Marcus Allen

Speaker: Mark Worden (Standard British accent)

This month the world celebrates the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. Yet according to a number of people, the moon landings never actually took place. Englishman Marcus Allen is one such person. A former professional photographer, he is the UK distributor for the magazine Nexus, which covers a number of subjects, including “suppressed news, conspiracy and the unexplained.”
We spoke to him by telephone. As he explained, it was his doubts about the ability of men in spacesuits to operate a sophisticated Hasselblad camera that first led him to have doubts about the moon landings:

Marcus Allen (Standard British accent):

The camera had no viewfinder: if you’re wearing a spacesuit, you couldn’t actually use the viewfinder, which is on top of the Hasselblad. So there was no viewfinder, there was no exposure metre in the camera. The lenses, made by Zeiss in Germany, were the best lenses available, they were Zeiss Biogon, and the aperture had to be set manually, the shutter speed had to be set manually, and it had to be focused manually. There was no automatic focus, there was no automatic exposure and, aside (from) there being no viewfinder, we also have to take into account the fact that wearing a spacesuit is not the best piece of equipment in order to operate a camera as sensitive as a Hasselblad. It’s not even the best choice of camera for the circumstances under which they were operating. A 35 millimeter camera would have been more effective, however, they chose Hasselblad.
So we have no viewfinder, no exposure metre, manual setting of focus, aperture and shutter speeds, no means of knowing if a photograph had been taken; normally you would hear the click of the mirror, and the camera winding on, the only automatic function on these cameras was it wound the film on automatically.

GARDENING GLOVES!

As soon as the shutter had been pressed – which, by the way, you couldn’t see the shutter from inside a spacesuit – because it’s mounted on the front of the camera – and you are wearing what are – in effect – heavy duty gardening gloves, armoured gauntlets which come with the spacesuit –  you had no feel through it, they were made of very heavy duty material, they had to stop meteorite impacts, they had to withstand internal pressure, they were made of many layers of material, they were not the best things to operate a camera with.

ICONIC IMAGES

The problem then arises, given all these restrictions on the use of the camera, and its design, some of the best and most iconic photographs of the 20th Century were produced under these conditions!
The famous one of “Man on the Moon,” which has probably been the most reproduced image that NASA has available, but there were many thousands of other photographs, and if we concentrate specifically on Apollo 11, there were 121 images taken during their time on the lunar surface, the two-and-a-half hours that were spent on the lunar surface.

If you want to listen to more of our interview with Marcus Allen, click here