Melvin, Jenkins and Bara play along with the producers, pretending to be skeptical about the Moon Landing nearly 50 years ago. The episode starts with a lot of irrelevant material about never-flown military space projects and German rocket scientists who immigrated after the second World War under "Project Paperclip." The trio interview Linda Hunt, the first journalist to write about Paperclip. Hunt says the Nazi past of rocket scientists like Wernher Von Braun was covered up.
Eventually the show gets down to the first of a list of reasons some people think the landing had to be faked. This first one is the alleged impossibility of passing unscathed through the Van Allen radiation belts. The trio goes to inspect the actual Apollo 11 Command Module, currently on show in a museum in Seattle, and measure the thickness of its walls with a Lidar scanner.
Dr. Michael Walter of the Carnegie Institiute for Science shows how even quite thin shielding would have been sufficient to attenuate the effects of radiation enough for a fast transit to be no problem. Using a Geiger counter and a plexiglass model, Walter does a rough calculation of the exposure on a two-way trip through the belts. Mike Bara says "[The demonstration] changed my mind. It seems it was possible to go through the Van Allen belts." This despite the fact that Bara wrote a book just last year in which he scorned the Van Allen disbelievers.
"The notion that the Van Allen belts would have turned the astronauts to crispy critters is simply false."
--Ancient Aliens and JFK by Mike Bara (2018), p.183
Synopsis by Penshurst Teleratings
