that can't be distinguished from the real thing. This is perhaps the most important reason why the burden of proof is properly placed on the HB claimants. [......]
A good example of the HB argumentation style involves an excerpt from the video record of Apollo 15. During the second EVA, Jim Irwin and Dave Scott have just erected the US flag and are taking pictures of each other standing next to it. We watch through the TV camera on the nearby Lunar Rover. After they finish picture taking, Dave Scott walks between the camera and the stationary flag. After he passes, the flag swings slightly and eventually stops. "Ah ha!", exclaim the HBs. "This was shot on earth on a soundstage with an atmosphere; the astronaut disturbed the flag with his wake as he passed!"
Why is this conclusion incorrect? There are several reasons. The most obvious and fundamental is that the HBs have failed to rule out the other ways that Scott may have disturbed the flag. Every proper forensic investigation starts by listing every conceivable explanation for the phenomenon in question. This is the time to let your imagination run wild. So the list can include the possibility, however unlikely, that the scene was faked on an earth set with an atmosphere as the HBs allege. But he may simply have brushed the flag with his left side as he passed, or he could have kicked up some lunar regolith that hit the flag or its staff, or there may have been an electrostatic attraction between the nylon flag and the pressure suit and life support system covered with beta cloth (Teflon-coated fiberglass), or gases emanating from the life support system may have disturbed the flag.
The next step is to walk down the list of possibilities evaluating each one against all of the available evidence. If a hypothesis conflicts with the evidence, then either the hypothesis or the evidence must go. Hopefully, when you are done, only one explanation remains. It becomes your conclusion, yet you still can't say that you've actually "proved" it; you can only say that this is the most likely explanation that you could think of that fits the available evidence. But it could still not be the right one; you may have completely missed the true explanation.
Because Scott blocks our view at the critical moment, we simply don't know (without further analysis) whether he touched the flag. Although at first glance it looks as though Scott was too far in front of the flag to have touched it, this is not necessarily so. The TV camera had a zoom lens set at wide angle, and wide angle lenses tend to exaggerate depth, sometimes quite considerably. A photometric analysis of the video and the still pictures taken from the side at the same time is inconclusive; it doesn't show that he must have hit it, nor does it show that he could not have hit it.
Here we come to a critical part of the analysis. Whatever conditions were in effect at the moment the flag began to move were most likely in effect through the entire scene. That is, if air was present on the "soundstage" at the moment Scott moved the flag, it was almost certainly also present a minute earlier and a minute later -- unless the "soundstage" was rapidly pumped to a vacuum or vented to the atmosphere. That raises the question: what happens at the other times an astronaut walks closely by the flag? At one point another astronaut does indeed walk closely by the flag, this time behind it so we can see how close he came. The flag does not move at all. Now if the hypothesis is that the "soundstage" had air, shouldn't the flag have moved every time that an astronaut walked closely by? The fact that the flag doesn't move these other times allows us to rule out the HB's theory that an air current was responsible the one time it did move. Only one candidate is left, so we can conclude that the flag moved most likely because Scott brushed it as he passed, probably with his left arm.
The HB make many claims like this one. They take one picture, one brief excerpt of video, or one line of dialogue and claim that it alone proves the entire Apollo program