vacuum of space itself. I find it amazing that they are so willing to scrutinize every available frame of data from the astronauts, yet miss the most obvious thing right in front of them. Fox television and the producers of this program should be ashamed of themselves. Even worse, the Fox Family Channel broadcast a show just last year that was skeptical and even handed about the Moon Hoax! Amazingly, Mitch Pileggi hosted that program as well.
I'll end this on one more bit the HBs don't talk about. When Jim Lovell, two time Apollo astronaut and commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, was told about Kaysing's claims, Lovell called him a kook. Kaysing, ever the rational thinker, sued Lovell for slander. Imagine: Kaysing, who says that NASA murdered three men outright and arranged for the murders of others, sued Commander James Lovell for slander! After some time, a judge wisely threw the case out of court.
There's still hope.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Links
There are many websites about the Moon Hoax where you can read both the theories by the HBs themselves or what reality is like as told by people debunking the theory. I have a list of them on my Bad Misconceptions page.
[Note added February 23, 2001: the link for the USA Today article is now gone, so I have removed it.] Dan Vergano of USA Today had an article (with an interview of me) about the TV show on the USA Today website. The print version was in the Friday, February 16th 2001 edition.
Conspiracy Theorist Clyde Lewis has a website ready to believe you! But I wouldn't believe him.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FALLOUT FROM THE SHOW
February 17, 2001:
Well, the Fox Apollo show has struck a chord, it appears. I am receiving a lot of email from people, both for and against. The most noteworthy support was quite a surprise: NASA itself! That explains why I am getting tens of thousands of hits to this site. Another site linking here is Ground Zero, a rather typical hoax and conspiracy site that calls me ``an annoyed scientist'' (true enough) and says that people call me a ``weapon for science''. I kinda like the sound of that one!
What's funny though is how that site pulls out the same tired arguments that are easy to show wrong, yet stands by them dogmatically. For example, Clyde Lewis, the webmaster of the site, shows a photo of the flag waving and asks how it can be waving; I already showed how it can appear to wave on this page earlier. In his image, the bottom corner of the flag is not flat, which is most likely simply residual rippling from the astronaut's twisting the pole. Remember, without air, there is nothing to dampen the rippling, so the flag actually can appear to wave as if from a breeze for a few moments.
This is hardly evidence of a hoax. Lewis goes on and on, bringing out the radiation arguments, the no stars arguments, on and on, like these are either new or damning, when they are neither.
Of course, I am trying to debunk the conspiracy theorists, but unlike them, I want people to look at their evidence rationally and critically, and not swallow it whole. It'll choke you if you do.
Finally, one last note: If I weren't a hard-headed scientist, I'd wonder if some cosmic force were at work sometimes. I went to a website that creates anagrams, that is, rearranges letters in a word to spell other words. I put in "The Bad Astronomer", and one of the anagrams was MOON TRASH DEBATER. I think that's pretty cool. [/quote]
source: BadAstronomy.com
One of the many disinformation sites:
[url]http://www.clydelewis.com/dis/moonalice/moonalice.html[/url]
[B]The french document[/B][/QUOTE]
Document[b]ary[/b], dammit. I keep thinking you're talking about a little piece of paper.
Yes, it is a very important subject to me. The space program and its achievements have fascinated me for all of my life. It's been one of those little points of reason in an unnecessarily complex and meaningless mess of government projects.
It's important, and it's been forsaken terribly...
:(
[B]Yeah Thats me allright
Did you know that Usama Bin Ladan is living in my Area, and Drives a Unmarked Hydro Truck. Thats what my friend says [/B][/QUOTE]
Bah, you've got nothing to worry about. Now I'd worry if it was [b]O[/b]sama Bin Lad[b]e[/b]n. :D
Thats was it says on the FBI web site.
I had an arabic chemistry teacher say it was something more like "Ousama Bin Alladin" in it's original pronounciation.
[B]Most people will probably never really appreciate the amount of space program based contributions there are in the technology and medicine they take for granted everyday down here on Earth.
It's important, and it's been forsaken terribly...
:( [/B][/QUOTE]
That's very true. I did a research project on this a few years ago, and the number of things that have come from the space program is simply enormous and reaches into every aspect of 1st world life, and even some aspects of 3rd world life now.
Even if we get a few huge breakthroughs that seem to make it worth while and a lot of pretty pictures of outer space I still think NASA is a bureaucratic nightmare. Just the way they are forced to pick their private contractors is a joke (anyone here who knows about govt contracts knows what I’m talking about). It would be interesting to do a study and see if had the money been spent on higher education or research park projects if there would have been better long-term results. What is the opportunity cost of NASA? It would be difficult to quantify the long-term benefits of things learned about space travel and life but that’s not what NASA is doing anymore – they have no direction. I suspect dollar for dollar land based research has far more benefit than NASA – at least the way NASA is doing things today. Things have stagnated and it’s time for a shake up – hopefully that will come in the form of government subsidized private businesses (sorry to all you socialists). NASA served its purpose, it’s time to let it pass and move on while maintaining the % of the budget spent on NASA redirected to private business and public research education.
I feel it is the military that deserves most of the credit for technological progress over the past half to full century. I’m not taking a shot at NASA as it was – but it’s not the future.
Anyway...
NASA has it's place. There is just as much need for unmanned probes as there is for manned missions going back to the Moon, and on to Mars etc...
You're right though... A revamp is in order...
:)
[B]Its Usama Bin Laden,
Thats was it says on the FBI web site. [/B][/QUOTE]
Its a typo. Look on every news article about him.
Seriously though its pointless to argue over this you know?