Yes, I have read the stickied 26 page thread. I want to put this in a readable format.
Let's look at how many people from what walks of life need to be in on the conspiracy in order for it to function, shall we?
1. Space agencies.
People like Tom Bishop love to make out that this is just NASA, the Goddamn Russians and if pushed, China. Not true. You also have the European Space Agency (including people from the UK, France, Germany and so on) and even India has a space programme now. Oh, and Japan. Anyone else I forgot? Probably.
1a. Accessory space agencies.
These are the people who back up the Space Agencies. The Space Agencies oversee the building and flight of spacecraft and the training of astronauts, but not everything in space is owned, created, or operated by them. For example, take deep space probes, often worked on by teams from universities and technical institutions, and monitored by teams such as JPL. These are the people who would need to be most involved in bribery if there was a conspiracy cover up, as they are actually recording the data using massive dishes, and sending the instructions back out to the space craft. They know where man made objects in space should be, and if they weren't where they're meant to be, they would know. We're talking hundreds of people worldwide that need to be in on the conspiracy to pull this off - so far. The number has to rise when we add:
2. Pilots.
There's quite a lot of pilots out there who fly in the southern hemisphere, along routes which according to FET, would exceed the actual capable range of their aircraft by many thousands of miles. The only way to account for this would be to add them to the conspiracy, which also enables them to ignore instrumental discrepancies such as between GPS and navigational beacons, and INS. So let's put that up to another thousand, to be on the conservative side. After all, we're not just talking about current pilots, but all the retired ones and the ones still in training.
3. The armed forces.
All of them, everywhere. At least the ones telling the troops where to go and what to do, and any involved in navigation. Also the crews of submarines, which often use INS for navigation. Let's say another two thousand, to be conservative. (Note to Americans: other countries have armies too, not just you guys.)
4. The hidden armed forces.
Want to disbelieve satellites? Then you have to have stratellites and pseudolites and all the other replacements you like to think exist. Who operates all these? A popular theory on here is it's a branch of the military. And it's gonna need to be another several thousand guys worldwide.
5. Satellite engineers.
No, not the ones that put the satellites up there (see section 1) but the guys that fix the dish on your house. They need to know where to point the dish. If your signal source is thousands of miles away in space, it's easy. If it's on a balloon up in the atmosphere somewhere, then oh dear, suddenly they need to point a dish in Guildford at a different place in the sky than a dish in Croydon. How very strange. Better bribe the thousands of dish guys then, hadn't we?
6. Everyone in the Antarctic.
All the people who work on all the bases out there and who have seen this massive wall of ice, or a big cataclysmic edge - quick, slip them a cash bung! And make sure you've got plenty of cash available because there's quite a high turnover rate of staff down there, and once they've seen the truth, well you just gotta keep paying.
7. Conspiracy enforcers
Assuming all these people are being bribed, you need to have somebody actually running the whole thing. Who looks after the cash that pays off the satellite engineers and the Antarctic researchers? Who threatens to murder them if they squeal? The numbers can't be known for sure but you're gonna need a few hundred of this type just to corral everyone else. Oh, yes, also corrupt politicians in every country.
So how many people are we up to? Probably over ten thousand now. Minimum. This is ridiculous. And once someone's in on it, they need to keep paying them indefinitely. And yet not once do we hear of a leak, after all those thousands of people have been so easily bribed?
Yeah, right.