The debate rages even today, although in 1991 Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, two elderly men from Wiltshire County, came forward and claimed responsibility for the crop circles that appeared there over the preceding 20 years. The pair made the circles by pushing down nearly ripe crops with a wooden plank suspended from a rope.
Moon Landing—a Hoax?
Ever since NASA sent astronauts to the moon between 1969 and 1972, skeptics have questioned whether the Apollo missions were real or simply a ploy to one-up(领先)the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The debate resurfaced and reached crescendo levels in February 2001, when For television aired a program called Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?
Guests on the show argued that NASA did not have the technology to land on the moon. Anxious to win the space race, NASA acted out the Apollo program in movie studios, they said. The conspiracy theorists pointed out that the pictures transmitted from the moon do not include stars and that the flag the Americans planted on the moon is waving, even though there is though to be no breeze on the moon.
NASA quickly refuted these claims in a series of press releases, stating that any photographer would know it is difficult to capture something very bright and very dim on the same piece of film. Since the photographers wanted to capture the astronauts striding across the lunar surface in their sunlit space suits, the background stars were too faint to see.
As for the flag, NASA said that the astronauts were turning it back and forth to get in firmly planted in the lunar soil, which made it wave.
1. Some people have the age-old desire to put the joke on others.
2. According to the passage, the only form of Internet hoaxes is e-mail hoax.
3. Dihydrogen monoxide is a very dangerous chemical, which is often used as an industrial solvent.
4. Dihydrogen monoxide can accelerate corrosion and rusting, and cause sever burns and even death from inhalation.
5. The reason why the ersatz news that Alabama changed the value of Pi spread wildly was that ________ forwarded the article to friends and posted it on other newsgroups.
6. Traditional media outlets such as ________ may still hoax their audiences nowadays.
7. According to Boese, many people believed the report of Swiss spaghetti harvest because the British did not know ________.
8. According to a hoax announcement, the Taco Bell Corporation bough the Liberty Bell and moved it to Irvine to help ________.
9. The crop circles were thought to be the greatest works of modern art, the signs of ________ or landing sites of UFOs.
10. Some people thought that NASA acted out the Apollo program in movie studios partially because the pictures transmitted from the moon do not include ________.
