Apollo moon landing hoax accusations

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The Apollo moon landing hoax accusations are a series of claims alleging that the Apollo moon landings never took place, but were instead faked by NASA. Nearly all interested scientists, technicians and space enthusiasts who have commented on the accusations have rejected them as baseless. Public opinion polls in the United States have shown that a large majority accept the Apollo missions as fact, while a notable percentage have at least some doubts about them.

Origins of the accusations

Hoax proponents say that the Moon landings of Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969 and subsequent missions never happened, but were instead staged and filmed on Earth.

From the beginning of the Apollo program there was some skepticism of it. In his book A Man on the Moon, Andrew Chaikin mentions that at the time of Apollo 8's lunar orbit mission in December 1968, such conspiratorial stories were in circulation. Several public media reports and artworks are believed to have helped to fuel the growth of the hoax accusations:

In 1967, British playwright Desmond Lowden wrote a play called The News-Benders, in which all major technological advances since 1945 were shown to have been simulated; the play was (ironically) televised in January 1968 and showed a Moon landing faked with models.

In early 1969, the now-defunct Flat Earth Society challenged the veracity of the Apollo missions (Schadewald 1980) (also see the external link to the Flat Earth Society). They said the various "earthrise" photos from Apollo 8, with the Moon in the foreground and the spherical Earth in the background, were fakes. The primary basis of their claim was that it did not square with their belief that the Earth is flat (Newsweek, January 13, 1969).

In 1971, there was a brief sequence in the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever which appeared to show a Moon landing being simulated.

In 1974, two years after the final Apollo mission was completed, the first published attempt to establish hoax arguments was Bill Kaysing's self-published book We Never Went to the Moon (Plait 2002:157), although perhaps the best known is NASA Mooned America by Ralph Rene.

In 1978, the film Capricorn One was released. Its story portrayed a NASA attempt to fake a landing on Mars. It is generally believed that skepticism of the Apollo program grew the most significantly in popularity as a result of that movie. However, in Capricorn One, the need for the fake arises out of complications affecting a genuine mission, rather than existing as a fabrication from the very beginning.

The burden of proof

Hoax accusation opponents maintain that a key feature of all arguments questioning the moon landing is the unstated assumption that the burden of proof lies entirely with NASA and its supporters. http://www.dave.co.nz/space/moon-hoax/logic.html Hoax proponents' presentations often consist of questioning technical minutiae with the result that debunkers must research and answer all questions that the hoax proponents come up with, failure to do so being taken as proof of a moon landing hoax. Larger problems (such as the roles of the USSR, and of President Kennedy) are rarely discussed at length, as hoax proponents tend to respond to them by changing the subject, or finding a new audience. http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/debating.html

Application of the scientific method to this scenario would allow each explanation of an event as a separate hypothesis, like this:

Truth hypothesis: NASA's portrayal of the moon landing is fundamentally accurate, allowing for such common errors as mislabeled photos and personal recollections.

Hoax hypothesis: NASA's portrayal of the moon landing is an orchestrated simulation.

Hypotheses are accepted or rejected by scientists based upon a set of criteria that apply to all scientific theories. For a theory to qualify as scientific it must be:

# Consistent (internally and externally)

# Parsimonious (sparing in proposed entities or explanations, see Occam's Razor)

# Useful (describes and explains observed phenomena)

# Empirically testable and falsifiable

# Based upon multiple observations, often in the form of controlled, repeated experiments

# Correctable and dynamic (changes are made as new data are discovered)

# Progressive (achieves all that previous theories have and more)

# Provisional or tentative (admits that it might not be correct rather than asserting certainty)

When viewed in this way, the question is not "Can every detail about the moon landing be explained?" but "Does the Hoax hypothesis better fit observable facts than the Truth hypothesis, and is it more self-consistent?". http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/gen01/gen01278.htm Thus, a first obvious problem with the Hoax hypothesis is its lack of narrative cohesion. The Truth hypothesis is a single story, but there are many Hoax hypotheses that each address specific aspects of the moon landing, but conflict with each other if taken as a whole. One proposal says that the landings were faked because the real landings were conducted using alien technology.

Hoax proponents do not see narrative cohesion as a problem, since, as with the JFK conspiracies, the many accounts grow out of what they say are the many inconsistencies with the NASA story. Hoax proponents have said that because the Apollo moon landings have never been verified, "by failing to require independent duplication of such an outlandish claim after over 30 years have passed, science is degraded to the status of being just another religion."http://216.26.168.193/moonmovie/default.asp?ID=8 Opponents have pointed out that every piece of evidence regarding the moon landings can be met with pathological skepticism on the part of hoax believers. As is the case with many conspiracy theories, evidence presented in opposition to hoax arguments is generally labeled as unconvincing propaganda made by the "establishment" to cover up the alleged lie.

An example of such an exchange is the evidence for the landing of the Apollo 11, Apollo 14, and Apollo 15 retroreflectors on the Moon http://www.lpi.usra.edu/expmoon/Apollo15/A15_Experiments_LRRR.html. Scientists can reflect lasers off these to measure the distance between Earth and the Moon (see Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment). Hoax proponents such as Marcus Allen say that because the Russians placed mirrors on the moon using robotic missions Unmanned Soviet Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2 rovers carried mirror arrays. Reflected signals were received from Lunokhod 1, but then it was left in a position preventing the return of signals the presence of other mirrors can also be explained in other ways, for example by secret US robotic missions whose express aim was to place retroreflectors on the moon in order to corroborate that part of the Apollo missions, and therefore the Lunar Ranging Experiments do not provide evidence for Apollo [link].

Conspiracy theory

The accusations are a type of conspiracy theory, because the hoax argument centers on claims that conspirators in the possession of secret knowledge are misleading the public in pursuit of a hidden agenda. For more on this, see the motives section below. The Apollo moon landing hoax accusations have been the subject of debunking and according to the debunkers have been sufficiently falsified, but hoax proponents obviously disagree with this characterization, and with the label 'conspiracy theory'. The German magazine Der Spiegel speaks of "...those myths in which Elvis is alive, John F. Kennedy fell victim to a conspiracy involving the Mafia and secret service agents, the Moon landing was staged in the Nevada desert, and Princess Diana was murdered by the British intelligence services."

Public opinions about the Apollo program

While not asking about whether the landings were faked specifically, soon after the missions, Knight Newspapers (later to become Knight-Ridder) found that more than 30 percent of respondents to their poll were suspicious of NASA's trips to the moon. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.09/moon.land_pr.html

According to a 1999 Gallup poll, about 6% of the population of the United States has doubts that the Apollo astronauts walked on the Moon. (Five percent had no opinion, while eighty-nine percent believe the landings took place.) http://poll.gallup.com/content/default.aspx?ci=1993&pg=1 It asked, "[t]hinking about the space exploration, do you think the government staged or faked the Apollo moon landing, or don't you feel that way?" Six percent of respondents answered "yes, staged." (Plait 2002:156) "Although, if taken literally, 6% translates into millions of individuals," Gallup said of this, "it is not unusual to find about that many people in the typical poll agreeing with almost any question that is asked of them; so the best interpretation is that this particular conspiracy theory is not widespread." By comparison, in a 2001 Gallup poll 45% of Americans concurred with the statement that "God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years", and in a 2003 ABC poll, some 70% of Americans suspect some form of conspiracy surrounding the John F. Kennedy assassination.http://abcnews.go.com/images/pdf/937a1JFKAssassination.pdf

Fox television's 2001 TV special "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Really Land on the Moon?", airing to 15 million viewers, may have given a boost to the idea, despite the allegation of many errors of fact and presentation in the program by the Web site called "Who mourns for Apollo?". http://www.lunaranomalies.com/fake-moon2.htm Fox said roughly 20% of the public had doubts about the authenticity of the Apollo program after the show.

James Oberg, an American journalist who reports on NASA, estimates that "perhaps 10 percent of the population, and up to twice as large in specific demographic groups" believe in the hoax or have some doubts about the Apollo program. http://www.jamesoberg.com/042003lessonsfake_his.html

The late U.S. Senators Alan Cranston (D-California) and Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina) were on record as having written to NASA passing on the concerns of their constituents.

President Clinton in his 2004 autobiography, My Life, states (on page 156): "Just a month before, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had left their colleague, Michael Collins, aboard spaceship Columbia and walked on the moon, beating by five months President Kennedy's goal of putting a man on the moon before the decade was out. The old carpenter asked me if I really believed it happened. I said sure, I saw it on television. He disagreed; he said that he didn't believe it for a minute, that "them television fellers" could make things look real that weren't. Back then, I thought he was a crank. During my eight years in Washington, I saw some things on TV that made me wonder if he wasn't ahead of his time."

Examining hoax proponents' arguments

The hoax accusations are not a single cohesive theory or hypothesis, but rather several of them. Each one is a reaction to what Apollo skeptics see as inconsistencies in evidence. Several major sub-theories can be identified:

1. Complete hoax - The idea that the entire human landing program was faked. Various sources argue that either the technology to send men to the moon was insufficient and/or that the Van Allen radiation belts made such a trip impossible.
2. Partial hoax / Unmanned landings - Sibrel typifies this argument when he says that Apollo 11 and subsequent astronauts had faked their moon walk and their orbit around it using trick photography, and that they never got more than halfway to the moon. A subset of this theory is advocated by those who concede the existence of laser mirrors and other human-made objects observable on or from the moon. Marcus Allen represents this argument when he says "I would be the first to accept what [telescope images of the landing site] find as powerful evidence that something was placed on the Moon by man." He goes on to say that photographs of the lander would not prove that America put men on the Moon. "Getting to the Moon really isn't much of a problem - the Russians did that in 1959, the big problem is getting people there." His argument focusses around NASA sending robot missions because radiation levels in space were lethal to humans.
3. Manned landings, with backup stagings - Dr. Brian O'Leary once suggested that while the landing took place, NASA created a parallel fake landing in case of accidents or failures, although he now believes otherwise.
4. Manned landings, with cover-ups - William Brian and others believe that, while NASA did make it to the moon, they covered up what they found. While Brian focusses on what he says are gravitational anomalies, others have suggested alien artifacts.
5. Hoax with whistleblowers - a subset of any of the other hoax hypotheses. David Percy has argued that the errors in the NASA photos in particular are so obvious that they are evidence that insiders are trying to 'blow the whistle' on the hoax by deliberately inserting errors that they know will be seen.

A brief treatment of some of the arguments and counter-arguments is given below.

Missing data

1. Blueprints, telemetry data and other key documents that would help to validate the missions are missing.

a) Dr. David Williams (NASA archivist at Goddard Space Flight Center) and Apollo 11 flight director Gene Kranz both acknowledged that the Apollo 11 telemetry data tapes are missing. Hoax proponents interpret this as support for the case that they never existedhttp://moonhoax.com/site/evidence.html.

* The website above only states that the Apollo 11 telemetry tapes are missing — and not those of Apollo 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17. [link], [link] Apollo 11 flight director Gene Kranz in interview with Aron Ranen.

* Others are looking for the missing telemetry tapes, but for different reasons. The tapes contain the original and highest quality video feed from the lunar landing which a number of former Apollo 11 personnel want to recover for posterity, while NASA engineers looking towards future moon missions believe the Apollo telemetry data may be useful for their design studies. Their investigations have determined that the Apollo 11 tapes were sent for storage at the US National Archives in 1970, but by 1984 all the Apollo 11 tapes had been returned to the Goddard Space Flight Center at their request. The tapes are believed to have been stored rather than re-used, and efforts to determine where they were stored are ongoinghttp://www.honeysucklecreek.net.nyud.net:8080/Apollo_11/tapes/Search_for_SSTV_Tapes.pdf. Goddard was storing 35,000 new tapes per year in 1967 http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19670010532_1967010532.pdf, even before the lunar landings.

b) Hoax proponents say that blueprints for the Apollo lunar module, rover and associated equipment are missing or never existed.

* Although there are some diagrams of the lunar module and moon buggy on the Nasa web site, the hoax examination site 'xenophilia.com' says that "the technical blueprints showing sizes, etc. do seem to be missing''" http://www.xenophilia.com/zb0003c.htm.

* Despite the questions concerning the existance or location of the LEM blueprints, what is said to be a flight-worthy LEM is on exhibit at the [Cradle of Aviation Museum]. [LM-13] would have landed on the moon during the Apollo 18 mission, but was instead put into storage when the mission was cancelled: it has since been restored and put on display. Four flight-worthy Lunar Rovers were built, but three flew to the Moon and the other was used for spares after Apollo 18 was cancelled: the only Lunar Rovers on display are test articles and replicas.http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo_lrv.html

However, the existence of blueprints alone would not prove that the objects they describe were actually constructed, nor that, if constructed, they were used to fly people to the moon. The massive amount of data in the blueprints and on the telemetry tapes however, would be very difficult to fake without introducing errors that would be spotted by careful scrutiny if they were available.

Photographs and films

Critics have said there are various issues with photographs and films apparently taken on the Moon.

Challenges and responses

1. Issues with crosshairs (fiducials) that were etched onto the lenses of the cameras.

a) In some photos, the crosshairs appear to be behind objects, rather than in front of them where they should be, as if the photos were altered.

*In photography, the light white color (the object behind the crosshair) makes the black object (the crosshair) invisible due to saturation effects in the film emulsion. The film particles that ought to have been black were exposed by light from the adjacent brightly lit particles. http://www.redzero.demon.co.uk/moonhoax/Cross_Hairs.htm Ironically, this saturation effect would not happen if the crosshairs were drawn on in post, and so is evidence of genuine photos. Attempting to alter photos that already have crosshairs would make the compositing process far more difficult.

b) In the 'classic' Aldrin photo, the reticle (etched crosshair on the camera) is too low. Since the crosshairs are in a fixed position on all the images, a lower reticle on this image indicates that the image has been cropped. This is so even on the 70mm duplicate transparency NASA issues. The 70mm transparencies should show the entire 'full' image. Hoax proponents say that the only explanation for this is if the original full transparency needed to be cropped because of an embarrassing artifact like a piece of stage scenery were in shot.

* The actual photo [AS11-40-5903] or [AS11-40-5903 high resolution] is chopped off just above Aldrin. Duplicate transparencies are not necessarily exact copies of the original. The publicly-released version of the photo was cropped and recomposed by NASA within hours of the film being made available, with extra black space added at the top of most released versions for aesthetic reasons. This Web page has NASA's [history of the photo].

c) In other photos, the reticles are not in a straight line, or appear in the 'wrong' place, indicating that the photo has been doctored. [link]

* The debunking Web site [Clavius.org] explains that the methodologies that the conspiracy theorists propose for doctoring the photos with "wrong" reticles are often contradictory and generally require absurd lengths to explain the "inconsistencies" when there are reasonable explanations. In particular, prints were often cropped and rotated, which causes the illusion of reticles occurring off-center or "not straight".

2. The quality of the photographs is implausibly high.

*The astronauts were trained in the use of their gear, and shots and poses were planned in advance as part of the mission. NASA selected only the best photographs for release to the public, and some of the photos were cropped to improve their composition. There are many badly exposed, badly focused and poorly composed images amongst the thousands of photos that were taken by the Apollo Astronauts. Many can be seen at the [Apollo Lunar Surface Journal]. Photos were taken on high-quality Hasselblad cameras with Zeiss lenses, using 70 mm medium format film.

3. There are no stars in any of the photos, and astronauts never report seeing any stars from the capsule windows. Yuri Gagarin commented that the stars were astonishingly brilliant (see the external link below), and some NASA photos do show stars. The stars in the photos may have been removed, because professional astronomers would be able to use them to prove (through parallax measurements) that the photos were not taken from the moon. (See, for instance, the photos above.)

*Stars are also never seen in Space Shuttle, Mir, International Space Station Earth observation photos, or even sporting events that take place at night. The sun in the Earth/Moon area shines as brightly as on a clear noon day on Earth, so cameras used for imaging these things are set for daylight exposure, with quick shutter speeds in order to prevent overexposing the film. The dim light of the stars simply does not have a chance to expose the film. (This effect can be demonstrated on Earth by attempting to view stars from a brightly lit parking lot. You can only see them if you somehow block out all illuminated objects from your field of view, and then let your eyes adjust for night vision. Otherwise, it is like taking a picture of the night sky with exposure settings for a bright sunny day. Science fiction movies and television shows do confuse this issue by depicting stars as visible in space under all lighting conditions.) Stars were seen by every Apollo mission crew except for the unfortunate Apollo 13 (they couldn't see the stars due to the fact that oxygen and water vapor created a haze around the spacecraft). Stars were used for navigation purposes and were occasionally also seen through cabin windows when the conditions allowed. To see stars, nothing lit by sunlight could be in the viewer's field of view. (Plait 2002:158-60).

*Stars are not dramatically brighter in space (above the Earth's atmosphere). Professional astronomer and two-time space shuttle astronaut Ronald A. Parise stated that he could barely see stars at all from space. He had to turn out all of the lights in the shuttle to even glimpse the stars (Plait 2002:160). Even with cameras several times more sensitive than the ones used on Apollo, it takes an exposure of several seconds to show up even the brighter stars. http://ottawa.rasc.ca/articles/taylor_richard/digicam/digicam.html Exposure times of the Apollo photographs were a small fraction of a second, typically 1/250 of a second.

*The distance from the Earth to the Moon is very small compared to the distance to the stars, so no parallax effect would have been observable. (The nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is over 100,000,000 times farther away than the Moon, and all other stars are much farther away than that.)

4. The color and angle of shadows and light are inconsistent.

*Shadows on the Moon are complicated because there are several light sources: the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon itself. Light from these sources is scattered by lunar dust in many different directions, including into shadows. Additionally, the Moon's surface is not flat and shadows falling into craters and hills appear longer, shorter and distorted from the simple expectations of the hoax believers. More significantly, perspective effects come into play, particularly on rough or angled ground. This leads to non-parallel shadows even on objects which are extremely close to each other, and can be observed easily on Earth wherever fences or trees are found. And finally, the camera in use was fitted with a wide angle lens, which naturally resulted in subtle versions of "fish eye" distortion (Plait 2002:167-72).

5. Identical backgrounds in photos are listed as taken miles apart.

*Detailed comparison of the backgrounds said to be identical in fact show significant changes in the relative positions of the hills that are consistent with the claimed locations that the images were taken from. Parallax effects clearly demonstrate that the images were taken from widely different locations around the landing sites. Claims that the appearance of the background is identical while the foreground changes (for example, from a boulder strewn crater to the Lunar Module) are trivially explained when the images were taken from nearby locations, akin to seeing distant mountains appearing the same on Earth from locations that are hundreds of feet apart showing different foreground items. Furthermore, as there is no atmosphere on the Moon, very distant objects will appear clearer and closer to the human eye. What appears as nearby hills in some photographs, are actually mountains several kilometers high and some 10-20 kilometers away. Changes in such very distant backgrounds are quite subtle, and can be mistaken for no change at all. As the Moon is also much smaller than the Earth, the horizon is significantly nearer in photographs than Earthbound observers are used to seeing (an eye 1.7 m above completely flat ground will see the horizon 4.7 km away on Earth, but only 2.4 km away on the Moon). This can lead to confusing interpretations of the images. http://www.iangoddard.net/moon01.htm

6. The number of photographs taken is implausibly high. When the total number of official photographs taken during EVA of all Apollo missions is divided by the total amount of time of all EVAs, one arrives at 1.19 photos per minute. That is one photo per 50 seconds. Discounting time spent on other activities results in one photo per 15 seconds for Apollo 11. This is even more remarkable considering that many locations in the photographs are situated miles apart and would have taken considerable travel time, especially in bulky pressure suits. On top of this, the cameras were neither equipped with a viewfinder nor with automatic exposure, which means that taking good pictures would take considerably longer.

*The astronauts were well trained before the mission in the use of photographic equipment. Since there were no weather effects to contend with and the bright sunlight scenes permitted the use of small apertures with consequent large depth of field, the equipment was generally kept at a single setting for the duration of the mission. All that was required of the astronauts was to open the shutter and wind the film to take a picture. In these conditions it is possible to take two photographs a second. The camera was in a bracket mounted on the front of their spacesuit, so they looked straight ahead at what they wanted to photograph; no viewfinder was needed. Also, many of the photographs were stereoscopic pairs or sets of panoramic images, taken immediately after each other. The Apollo Image Atlas (external link below) shows that 70mm magazine S of Apollo 11 has 122 photos taken during the walk on the surface - less than one per minute. In addition, by looking at the photographs in sequence, one can see that very often several of them were taken in rapid succession.

7. The photos contain artifacts like the two seemingly matching 'C's on a rock and on the ground (the rock is seen in NASA photos AS16-107-17445 and 17446). They could be "prop continuity markers". Hoax proponents say that the first copies of the photos released do show these marks, and that later releases may have been doctored, and that attempts to debunk this problem focus exclusively on one example on the rock, ignoring the second on the ground and the coincidence of two, allegedly identical artifacts on the same photo. http://www.aulis.com/apollo-investigation-2003.htm

* ''The "C"-shaped objects are most likely printing imperfections not in the original film from the camera, but only in some of the later generation copies of AS16-107-17446 (and no copies of 17445). One suggestion, as seen in the next link, is that when magnified the 'C' is a coiled hair present on the lens of an enlarger when a print of the photo was taken for NASA's website. (See [this link] and [this link].) Here are the photographs:

* [AS16-107-17445] [(high resolution)]

* [AS16-107-17446] [(high resolution)]

8. A resident of Perth, Australia, with the pseudonym Una Ronald, says she saw a Coke bottle in the frame which was edited out of later versions, and says that many articles appeared discussing this in The West Australian newspaper at the time. Western Australia was the only place in the world that got their feed 'live' without delay.

*No such newspaper reports can be verified. Una Ronald's true identity has been kept secret, and her claims have only been relayed by one source. Analysis shows that what she probably saw was in fact an optical artifact caused by a reflection inside the camera lens. Its motion precisely mirrors Aldrin's in the shot (see [Coke Bottle] and [Una Ronald]). The resolution of the video transmissions from the moon were far greater than that of ordinary television, and were converted to standard video by pointing a camera at a video screen, similar to the old kinescope method of recording live TV shows -- a process vulnerable to added reflections at the conversion site. Inverted ghost images of Aldrin appear throughout the video.

9. The 1994 hardback version of Moon Shot by Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton contains a photograph of Shepard playing golf on the moon with another astronaut. The picture is an obvious fake, there being no one else to take the shot of the two, and the artwork was poor (such as the grapefruit sized "golf ball"), and yet it was presented as if it were a real photo.

*The picture is a mockup made from several individual shots from the Hasselblad cameras (which had already been stowed at that point), and does not appear in the 1995 UK paperback version, although at no point is its nature mentioned in the book. It was used in lieu of the only existing real images, from the TV monitor, which the editors of the book apparently felt were too grainy to present in a book's picture section.

*The Lunar Module and its shadow come from a left/right reversal of [AS14-66-9276]. The astronaut on the right is a left/right reversal from [AS14-66-9240], the TV camera has been removed. The astronaut on the left is a left/right reversal of [AS14-66-9241], again with the TV camera removed. The flag is from [AS14-66-9232] or one of the similar photos. Some of the equipment came from a photo similar to [AS14-67-9361]. The golf club, ball, and some shadows have been added. See [this webpage] for the dialog and discussion of the activity that the faked photo depicts.

Shepard duffed the first ball and hit the second one fairly cleanly. Houston joked to Shepard "That looked like a slice to me, Al.", yet a slice is caused by uneven airflow on the ball. This is impossible without an atmosphere.

*The ball moved only two or three feet. Shepard also stated that the second ball went "miles and miles" (off-camera of the TV broadcast), which was clearly a joke, like the comment about the slice. Shepard later said, "I thought, with the same club-head speed, the ball's going to go at least six times as far. There's absolutely no drag, so if you do happen to spin it, it won't slice or hook 'cause there's no atmosphere to make it turn." http://anecdotage.com/index.php?aid=7706 A slice comes from hitting the ball off the outer end of the club-head, versus hitting it square in the middle of the club-head, versus hooking it, which is hitting it off the inner end of the club-head. Shepard did, in effect, "slice" the ball at first, and as he notes, being in the virtually non-existent lunar atmosphere, the ball did not curve laterally as an earthbound slice would.

:*See [ALSJ], click on "Apollo 14" on the left, under "Second EVA", click on "A nice day for a game of golf", and scroll down to "135:08:17", which has a transcript of the actual dialog. Just above "135:08:17" is a video clip of the golfing sequence. Below "135:09:26" is a discussion of the mock-up photo in Moon Shot.

Ionizing radiation and heat

Challenges and responses

1. The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation from the Van Allen radiation belt and galactic ambient radiation (see Radiation poisoning). Some hoax theorists have suggested that Starfish Prime (high altitude nuclear testing in 1962) was a failed attempt to disrupt the Van Allen belts.

*The Moon is ten times higher than the Van Allen radiation belts. The spacecraft moved through the belts in just 30 minutes, and the astronauts were protected from the ionizing radiation by the metal hulls of the spacecraft. In addition, the orbital transfer trajectory from the Earth to the Moon through the belts was selected to minimize radiation exposure. Even Dr. James Van Allen, the discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts, has rebutted the claims that radiation levels were too dangerous for the Apollo missions. Dosimeters carried by the crews showed they received about the same cumulative dosage as a chest X-ray or about 1 milligray. http://spider.ipac.caltech.edu/staff/waw/mad/mad19.html Plait cited an average dose of less than 1 rem, which is equivalent to the ambient radiation received by living at sea level for three years.(Plait 2002:160-62)

*The radiation is actually evidence that the astronauts went to the Moon. 33 of 36 of the Apollo astronauts who were on the nine Apollo missions to leave Earth orbit have early stage cataracts that have been shown to be caused by radiation exposure to cosmic rays during their trip. (see Ms. Irene Schneider on [The Space Show]), the [November 20, 2005 show].

2. Film in the cameras would have been fogged by this radiation.

*The film was kept in metal containers that prevented radiation from fogging the film's emulsion. (Plait 2002:162-63) In addition, film carried by unmanned lunar probes such as the Lunar Orbiter and Luna 3 was not fogged.

3. The Moon's surface during the daytime is so hot that camera film would have melted.

*There is no atmosphere to efficiently couple lunar surface heat to devices such as cameras not in direct contact with it. In a vacuum, only radiation remains as a heat transfer mechanism. The physics of radiative heat transfer are thoroughly understood, and the proper use of passive optical coatings and paints was adequate to control the temperature of the film within the cameras; lunar module temperatures were controlled with similar coatings that gave it its gold color. Also, while the Moon's surface does get very hot at lunar noon, every Apollo landing was made shortly after lunar sunrise at the landing site. During the longer stays, the astronauts did notice increased cooling loads on their spacesuits as the sun continued to rise and the surface temperature increased, but the effect was easily countered by the passive and active cooling systems. (Plait 2002:165-67)

4. The Apollo 16 crew should not have survived a big solar flare firing out when they were on their way to the Moon. "They should have been fried".

*''No large solar flare occurred during the flight of Apollo 16. There were large solar flares in August 1972, after Apollo 16 returned to Earth and before the flight of Apollo 17. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/27jan_solarflares.htm http://skyandtelescope.com/news/article_1754_1.asp

Transmissions

Challenges and responses

1. The lack of a more than 2 second delay in two way communications at a distance of a 250,000 miles (400,000 km).

*The round trip light travel time of more than 2 seconds is apparent in all the real-time recordings of the lunar audio, but this does not always appear as expected. There may be some documentary films where the delay has been edited out. Principal motivations for editing the audio would likely come in response to time constraints or in the interest of clarity. http://www.redzero.demon.co.uk/moonhoax/Radio.htm

2. Typical delays in communication were on the order of half a second.

*Claims that the delays were only on the order of half a second are unsubstantiated by an examination of the actual recordings.

3. The Parkes Observatory in Australia was billed to the world for weeks as the site that would be relaying communications from the Moon, then five hours before transmission they were told to stand down.

*The timing of the first Moonwalk was moved up after landing. http://www.nasm.si.edu/collections/imagery/apollo/AS11/a11sum.htm

4. Parkes supposedly provided the clearest video feed from the Moon, but Australian media and all other known sources ran a live feed from the United States.

*While that was the original plan, and, according to some sources, the official policy, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) did take the transmission direct from the Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek radio telescopes. These were converted to NTSC television at Paddington, in Sydney. This meant that Australian viewers saw the Moonwalk several seconds before the rest of the world. http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/Apollo_11/Australian_TV.html See also [The Parkes Observatory's Support of the Apollo 11 Mission], from "Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia" (The events surrounding the Parkes Observatory's role in relaying the live television of man's first steps on the moon were portrayed in a slightly fictionalized 2000 Australian film comedy The Dish.)

5. Better signal was supposedly received at Parkes Observatory when the Moon was on the opposite side of the planet.

*This is not supported by the detailed evidence and logs from the missions. http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/apollo11/one_giant_leap.html

Mechanical issues

Challenges and responses

1. No blast crater appeared from the landing.

*No crater should be expected. The Descent Propulsion System was throttled very far down during the final stages of landing. The Lunar Module was no longer rapidly decelerating, so the descent engine only had to support the module's own weight, which by then was greatly diminished by the near exhaustion of the descent propellants, and the Moon's lower gravity. At the time of landing, the engine's thrust divided by the cross-sectional area of the engine bell is only about 1.5 PSI (Plait 2002:164), and that is reduced by the fact that the engine was in a vacuum, causing the exhaust to spread out. (By contrast, the thrust of the first stage of the Saturn V was 459 PSI, over the area of the engine bell.) Rocket exhaust gases expand much more rapidly after leaving the engine nozzle in a vacuum than in an atmosphere. The effect of an atmosphere on rocket plumes can be easily seen in launches from Earth; as the rocket rises through the thinning atmosphere, the exhaust plumes broaden very noticeably. Rocket engines designed for vacuum operation have longer bells than those designed for use at the earth's surface, but they still cannot prevent this spreading. The lunar module's exhaust gases therefore expanded rapidly well beyond the landing site. Even if they hadn't, a simple calculation will show that the pressure at the end of the descent engine bell was much too low to carve out a crater. However, the descent engines did scatter a considerable amount of very fine surface dust as seen in 16mm movies of each landing, and as Neil Armstrong said as the landing neared ("...kicking up some dust..."). This significantly impaired visibility in the final stages of landing, and many mission commanders commented on it. Photographs do show slightly disturbed dust beneath the descent engine. And finally, the landers were generally moving horizontally as well as vertically until right before landing, so the exhaust would not be focused on any one surface spot for very long, and the compactness of the lunar soil below a thin surface layer of dust also make it virtually impossible for the descent engine to blast out a "crater". (Plait 2002:163-65)

2. The launch rocket produced no visible flame.

*Hydrazine (a fuel) and dinitrogen tetroxide (an oxidizer) were the Lunar Module propellants, chosen for their reliability; they ignite hypergolically –upon contact– without a spark. Hypergolic propellants happen to produce a nearly transparent exhaust. Hypergolic fuels are also used by several space launchers: the core of the American Titan, the Russian Proton, the European Ariane 1 through 4 and the Chinese Long March, and the transparency of their plumes is apparent in many launch photos. The plumes of rocket engines fired in a vacuum spread out very rapidly as they leave the engine nozzle (see above), further reducing their visibility. Finally, most rocket engines use a "rich" mixture to lengthen their lifetimes. While the excess fuel will burn when it contacts atmospheric oxygen, this cannot happen in a vacuum.

3. The rocks brought back from the Moon are identical to rocks collected by scientific expeditions to Antarctica.

*Chemical analysis of the rocks confirms a different oxygen isotopic composition and a surprising lack of volatile elements. There are only a few 'identical' rocks, and those few fell as meteorites after being ejected from the Moon during impact cratering events. The total quantity of these 'Lunar Meteorites' is small compared to the more than 840 lb (380 kg) of lunar samples returned by Apollo (although NASA states that only a couple of pounds were actually picked up by astronauts, the rest being collected automatically). Also the Apollo lunar soil samples chemically matched the Russian luna space probe’s lunar soil samples.

4. The presence of deep dust around the module; given the blast from the landing engine, this should not be present.

*The dust around the module is called regolith and is created by ejecta from asteroid and meteoroid impacts. This dust was several inches thick at the Apollo 11 landing site. The regolith was estimated to be several meters thick and is highly compacted with depth. In an atmosphere, we would expect a rocket engine to blast all the surface dust off the ground for tens of meters. However, dust was only removed from the area directly beneath the Apollo landing engine. The important observation here is "atmosphere". Powerful engines set up turbulence in air which lifts and carries dust readily, far beyond the engine itself. However, in a vacuum, there is no air to disturb. Only the actual engine exhaust's direct pressure on the dust can move it. (Plait 2002:163-65)

5. The flag placed on the surface by the astronauts flapped despite there being no wind on the Moon.

*The astronauts were moving the flag into position, causing motion. Since there is no air on the Moon to provide friction, these movements caused a long-lasting undulating movement seen in the flag. There was a rod extending from the top of the flagpole to hold the flag out for proper display. The fabric's rippled appearance was due to its having been folded during flight and gave it an appearance which could be mistaken for motion in a still photograph. The top supporting rod of the flag was telescopic and the crew of Apollo 11 found they could not fully extend it. Later crews did not fully extend this rod because they liked how it made the flag appear. A viewing of the videotape made during the moonwalk shows that shortly after the astronauts remove their hands from the flag/flagpole, it stops moving and remains motionless. At one point the flag is in view for well over thirty minutes and it remains completely motionless throughout that period (and all similar periods). (See inertia) See the photographs below.

Buzz Aldrin saluting the flag (Note the fingers of Aldrin's right hand can be seen behind his helmet)

Photo taken a few seconds later, Buzz Aldrin's hand is down, head turned toward the camera, the flag is unchanged

6. The Lander weighed 17 tons yet the astronauts feet seem to have made a bigger dent in the dust.

*''The astronauts were much lighter than the Lander, but their boots were also much smaller than the lander's pads. As pressure is what makes the 'dent', and is force over an area, you make the pressure much smaller by making the area a little larger. An example would be driving a car (heavy) on sand, then getting a person (light) to walk on the same surface. You will often find the depth of tracks to be about the same.

7. The F-1 rocket engine used in the first stage of the Saturn V was too unreliable (Kaysing).

''Early problems with the F-1 were solved in the early 1960s. Five F-1 engines were used in the first stage of the Saturn V. Thirteen launches of the Saturn V were made, and no F-1 engine failed on any flight. http://www.astronautix.com/engines/f1.htm

Moon rocks

The extensive payload of moon rocks brought back from the Moon are still analyzed by scientists to this day as some of the only samples returned from another body in the solar system. Hoax proponents have argued that Wernher von Braun's trip to Antarctica two years prior to Apollo missions was to collect lunar meteorite rocks to be used as fake moonrocks. Because von Braun was a former SS officer, it is suggested by hoax proponents (including Aron Ranenhttp://moonhoax.com/site/evidence.html), he would have been susceptible to pressure to agree to the conspiracy in order to protect himself from recriminations over the past.

While it is true that rocks dislodged from the Moon by meteoric impacts occasionally land on Earth, and a handful of rocks believed to be from the moon and Mars have been found in Antarctica, there are only a few of these objects in our collections and the rest of the rocks collected on Earth are entirely different in composition and in their detailed structures from those found and returned from the Moon. Scientists currently identify thirty-nine lunar metorites (lunaites) — far fewer than the number of rocks brought back from lunar missions. (Cooke 2006:67) Furthermore, detailed analysis of the lunar rocks show no evidence of their having been on Earth prior to their return during Apollo. They are also entirely consistent with having been on the Lunar surface since their formation many billions of years ago with the detailed geological context that they were documented to have been sampled from. They are almost entirely composed of heavily shocked rocks consistent with the meteoroid environment on the Moon's surface. Many of them are older than any rocks found to date on Earth.

The first Antarctic meteorite discovery was made by the Australian explorer Douglas Mawson in 1912. http://www.amonline.net.au/geoscience/collections/specimens.htmin A later expedition was mounted in 1969 by a Japanese team. The first United States led team began searches in the mid to late 1970s and discovered more meteorites in 1981, which were identified as being similar to the lunar samples returned by Apollo which in turn are similar to the few grams of material returned from the Moon by Soviet sample return missions (see ANSMET). The total collection of identified Antarctic lunar meteorites presently in the collection at JSC amounts to only about 2.5 kilograms, less than 1% of the 381 kilograms of moonrocks and Regolith returned by Apollo.

The physics of the process is well understood. It is not favourable in orbital dynamics for an object to leave the Moon and impact Earth, the most favourable outcomes are the complete escape of the object (thus entering solar orbit) directly, or a chaotic orbit around the Moon, Earth or both which eventually results in the object being ejected from the system or re-impacting the Moon. The Moon being the least massive object, it becomes a sort of "kink" in Earth's gravity well, and this makes it more likely than Earth to be struck by any incoming object.

Gravity on the moon

The hoax investigation site xenophilia.com says that versions of the Encyclopedia Britannica from the 1960s (pre-Apollo missions) have the neutral point between the earth and the moon 20,520 miles from the Moon. In theory, the site says, "a moon with 1/6 Earth's gravity should have a Neutral Point between 22,078 - 25,193 miles from the Moons surface. Yet after the Apollo missions, Time magazine July 25, 1969 said 'At a point of 43,495 miles from the moon, lunar gravity exerted a force equal to the gravity of the Earth, then some 200,000 miles distant.'" The site says that the 1973 Encyclopedia Britannica gave a new neutral point distance of 39,000 miles. The site says that these anomalies cause problems whichever one is true. A neutral point of 43,495 miles would give the moon 64% of Earth's gravity, which would require much more fuel than was supposedly available in the Apollo missions.

The site fails to note that the flight paths of the Apollo crafts were curved, not straight-line, so the neutral point within their flight paths would be significantly larger than the straight-line neutral point range of 22,000-25,000 miles (for illustration, see the bands of gravitational influence in the diagram accompanying Lagrangian point). The Time article's statement would then be equally as true as the early 1960s Britannica. The statement that the 1973 Britannica reported a different figure is currently unverified.

Individuals featured in the controversy

Major proponents of the moon hoax

• Bill Kaysing (b. 1922), former head of technical publications at Rocketdyne until 1963, where the Saturn V rocket engines were built. Author of We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle.
• David Percy, TV producer and expert in audiovisual technologies and member of the Royal Photographic Society. He is co-author, along with Mary Bennett of Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers (ISBN 1-898541-10-8) and co-producer of What Happened On the Moon?. He is considered the main proponent of the 'whistle blower theory'. http://www.clavius.org/bibcast.html
• Ralph Rene, inventor and 'self taught' engineer. Wrote NASA Mooned America.
• Bart Sibrel, filmmaker and self proclaimed investigative journalist (creator of the documentary film A funny thing happened on the way to the Moon).
• Charles T. Hawkins, author of How America Faked the Moon Landings,
• Philippe Lheureux, French author of Moon Landings: Did NASA Lie?, and Lumières sur la Lune (Lights on the Moon): La NASA a t-elle menti!.
• James M. Collier (d. 1998) American journalist and author, producer of the video Was It Only a Paper Moon? in 1997.
• Dr. Brian O'Leary, American scientist and former astronaut corps member (he left the astronaut corps before being assigned to a mission). He is frequently consulted and quoted by hoax proponents. http://www.clavius.org/oleary.html He is on record as saying that NASA may have faked some moon footage.
• Jack White American photo historian known for his attempt to prove forgery in photos related to the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
• Marcus Allen - British publisher of Nexus magazine says that photographs of the lander would not prove that the US put men on the moon. "Getting to the moon really isn't much of a problem - the Russians did that in 1959 - the big problem is getting people there." [link]
• Aron Ranen directed Did we go? (co-produced with Benjamin Britton and selected for the 2000 "New Documentary Series" Museum of Modern Art, NYC, the 2000 Dallas Video Festival Awards and the 2001 Digital Video Underground Festival in San Francisco). He recieved a Golden Cine Eagle and two fellowships from the National Endowment for Arts.
• William Brian, engineer and author of "Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the U.S. Space Program". Brian says that NASA discovered the moon's gravity was 64% as strong as earth's. He does not dispute that astronauts visited the moon, but rather that their discoveries are being covered up.
• Dr David Groves (who works for Quantech Image Processing) and worked on some of the NASA photos. He says he can pinpoint the exact point at which the artificial light was used. Using the focal length of the camera's lens and an actual boot, he has calculated (using ray-tracing) that the artificial light source is between 24 and 36 cm to the right of the camera [link], [link].

People thought to be involved in the hoax

• Deke Slayton, NASA Chief Astronaut in 1968: Some hoax proponents (for example, the 'NASA Scam'http://www.geocities.com/apollotruth/ website, and Clyde Lewis http://www.clydelewis.com/dis/moondoggle/moondoggle.htm) say that Slayton was one of the primary leaders of the hoax. He visited the film set of "2001 A Space Odyssey", in the UK, which he referred to it as "NASA East", although many could interpret this statement as a joke.
• Wernher Von Braun, NASA rocket scientist and former NAZI SS Officer: Prominent hoax proponents Bart Sibrel http://216.26.168.193/moonmovie/default.asp?ID=8and Aron Ranen (among others) say that Von Braun was complicit in the hoax, and that he travelled to Antarctica two years before Apollo 11 to collect samples to be used as the basis for 'moon rocks'.
• Michael J Tuttle: Some hoax proponents say that he took the job of producing fake photographs in 1994 http://www.geocities.com/fakemoonpics/. Prior to the widespread availability of the internet, only a small subset of the photos currently in existence were seen. Some hoax proponents believe many of the photos were created in the mid 1990s.

Confrontations

Bart Sibrel made repeated demands (over several years) that Aldrin swear an oath on the Bible that he had walked on the Moon, or admit that it was all a hoax. Aldrin pointedly ignored Sibrel, and Sibrel became much more aggressive with Aldrin and several other Apollo astronauts. Sibrel often gained access to the astronauts by claiming to represent organizations that he did not, and by otherwise assuming false identities. In September 2002, he approached Aldrin and a young female relative as they were leaving a building, and called Aldrin "a coward, a liar, and a thief". Aldrin punched Sibrel in the face, saying that he felt forced to defend himself and his companion (Sibrel was about half Aldrin's age and rather taller and larger). Sibrel suffered no permanent injury. In fact, immediately after being hit, he turned to the cameraman and asked, "Did you get that?" The Beverly Hills police investigated the incident, but no charges were filed.

Apollo 14 Lunar Module Pilot Ed Mitchell says that when Sibrel came to his home with History Channel credentials, he (Mitchell) did swear to the veracity of the moon landings on Sibrel's bible.http://insideksc.com/moonshot/apollohoax_two.htm

Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell has also been outspoken in support of the program, and also incurred the wrath of a noted hoax proponent. In the July 25-31, 1996 issue of San José Metro News, Lovell was quoted as saying the following of hoax proponent Bill Kaysing:

"The guy is wacky. His position makes me feel angry. We spent a lot of time getting ready to go to the moon. We spent a lot of money, we took great risks, and it's something everybody in the country ought to be proud of."

Kaysing sued Lovell for libel. In 1997 a judge threw the case out of court (Plait 2002:173).

Stanley Kubrick

It has been claimed, without any evidence, that in early 1968 while , (which includes scenes taking place on the Moon), was in post-production, NASA secretly approached Kubrick to direct the first three Moon landings. In this scenario the launch and splashdown would be real but the spacecraft would have remained in Earth orbit while the fake footage was broadcast as "live" from the lunar journey. Kubrick did hire Frederick Ordway and Harry Lange, both of whom had worked for NASA and major aerospace contractors, to work with him.

During the mission, however, the supposedly Earth orbiting spacecraft was never noticed during the time it was supposed to be hiding in orbit, and the actual spacecraft was seen during its trans-Lunar coast by observers on Earth. Amateur astronomers were able to sight the Apollo spacecraft, exactly where they should have been, during the trans-Lunar coast and amateur radio operators were able to listen-in on the command module in Lunar orbit. http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/space/apollo.html Russian radio telescope observatories not owned or controlled by the USA also tracked the Apollo spacecraft and their transmissions.

Finally, it seems inconsistent with this idea that Kubrick's version of the moon in 2001 did not look very much like the real moon, as the 2001 version has harsh, sharp, rocky features (a style also shared by virtually all astronomical art up until that time), while the real one (i.e. the one in the Apollo footage) has smooth, hilly-looking terrain.

In 2002, William Karel released a spoof documentary film, Dark Side of the Moon, 'exposing' how Kubrick was recruited to fake the Moon landings, and featured interviews with, among others, Kubrick's widow and a number of American statesmen including Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld. It was an elaborate joke: interviews and other footage were presented out of context and in some cases completely staged, with actors playing interviewees who had never existed (and in many cases named after characters from Kubrick's films, just one of many clues included to reveal the joke to the alert viewer). http://www.pointdujour.fr/Va/programmes/prog_fiche.asp?idProg=20965

Deaths of key Apollo personnel

In a television program about the hoax allegations, Fox Entertainment Group listed the deaths of 10 astronauts and of two civilians related to the manned spaceflight program as having possibly been killed as part of a cover-up.

• Ted Freeman (T-38 crash, 1964)
• Elliott See and Charlie Bassett (T-38 accident, 1966)
• Virgil "Gus" Grissom (supposedly an outspoken critic of the Space Program) (Apollo 1 fire, January 1967). His son, Scott Grissom says the accident was a murder [link].
• Ed White (Apollo 1 fire, January 1967)
• Roger Chaffee (Apollo 1 fire, January 1967)
• Ed Givens (car accident, 1967)
• C. C. Williams (T-38 accident, October 1967)
• X-15 pilot Mike Adams (the only X-15 pilot killed in November 1967 during the X-15 flight test program - not a NASA astronaut, but had flown X-15 above 50 miles).
• Robert Lawrence, scheduled to be an Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory pilot who died in a jet crash in December 1967, shortly after reporting for duty to that (later cancelled) program.
• NASA worker Thomas Baron (train crash, 1967 shortly after making accusations before Congress about the cause of the Apollo 1 fire, after which he was fired.) Ruled as suicide. Baron was a quality control inspector who wrote a report critical of the Apollo program and was an outspoken critic after the Apollo 1 fire. Baron and his family were killed as their car was struck by a train at a train crossing [link].
• Lee Gelvani says he almost convinced James Irwin, an Apollo 15 astronaut whom Gelvani referred to as an "informant", to confess about a cover-up having occurred. Irwin was supposedly going to contact Gelvani about it; however he died of a heart attack in 1991, before any such telephone call occurred.

Spacecraft testing and flying high performance jet aircraft can be dangerous, and all but one of the astronaut deaths (Irwin's) were directly related to their rather hazardous job. Two of the astronauts, Mike Adams and Robert Lawrence, had no connection with the civilian manned space program. Astronaut James Irwin had suffered several heart attacks in the years prior to his death. There is no independent confirmation of Gelvani's claim that Irwin was about to come forward. Moreover, if there was a cover-up (that the Apollo 11 and subsequent landings were faked), the cover-up would logically have occurred in 1969 and subsequent years – yet all bar one of the deaths listed above occurred in 1967 or earlier.

Other evidence and issues

NASA book commission and withdrawal

In 2002, NASA commissioned James Oberg $15,000 to write a point-by-point rebuttal of the hoax claims, and, in the same year, cancelled their commission in the face of protests by hoax skeptics that the book would dignify the accusations. Oberg says that he intends (funding allowing) to finish the project. http://www.jamesoberg.com/042003lessonsfake_his.html, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2424927.stm

Attempts to view the landing site

Leonard David published an article on space.comhttp://www.space.com/missionlaunches/missions/apollo15_touchdown_photos_010427.html, http://www.tass-survey.org/richmond/answers/lunar_lander.html#clem on 27 April 2001 showing a picture taken by the Clementine mission which shows a diffuse dark spot at the location of the lunar module Falcon. The resolution is not high enough to see what it is. The evidence was noticed by Misha Kreslavsky, of the Department of Geological Sciences at Brown University, and Yuri Shkuratov of the Kharkov Astronomical Observatory in the Ukraine.

The Daily Telegraph published a story in 2002 (see ref.) saying that European astronomers at the Very Large Telescope (VLT, the most powerful telescope in the world) would use the telescope to view the remains of the Apollo lunar landers. According to the article, Dr Richard West said that his team would take "a high-resolution image of one of the Apollo landing sites". Marcus Allen, a moon hoax believer, pointed out in the story that no images of hardware on the moon would convince him that manned landings had taken place http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/11/24/nmoon24.xml&sSheet=/news/2002/11/24/ixnewstop.html (Allen believes robot missions placed objects there). The article greatly overstates the power of the VLT (it can show details only as small as 130m) and so it is not surprising that no images sharp enough to resolve the lander have been forthcoming[link]. Such photos, if and when they become available, would be the first non-NASA produced images of the site at that definition.

Motives

Several motives have been put forward by hoax proponents for the U.S. government to fake the Moon landings - some recurrent elements are:

1. Distraction - The U.S. government sought to distract the public from the Vietnam War. Conspiracy theorists such as by Bart Sibrel and othershttp://24.73.239.154:8081/moonshot/debunkpg2.htm, say that lunar activities stopped abruptly, with planned missions cancelled, around the same time that the U.S. ceased its involvement in the Vietnam War. However, that that assertion is not chronologically correct.
2. Cold War Prestige - The U.S. government considered it vital that the U.S. win the space race with the USSR. Going to the Moon, if it was possible, would have been risky and expensive. As JFK famously said that we chose to go because it is difficult. They say that despite close monitoring by the Soviet Union, it would have been easier for the US to fake it and consequently guarantee success, than to actually go.
3. Money - NASA raised approximately 30 billion dollars going to the moon. This could have been used to pay off a large number of people, providing significant motivation for complicity.
4. Risk - The available technology at the time was such that the landing might fail if genuinely attempted. Sibrel and others make this claim, without specific substantiation.

Involvement of the Soviet Union

A primary reason for the race to the moon was the Cold War - a competition of worldwide political and economic status and influence between the US and the USSR that dominated the history of the 20th century. The Soviets, with their own competing moon program and a formidable scientific community able to analyze NASA data, could be expected to have cried foul if the USA tried to fake a Moon landing (Plait 2002:173), especially as they themselves had been unsuccessful in their own man-on-the-moon program. They would have scored enormous status in the eyes of the rest of the world by doing so. Conspiracy theorist Ralph Rene says that the USSR was bought off with secret shipments of grain.^{[[Citing sources citation needed]]}

Given the lack of supporting evidence from any Communist bloc countries since the openness and revelations following the collapse of the Soviet Union, this is seen by many as a strong argument against such a hoax. For more on conspiracy theories within the Soviet space program, see Soviet space program conspiracy accusations.

Apollo hoax in popular culture and parody

• In the 1971 James Bond film Diamonds are Forever, Agent 007 steals a moon buggy and drives it off to escape from an enemy compound. It is possible, however, that the moon buggy was being built for NASA (Bond is in a testing facility) and the film therefore depicts a test site made to look like the lunar surface, as was often done for Apollo training missions.
• In the 1992 movie Sneakers, the character “Mother,” played by Dan Aykroyd mentions “Just like they faked the Apollo moon landing.”
• On an episode of Fox TV's Family Guy, a flashback shows the ending of filming the hoax, with Neil Armstrong walking out of the studio and a pedestrian seeing him. When the pedestrian asks why he is not in space, Neil Armstrong kills him. In another episode, Peter says that his 'healing powers' were a fake, "like the moon landings".
• On an Roswell That Ends Well, an episode of Futurama, when the crew is mysteriously flung back in time to 1947, President Truman requests that Zoidberg, an alien, be taken to Area 51 for study. When informed that Area 51 is the location for the faked moon landing, he orders that NASA be invented and get to work.
• The video game Duke Nukem 3D contains a level (Episode 3 Level 5) with a motion picture studio containing a lunar landscape set.
• Worms 3D, a video game by UK Software developers Team17, contains a level depicting a movie sound stage with moon landscape and a lunar landing module.
• One level in Midway's remake of the classic arcade shooter, Area 51, takes place on a moon landing set, complete with a cardboard-cutout astronaut, fake LEM, lunar lander, and lunar rover.
• The [Men From Earth] song "I Faked The Moon Landing" tells an imaginary story of someone's deathbed confession to assisting with the hoax. Among the many references in the song to popular hoax accusations is the line "that wasn't Buzz next to the LEM / just a guy who looked like him."
• The group Looper have a song called "Dave the Moon Man" on their album, Up A Tree. It features a character who doesn't believe in the moon landings and repeats several of the arguments mentioned here.
• The video for the Rammstein song "Amerika" depicts the band on a movie set wearing NASA suits and a theme of the video is the faking of the moon landing.
• On an episode of Friends, Joey asks Phoebe for a good lie, and she responds, "Okay, how about the whole 'man-landing-on-the-moon' thing? I mean, you can see the strings, people!!"
• The book (published in April 2005) by Christopher Wunderlee tells the story of an astrophysicist's role in assisting NASA in faking the lunar landings. The book details the implications of 'knowing the truth' and the massive cover-up.
• A 2006 commercial for Red Bull features astronauts who, after drinking Red Bull, "have wings" and are unable to actually set foot on the moon. They are instructed by Houston to return to Earth so the scene can be shot in a studio instead.
• On an episode of The PJs, Thurston says that if people can fake a moon landing, anything's possible.
• In the movie studio in , there is a fake moon landing set in one of the warehouses.
• Also in the video game there is a "caller" on one of the radio stations on the game said "Of course we never landed on the moon, it was just a big hoax".
• On the June 7, 2006 edition of The Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert said "Tonight's guest is a pioneer in Mars exploration. Hopefully tonight he'll explain how they faked a space landing there too." This was followed by laughter from the audience.
• In the movie , as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are in Area 52 they browse the videotape shelf, one of the videotapes searched had "MOON LANDING DRESS REHEARSAL".

See also

• Capricorn One, fictional movie about a Mars landing hoax
• Dark Side of the Moon (also known as Opération Lune)
• Jim Lovell - was unsuccessfully sued by Kaysing for libel.
• Soviet space program conspiracy accusations
• Nazi Moon base

Notes

References

• Newsweek (1969). Where are they Now? the Flat Earthers, vol 73, Jan 13, 1969, pg 8.

• Robert J. Schadewald (1980). "The Flat-out Truth: Earth Orbits? Moon Landings? A Fraud! Says This Prophet", Science Digest, vol 83, July 1980, pg. 58-63. (available [online])
• John Noble Wilford (1969). "A Moon Landing? What Moon Landing?", New York Times, December 18, 1969, p. 30.

• The Daily Telegraph (2002). World's biggest telescope to prove Americans really walked on Moon, The Daily Telegraph, November 24, 2002 [link]

External links

• [National Geographic: Conspiracy Moon Landing]

Television specials

Google videos

• [NASA - Apollo 11 How did they do it?] 8 Min
• [What happened on the Moon? Part 1] 2hr 11 min
• [What happened on the Moon? Part 2 & 3] 1hr

Hoax allegation links

• [Conspiration.co.uk]
• A group forum website [suggesting that there was a religious motive behind the moon hoax]
• [Can One man prove we went to the moon in 1969?] Documentary by Aron Ranen
• Bart Sibrel is the producer of ["Astronauts Gone Wild,"] a documentary confronting nine Apollo astronauts with his accusations that the moon landings were not authentic. Includes footage of the verbal assault on Mr. Aldrin and his physical assault on Mr. Sibrel. His other videos also try to prove the moon landings were faked.
• [Bill Kaysing]
• [Ralph Rene] is author of "NASA Mooned America," the most popular book on the moon hoax allegation.
• [Moon Wide Web]
• [Photo analysis by Jack White]
• [The Apollo Hoax] Presents a clearinghouse of what the authors say is "evidence proving the moon landings were faked".
• [The Apollo 11 Hoax Conspiracy] Evidence, Motives and photos to argue that the landings were faked.

Hoax rebuttal links

• [The Bad Astronomy Web site] is run by astronomer Phil Plait
• [Who mourns for Apollo?] Richard Hoagland's Moon Hoax rebuttal page.
• [Point by point rebuttal of hoax allegations]
• [Clavius website] established to debunk the hoax arguments
• [Lunar reflection analysis supporting the presence of retroreflectors]
• [A rebuttal to one typical moonlanding hoax webpage]
• [Humans Walked on the Moon]
• [Did We Land On the Moon?]
• [Did we land? (different from above)]
• [Straight Dope]
• [Snopes.com on fake footage]
• [Are Apollo Moon Photos Fake?]
• [HardyArt]
• [NASA Stooge]
• [Did we really land on the moon?] by Michael Shermer
• [The great Moon hoax] NASA about the rocks

Neutral links

• [BBC-Did we land men on the moon?]
• [Xenophilia - a thorough examination from a neutral perspective]
• [Moon Landing Hoax]
• [About the lunar retroreflector experiment]
• [McDonald Laser Ranging Station] that bounces light signals off the retroreflectors
• [Telescope to challenge moon doubters]
• [BBC news report: Nasa pulls Moon hoax book]
• [Wired artice The Wrong Stuff] Not quite neutral, but reports both sides
• [NASA site explaining lunar surface shadows]
• [Crank.net list of websites about Apollo] mostly cranky but some parodies and anti-crank

Source material

• [The Project Apollo Archive] – Collection of publicly released Apollo photography
• [Clip of Apollo 11 press conference]
• [The Apollo Image Atlas] at [The Lunar and Planetary Institute] – Thumbnails of images taken during the Apollo Saturn missions
• [Description by ground station engineers at Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station of receiving images from Apollo 11 from the Moon]
• [Apollo Lunar Surface Journal]
• [Parkes radio telescope and Apollo 11]
• [Video of Nixon talking to the Apollo 11 astronauts]
• [Aldrin hopping, television]
• [Aldrin hopping, movie camera]
• [Apollo 15 dropping a hammer and a feather]
• [Gagarin quote about seeing stars]
• [Seeing stars in space]
• [Flat Earth Society] (reprinted from 1980 Science Digest article)
• [Telescopic Tracking of the Apollo Lunar Missions]
• [Space debris] shows photo of water dump from video screen
• [Apollo 15 landing site]
• [Apollo 11 Tapes] Search for original Apollo 11 EVA tapes, television details
• [Technical drawings of Apollo capsule and Lunar Module]

Spoofs

• [Parody with The Clangers]
• [The Mad Revisionist] - This web site says the Moon Landings are a hoax because the moon does not exist. See also [link]

 

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