I love "Dogs that did not Bark"

[cthulu2016]

The phrase is from a Sherlock Holmes story where the key clue is something that did NOT happen. A dog did not bark.

The general concept is to examine possibilities in terms of positive AND negative evidence. If X was true then what would have happened? Did it?

For instance, if the USA got a largely intact crashed flying saucer circa 1950 what would have happened? I would suggest that we probably would not have bothered with the Apollo program... might not have viewed Russia as our biggest threat... that the US military would have almost all advances in basic physics research... whatever.

What about the car that runs on water that the oil companies or auto-makers suppressed? It is an unlikely enough tale on positive evidence, but an impossible tale when we consider the dog that didn't bark. The story requires that the laws of physics on our planets are such that a car than can run on water can, in fact, be developed by some guy in his garage using 1950s technology. Thus the water engine would have been developed time after time after time. Thousands of chemists and physicists around the world would be coming up with the basic idea (whatever it was) constantly... and even if GM whacked every single America who followed that thought, the scientists in Russia or China would have been quite pleased to present their governments with a water engine. And so on...

I was inspired to write this by my favorite refutation of the idea that the moon-landing was a hoax filmed in a studio.

If that were true, Russia would have told everybody. Really. They would have.

It is fine to think of John Q. Public credulously consuming a TV show, but a lot of very serious scientists around the world would needed to dummy up about their doubts. (Like observatories with really good telescopes, for instance.)

"They" could fool ME about all kinds of stuff, but with these global conspiracies "they" need to fool everybody. That is a lot harder than fooling me. (The alternate view is that everyone... all scientists, all nations, all corporations, all key employees, etc..) are ALL in on it.

[jberryhill]

1. "they" need to fool everybody

Well, there you go. Nobody fools Alex Jones, for example.

[Pretzel_Warrior]

2. The Russkis were in on it! They've never even BEEN to space

The whole Sputnik thing was a fake breakthrough hatched by the United States' MIC!!

[yellowcanine]

3. Sometimes a dog is just a dog.

I don't know what that means but it seemed appropriate here.

[Fumesucker]

4. Even the Hubble or the Keck can't resolve the Moon landers from Earth

Not to dispute your OP because I agree, but that's not a good example.

Large telescopes are more about collecting as much light as possible "light buckets" rather than sheer magnification.

/Little Miss Nitpick