I read with interest an article on the above subject that appeared in The Island of 16th July listing out ten reasons why the author of the article  believed that man never landed on the moon.

That reminded me of an experience the famous British Philosopher Betrand Russel had in Landon about half a century ago. Russel gave a talk on the ‘Structure of the Solar System.’    He described that the sun, planets and their moons were all spherical in shape  and  all the planets orbit around the sun.  

Then an elderly lady got up and said, "Very clever young man, very clever!   Everything you say is rubbish!  The earth is flat and it rests on the back of a giant turtle". 

After saying that she walked away. Russel then told the audience "I didn’t want to embarass the lady by asking her: "And where does that turtle stand on?"

I am one of the scientists who analyzed the moon soil brought down to earth by Neil Armstrong four decades ago.

At that time I was at the Chemical Laboratories of the Cambridge University in England. 

I used a very powerful nuclear technique known as the Mossbauer Effect Spectroscopy and it was very clear that that soil had come from a place where there is no free oxygen.  It contained metallic iron which could not be found where free oxygen was present.  This made it very clear that that soil had come from outside the earth.

At that time Television was not available in Sri Lanka.  But  in Cambridge we were watching every detail of the spacecraft landing on moon on TV at the Graduate Centre in Cambridge.

Ten reasons were given to prove that man never landed on moon. 

Let me comment on just one of them. The author of the article had assumed that the NASA scientists are idiots who would send their national flag to an airless place for it to simply hang perpetually without flying.

He didn’t believe that those scientists would have some mechanism to keep it flying on the moon.

Let me also add an interesting anecdote from that time.  At the time Armstrong landed on moon the well known politician,  Dr. Wickramabahu Karunaratne was with us in Cambridge living in Darwin’s house now known as Darwin College.

He translated the name ‘Armstrong’  to sinhala as ‘Wickramabahu’.  After Armstrong landed on the moon Bahu (pet name of Wickramabahu)  used to raise his hand and say ‘Wickramabahu handata bahee’