Apollo Moon Landing hoax accusations

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The Apollo Moon landing hoax accusations are a set of allegations that some or all elements of the Apollo Moon landings were faked by NASA and possibly members of other involved organizations. A number of groups and individuals have advanced alternate historical narratives which tend, to varying degrees, to include the following common elements:

• The Apollo astronauts did not land on the Moon;
• NASA and possibly others intentionally deceived the public into believing the landing[s] did occur by manufacturing, destroying, or tampering with evidence, including photos, telemetry tapes, transmissions, and rock samples;
• NASA and possibly others continue to actively participate in the conspiracy to this day.

According to a 1999 poll conducted by the The Gallup Organization, 6 percent of the public believes the landing was faked, while what Gallup termed an "overwhelming majority", some 89 percent, did not.^[1] The hoax claims are widely dismissed as baseless by mainstream scientists, technicians and engineers, as well as by NASA.

Contents 1 Origins and history 2 Predominant hoax claims 2.1 Suggested motives for a hoax 3 Public opinions 4 Critics' comments 4.1 Hoax accusations as 'conspiracy theories' 4.2 The burden of proof 4.3 The scientific method 5 Hoax claims examined 5.1 Missing data 5.2 Technological capability of USA compared to the USSR 5.3 Photographs and films 5.4 Ionizing radiation and heat 5.5 Transmissions 5.6 Mechanical issues 5.7 Moon rocks 5.8 Deaths of key Apollo personnel 5.9 Gravity on the Moon 5.10 Involvement of the Soviet Union 6 Individuals featured in the controversy 6.1 Major hoax proponents and proposals 6.1.1 Bill Kaysing 6.1.2 Bart Sibrel 6.1.3 William Brian 6.1.4 David Percy 6.1.5 Ralph Rene 6.2 Other proponents 6.3 People accused of involvement in the hoax 7 Other evidence and issues 7.1 NASA book commission and withdrawal 7.2 Academic work 7.3 Attempts to view the landing site 8 Apollo hoax in popular culture and parody 8.1 In print 8.2 On film 8.3 On television 8.4 In video games 8.5 In music 8.6 Other references 9 See also 10 Notes 11 References 12 External links 12.1 Television specials 12.2 Google videos 12.3 Hoax allegation links 12.4 Hoax rebuttal links 12.5 Neutral links 12.6 Source material 12.7 Spoofs

[edit] Origins and history

In his book A Man on the Moon, published in 1994, Andrew Chaikin mentions that, at the time of Apollo 8's lunar-orbit mission, in December 1968, such conspiratorial stories were already in circulation.^{[citation needed]}

Charles K. Johnson, president of the International Flat Earth Research Society, challenged the idea that men had landed on the Moon, claiming that the landings were "faked in Hollywood studios", with science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke writing the script.^[2][3]

The first book dedicated to the subject, Bill Kaysing's self-published We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle was released in 1974, two years after the Apollo Moon flights had ceased.

[edit] Predominant hoax claims

A number of different versions of the hoax have been advanced. The various claims do not present a complete narrative of how the alleged hoax could have been perpetrated, but instead focus on perceived gaps or inconsistencies in the historical record of the missions. Several of these ideas and their most readily identifiable proponents are described below:

1. Complete hoax—The idea that the entire human landing program was faked. Various sources argue that the technology to send men to the Moon was insufficient and/or that the Van Allen radiation belts made such a trip impossible.^{[citation needed]}
2. Partial hoax / Unmanned landings— Bart Sibrel argues that Apollo 11 and subsequent astronauts had faked their orbit around the Moon and their walk on its surface by trick photography, and that they never got more than halfway to the Moon. A subset of this proposal is advocated by those who concede the existence of laser mirrors and other observable human-made objects on the Moon. Marcus Allen represented this argument when he said "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 focuses around NASA sending robot missions because radiation levels in space were lethal to humans. Another variant on this is the idea that NASA and its contractors did not recover quickly enough from the Apollo 1 fire, and so all the early Apollo missions were faked, with Apollo 14 or 15 being the first authentic mission.^[4]
3. Manned landings, with backup stagings— Dr. Brian O'Leary once suggested that, as a hypothetical situation, NASA could have falsified some portion of the video and photographs of the Moon landings to replace those damaged or lost during the actual mission. Hoax proponent David Percy apparently took O'Leary's hypothetical as a sincere belief. O'Leary has since reasserted the idea as merely hypothetical.^[5]
4. Manned landings, with cover-ups—William Brian and others believe that, while astronauts did land on the Moon, they covered up what they found, whether it was gravitational anomalies, alien artifacts, or alien encounters.^[6] Phillip Lheureux, in Lumieres sur la Lune (Lights on the Moon), said that astronauts did land on the Moon, but that, in order to prevent other nations from benefiting from scientific information in the real photos, NASA published fake images.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Suggested motives for a hoax

Several motives are given by hoax proponents for the U.S. government to fake the Moon landings.

1. Distraction—The U.S. government sought to distract the public from the Vietnam War.^{[citation needed]}
2. Cold War Prestige—The U.S. government considered it vital that the U.S. win the space race against the Soviet Union. Going to the Moon, if it had been possible, would have been risky and expensive (though John F. Kennedy famously said that we chose to go because it was difficult). Despite close monitoring by the Soviet Union, hoax proponents argue that it would have been easier for the U.S. to fake it, and consequently guarantee success, than for the U.S. actually to go. (Kaysing 2002:29).
3. Money—NASA raised approximately $30 billion to go to the Moon. Hoax proponents hypothesize that this could have been used to pay off a large number of people, providing significant motivation for complicity. (Kaysing 2002:71).
4. Risk—The available technology at the time was such that the landing might fail if genuinely attempted. This argument assumes that the problems early in the space program were insurmountable, even by a technology team fully motivated and funded to fix the problems. (Kaysing 2002:26-40).

[edit] Public opinions

Around the time of Project Apollo, while not asking about whether the landings were faked specifically, soon after the missions, Knight Newspapers found that more than 30 percent of respondents to their poll were suspicious of NASA's trips to the Moon.^[7]

According to a 1999 Gallup poll, about 6 percent of the population of the United States has doubts that the Apollo astronauts walked on the Moon. (Five percent had no opinion, while 89 percent believe the landings took place.)^[1] It asked, "thinking 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."^[8] (Plait 2002:156) "Although, if taken literally, 6 percent 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." A 1995 Time/CNN poll also found that 6 percent of the people believe in a hoax (Plait 2002:156). Fox television's 2001 TV special "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Really Land on the Moon?", airing to 15 million viewers,^{[citation needed]} 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?".^[9] Fox said roughly 20 percent of the public had doubts about the authenticity of the Apollo program after the show.^{[citation needed]}James Oberg, an American journalist who reports on NASA (and has worked for them), 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.^[10] "It’s not just a few crackpots and their new books and Internet conspiracy sites," Oberg said in 1999. "There are entire subcultures within the U.S., and substantial cultures around the world, that strongly believe the landing was faked. I’m told that this is official dogma still taught in schools in Cuba, plus wherever else Cuban teachers have been sent (such as Sandanista [sic] Nicaragua and Angola)."^[11]

The International Society for Krishna Consciousness has published articles on its Web site in favor of hoax accusations, in part because it conflicts with their belief that the Moon is farther away from the Earth than the Sun is.^[12][13]

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.^{[citation needed]}.

[edit] Critics' comments

[edit] Hoax accusations as 'conspiracy theories'

Hoax accusations have been characterized as conspiracy theories since believers claim that conspirators in the possession of secret knowledge are misleading and/or have misled the public in pursuit of a hidden agenda — namely, hiding that the Moon landings were faked.^{[citation needed]} The hoax accusers themselves sometimes reject that characterization^{[citation needed]}. The 2001 Fox special, which raised many of the standard hoax proponent questions and allowed NASA representatives to respond to them, used that term in its title (Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?).

The Apollo Moon landing hoax accusations have been the subject of debunking and, according to the debunkers, have been sufficiently falsified, although hoax proponents do not accept this, saying that 'debunkers' focus on claims they do not make^{[citation needed]}, and ignore the most compelling evidence^{[citation needed]}. An article in the German magazine Der Spiegel places the Moon hoax in the context of other well-known 20th century conspiracy theories which it describes as "the rarefied atmosphere 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."^[14]

[edit] The burden of proof

Hoax critics have claimed that a key assumption of hoax proponents is that the burden of proof for the Apollo landings lies entirely with NASA. Critics have countered that in formal rhetoric the burden actually lies upon those who propose a new hypothesis, in this case, the hoax.^[15] According to Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy Web site,^[16] hoax theorists, or pseudoscientists, often focus on a variety of technical minutiae with the expectation that hoax critics should research and address any questions that the hoax proponents raise. Plait says that failure to address a given question is taken by the hoax theorists as proof of some aspect of the Moon landing hoax.

[edit] The scientific method

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

Real landing 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 hoax.

In this type of evaluation, the question is not "Can every detail about the Moon landing be explained?" but "Does the 'hoax hypothesis' better fit observable facts than does the 'real landing hypothesis', and is it more self-consistent?"^[17] The lack of narrative consistency in the hoax hypothesis occurs because hoax accounts vary from proponent to proponent. The 'real landing' hypothesis is a single story, since it comes from a single source, but there are many hoax hypotheses, each of which addresses a specific aspect of the Moon landing. The evidence regarding the Moon landings is met by hoax believers with skepticism, who label the NASA story as unconvincing propaganda made by the establishment to cover up the alleged lie.^{[citation needed]}

Hoax proponents do not see a lack of narrative cohesion as a problem. Film director Bart Sibrel said, for example, that because the Apollo Moon landings have failed to follow a central tenet of the scientific method, and have not 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."^[18]

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.^[19] Scientists have reflected 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,^[20] the presence of similar mirrors can also be explained by such things as secret American robotic missions whose express aim was to place retroreflectors on the Moon to corroborate that part of the Apollo missions, and therefore the Lunar Ranging Experiments do not provide evidence for Apollo.^[14][21] This kind of iterative exchange involving elaborate cover-ups explaining the evidence is a common feature of the arguments made by hoax proponents (another example of this kind of argument is the hoax proponents' explanations for the Moon rocks brought back to Earth by the Apollo missions).^{[neutrality disputed]}

[edit] Hoax claims examined

A number of the predominant claims of the hoax proponents are treated below:

[edit] Missing data

1. Blueprints and design and development drawings of the machines involved, telemetry tapes, the original high quality video of the Apollo 11 Moonwalk, original tapes containing telemetry and video from the other five missions and other key documents that would help to validate the missions are missing.^[22] For more information see Apollo program missing tapes.

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 existed.^[23]

• The website above only states that the Apollo 11 telemetry tapes are missing — and not those of Apollo 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17.^[24] For technical reasons, the Apollo 11 Lunar Module carried a Slow-scan television (SSTV) camera. In order to be broadcast to regular television, a scan conversion has to be done. The radio telescope at Parkes Observatory in Australia was in position to receive the telemetry from the Moon at the time of the Apollo 11 Moonwalk.^[25] Parkes had a larger antenna than NASA's antenna in Australia, so it got the best picture. It also got a better picture than NASA's antenna at Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex. This direct TV signal, along with telemetry data, was recorded onto one-inch fourteen-track analog tape there. A crude, real-time scan conversion of the SSTV signal was done in Australia before it was broadcast around the world. The original SSTV broadcast had better detail and contrast than the scan-converted pictures.^[26] It is this tape made in Australia before the scan conversion which is missing. Tapes or films of the scan-converted pictures exist and are available. Later Apollo missions did not use SSTV, and their video is also available. At least some of the telemetry tapes from the ALSEP scientific experiments left on the Moon (which ran until 1977) still exist, according to Dr. Williams.^{[citation needed]}

• 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 ongoing.^[27] Goddard was storing 35,000 new tapes per year in 1967,^[28] even before the lunar landings.

• On November 1, 2006 Cosmos Magazine reported that some one-hundred data tapes recorded in Australia during the Apollo 11 mission had been discovered in a small marine science laboratory in the main physics building at the Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia. One of the old tapes has been sent to NASA for analysis. It is not known if the slow-scan television images are on any of the tapes.^[29]

b) Hoax proponents say that blueprints for the Apollo Lunar Module, rover and associated equipment are missing.^[30]

• There are some diagrams of the Lunar Module and Moon buggy on the NASA web site as well as on the pro hoax web site Xenophilia.com.^[30] Grumman appears to have destroyed most of the documentation.^[31][32]
• Despite the questions concerning the existence or location of the LEM blueprints, an unused flight-worthy LEM is on exhibit at the Cradle of Aviation Museum,^[33] LM-13. The Lunar Module designated LM-13 would have landed on the Moon during the Apollo 18 mission, but was instead put into storage when the mission was canceled: it has since been restored and put on display. Other unused Lunar Modules are on display: LM-2 at the National Air and Space Museum, LM-9 at Kennedy Space Center, and LM-16 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.^[34]

• Four mission-worthy Lunar Rovers were built, but three were carried to the Moon on Apollo 15, 16, and 17, and left there. After Apollo 18 was canceled (see Canceled Apollo missions), the other lunar rover was used for spare parts for the lunar rovers on the upcoming Apollo 15 through 17 missions. The only lunar rovers on display are test vehicles, trainers, and models.^[35] The "Moon buggies" were built by Boeing (the New Encyclopedia Britannica Micropedia, 2005, vol 2, p 319).^[36] The 221-page operation manual for the Lunar Rover contains some detailed drawings,^[37] although not the design blueprints.

c) Bart Sibrel said "In my research at NASA I uncovered, deep in the archives, one mislabeled reel from the Apollo 11, first mission, to the Moon. What is on the reel and on the label are completely different. I suspect an editor put the wrong label on the tape 33 years ago and no reporter ever had the motive to be as thorough as I. It contains an hour of rare, unedited, color television footage that is dated by NASA’s own atomic clock three days into the flight. Identified on camera are Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, and Michael Collins. They are doing multiple takes of a single shot of the mission, from which only about ten seconds was ever broadcast. Because I have uncovered the original unedited version, mistakenly not destroyed, the photography proves to be a clever forgery. Really! It means they did not walk on the Moon!"

• According to Clavius.org: "Consulting the transcripts and the unedited video, it is clear that the astronauts are practicing for their upcoming live telecast, for which they had not been able to rehearse ahead of time."^[38]

[edit] Technological capability of USA compared to the USSR

At the time of Apollo, the Soviet Union had five times more manned hours in space than the US. They had achieved:

1. First manmade satellite in orbit (October 1957, Sputnik 1).
2. First man in space (April 1961, Vostok 1).
3. First man to orbit the Earth (April 1961, Vostok 1).
4. First to have two spacecraft in orbit at the same time (though it was not a space rendezvous, as frequently described) (August 1962, Vostok 3 and Vostok 4).
5. First crew of three astronauts on board one spacecraft (October 1964, Voskhod 1).
6. First spacewalk (EVA) (March 1965, Voskhod 2).

On January 27, 1967, the three astronauts aboard Apollo 1 died in a fire on the launch pad during training. The fire was triggered by a spark in the pure oxygen atmosphere used in the spacecraft test, and fueled by a significant quantity of combustible material within the spacecraft. The congressional inquiry found that "the entire Apollo program was in shambles and it was a miracle no one was killed sooner"^{[citation needed]}. Two years later all of the problems were declared fixed. Bart Sibrel believes that the accident led NASA to conclude that the only way to 'win' the space race was to fake the landings.^[39] In any case, the first manned Apollo flight, Apollo 7, occurred in October, 1968, 21 months after the fire.

• NASA and others say that these achievements by the Soviets are not as impressive as the simple list implies; that a number of these 'firsts' were mere stunts that did not advance the technology significantly, or at all; and that they were built on a dangerous program of ballistic rocket research, not a gradual program aimed to get to the Moon.^[40]
• A close examination of the many flight missions reveal many problems, risks, and near-catastrophes for both the Soviet and American programs. A negative 'first' for the Soviets was the first in-flight fatality, in April 1967, three months after the Apollo I fire, as Soyuz 1 crash-landed. Despite that disaster, the Soyuz program continued, after a lengthy interval to solve design problems, as with the Apollo program.
• Before the first Earth-orbiting Apollo flight, the USSR had accumulated 534 hours of manned spaceflight whereas the US had accumulated over 1,992 hours of manned spaceflight. By the time of Apollo 11, the US's lead was much wider than that (see List of human spaceflights, 1960s.)
• Most of the 'firsts' above were done by the US within a year afterwards (sometimes within weeks). In 1965 the US started to achieve many 'firsts' which were important steps in a mission to the Moon. See List of Space Exploration Milestones, 1957-1969 for a more complete list of achievements by both the US and USSR. The USSR never developed a successful rocket capable of a Moon landing mission — their N1 rocket failed on all four launch attempts. They never tested a lunar lander on a manned mission.^[41]

[edit] Photographs and films

Main article: Examination of Apollo moon photos

Moon hoax proponents devote a substantial portion of their efforts examining NASA photos. They point to various issues with photographs and films apparently taken on the Moon. Experts in photography (even those unrelated to NASA) respond that the anomalies, while sometimes counterintuitive, are in fact precisely what one would expect from a real Moon landing, and contrary to what would occur with manipulated or studio imagery. Hoax proponents also state that "whistleblowers" may have deliberately manipulated the NASA photos in hope of exposing NASA. However, this raises the unanswered questions of why these whistleblowers do not speak now, and what would prevent a "whistleblower" from manipulating a real Moon photo to look fake.

See Examination of Apollo moon photos for more detail on these challenges and responses:

1. Crosshairs appear to be behind objects.

• Overexposure causes white objects to bleed into the black areas on the film.

2. Crosshairs are sometimes misplaced or rotated.

• Popular versions of photos are sometimes cropped or rotated for artistic impact.

3. The quality of the photographs is implausibly high.

• There are many, many poor quality photographs taken by the Apollo astronauts. NASA chose to publish only the best examples.

4. There are no stars in any of the photos.

• The sun was shining. Cameras were set for daylight exposure. (Plait 2002:158-60).

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

• Shadows on the Moon are complicated by uneven ground, wide angle lens distortion, and light reflected from the Earth, and lunar dust. (Plait 2002:167-72).

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

• Shots were not identical, just similar. Background objects were mountains many miles away. Without an atmosphere to obscure distant objects, it can be difficult to tell the relative distance and scale of terrain features.^[42]

7. The number of photographs taken is implausibly high. Up to one photo per 50 seconds.

• Simplified gear with fixed settings permitted two photographs a second. Many were taken immediately after each other.

8. The photos contain artifacts like the two seemingly matching 'C's on a rock and on the ground.

• The "C"-shaped objects are most likely printing imperfections not in the original film from the camera.

9. A resident of Perth, Australia, with the pseudonym Una Ronald, said she saw a Coke bottle in the frame.

• No such newspaper reports or recordings can be verified. Una Ronald's existence is claimed by only one source.

10. The book Moon Shot contains an obvious composite photograph of Shepard playing golf on the Moon with another astronaut.

• 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.

11. There appear to be "hot spots" in some photographs that look like a huge spotlight was used at a close distance.

• Moon dust reflects light in a manner similar to street signs or wet grass.^[43]

[edit] 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, 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.^[44] 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 (which used on-board film development processes) 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.^[45][46]

[edit] Transmissions

Challenges and responses

1. The lack of a more than two-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 two 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.^[47]

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. In fact, delays in getting the Moonwalk started meant that Parkes did cover almost the entire Apollo 11 Moonwalk.^[48]

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.^[49] See alsoThe 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.^[50]

[edit] Mechanical issues

Challenges and responses

1. No blast crater appeared from the landing (Kaysing 2002:75).

• 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 (Lunar Module ascent stage) 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. 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. Bart Sibrel said "The wind was probably caused by intense air-conditioning used to cool the astronauts in their lightened, un-circulated space suits. The cooling systems in the backpacks would have been removed to lighten the load not designed for Earth’s six times heavier gravity, otherwise they might have fallen over".

• 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 air conditioning units that were part of the astronauts' spacesuits could not have worked in an environment of no atmosphere. There is no way to dissipate heat without being able to tramsit energy through an atmosphere. ^{[citation needed]}

• The space suits had no air conditioning units. Excess heat was dissipated through radiative cooling.

[edit] Moon rocks

Hoax proponents argue that Wernher von Braun's trip to Antarctica in 1967 (two years prior to the Apollo missions) was in order to study and / or collect lunar meteorite rocks to be used as fake Moon rocks. Because von Braun was a former SS officer,^[51] it is suggested by hoax proponents (including Aron Ranen),^[23] he would have been susceptible to pressure to agree to the conspiracy in order to protect himself from recriminations over the past. NASA does not provide much information about why it said the MSFC Director and three others were in Antarctica at that time, but said that it was "to look into environmental and logistic factors that might relate to the planning of future space missions, and hardware".^[52] Even today, NASA continues to send teams to work in parts of Antarctica that are very dry and mimic the conditions on other planets such as Mars and the Moon.

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. 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 and other places, 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 meteorites — orders of magnitude fewer than the number of rocks brought back from lunar missions. (Cooke 2006:67) Furthermore, detailed analysis of the lunar rocks shows 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.^[53] 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 percent of the 381 kilograms of Moon rocks and regolith returned by Apollo. The physics of impact ejection and transfer of lunar material to Earth is reasonably well understood.^[54]

On a related note, Kaysing asked:

Why was there no mention of gold, silver, diamonds, or other precious metals on the Moon? It was never discussed by the press or astronauts.(Kaysing 2002:8)

Geologists realize that gold and silver deposits on Earth are the result of the action of ground water concentrating the precious metals into veins of ore. Since even in 1969 ground water was known to be absent on the Moon, no geologist would bother discussing the possibility of finding these on the Moon. Likewise, diamonds are a compressed form of carbon, and were not expected to be present on the Moon.

[edit] 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 Ivan "Gus" Grissom (Apollo 1 fire, January 1967). His son, Scott Grissom said the accident was a murder.^[55]
• 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 during the X-15 flight test program in November 1967 - 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 canceled) 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.^[55][56]
• Lee Gelvani said 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.

All but one of the astronaut deaths (Irwin's) were directly related to their job with NASA or the Air Force. 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. All but one of the deaths occurred at least one or two years before Apollo 11 and the subsequent flights.

[edit] Gravity on the Moon

The hoax investigation site xenophilia.com claims that versions of the Encyclopædia 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 claims, "a Moon with 1/6 Earth's gravity should have a Neutral Point between 22,078 - 25,193 miles from the Moon's 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 claims that the 1973 Encyclopædia Britannica gave a new neutral point distance of 39,000 miles.

• They appear to be confusing the Moon's sphere of influence and the point at which the Moon's gravitation and Earth's are equal. NASA were concerned with the Moon's sphere of influence, which starts around 40,000 miles from the Moon, and marks the point where the Moon's gravity has more influence on the spacecraft's trajectory than the Earth's. The 'Apollo 16 Flight Journal'^[57] comments on this: "we're scheduled to cross that mythical line known as the lunar Sphere of Influence, the point of which we begin calculating the increasing of the lunar gravity on the spacecraft. Our displays here in Mission Control shortly after that point are generally switched over to Moon reference from Earth reference. The velocities that we have been watching decrease steadily up to now, will then begin to increase as the spacecraft is accelerated toward the Moon.." The point where the lunar gravity and Earth's gravity are equal is around 25,000 miles, so there's no discrepancy to explain: they appear to be measuring different things.

• Spacecraft from several nations have traveled to or past the Moon,^[58][59][60] so unless all their space programs are part of the conspiracy, at least one should have told us by now if the mass of the Moon was incorrect. Similarly, if Lunar gravity was four times as high as generally believed, it would be demonstrable on Earth in unexpectedly large tidal motion. The Surveyor program Moon landers had an engine thrust of 150 pounds and their landing weight was approximately 660 pounds on Earth. Five of these spacecraft soft-landed on the Moon in 1966-68. If the Moon's surface gravity was much larger than one-sixth that Earth's, the spacecraft would not be able to soft-land on the Moon.

• The surface gravity of a Moon is not directly related to the position the neutral point between it and the planet it orbits. The neutral point between the Earth and Moon depends on the mass of the Earth, the mass of the Moon, and the current distance between them — which varies between the apogee of 405,500 km and perigee of 363,300 km, due to the Moon's eccentricity of 0.055. In contrast, the surface gravity of the Moon depends only on the gravitational constant, the mass of the Moon, and the radius of the Moon (see the equation at surface gravity). The surface gravity does not depend on the distance to Earth or the Earth's mass, so the neutral point is irrelevant to the Moon's surface gravity. The Moon's surface gravity is very close to one-sixth that of Earth's. (Seeds 1995:378)

• 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. The 1966 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia (volume 13, page 650) gives the Moon's surface gravity as one-sixth that of Earth's.

[edit] 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 said that the USSR was bought off with secret shipments of grain.^{[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.^{[citation needed]} For more on conspiracy theories within the Soviet space program, see Soviet space program conspiracy accusations.

Bart Sibrel said, in response, that "the Soviets did not have the capability to track deep spacecraft until late in 1972, immediately after which, the last three Apollo missions were abruptly canceled."^[61]

• However, the Soviet Union had been sending unmanned spacecraft to the Moon since 1959.^[62] and "during 1962, deep space tracking facilities were introduced at IP-15 in Ussuriisk and IP-16 in Evpatoria (Crimean Peninsula), while Saturn communication stations were added to IP-3, 4 and 14",^[63] the latter having a 100 million km range.^[64] This does not prove they could track foreign spacecraft, but as they had the ability to track their own it is likely they could at least receive radio transmissions from Apollo.

• Apollo 18 and Apollo 19 were canceled on September 2, 1970, due to budget cuts by the US Congress.^[65] Apollo 20 had been canceled earlier on January 4, 1970.^[66] (See Canceled Apollo missions.)

[edit] Individuals featured in the controversy

[edit] Major hoax proponents and proposals

Some of the more notable proponents of the hoax are:

[edit] Bill Kaysing

Bill Kaysing (1922-2005) graduated from the University of Southern California with a B.A. in English and, from 1957, worked in technical publications at Rocketdyne,^[67] the company which built the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V rocket. Reportedly described by his daughter as "a self-supporting vagabond", Kaysing left Rocketdyne in 1963 for a new life as a freelance writer, producing books on such subjects as cheap eating and living on houseboats.^[68]

In 1974 Kaysing released his self-published book We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle (Kaysing 2002) (Plait 2002:157), beginning the true Moon hoax movement.

Kaysing (and others, including Sibrel) claim that, according to that a Rocketdyne company report from the late 1950s,^[69] the chance of a successful landing on the Moon was calculated to be 0.0017 (1 in 600). Kaysing claimed in particular that the F-1 rocket engine used in the first stage of the Saturn V was too unreliable:

... the Air Force had 13 consecutive failures with the Atlas D, E, and F in the summer and fall of 1963. This was at the time when the F-1, a much larger engine, was under intensive development. My point is this: if the Atlas couldn't achieve reliability after almost a decade of development, how could a far larger and more powerful rocket engine be successful? (Kaysing 2002:9)

Kaysing also said that if five F-1 engines had actually been used, "it would have been a most spectacular fire bomb." (Kaysing 2002:37), instead claiming that seventy-two hours before the launch of a Saturn V, B-1 rocket engines (more reliable but lower thrust) were put within the large F-1 engines. (Kaysing 2002:64)

However, while F-1 development was problematic, particularly due to combustion instability,^[70] the problems were solved in the early 1960s,^[71] and by June 1965 it had been test-fired 1,000 times.^[72] No 'B-1' engine was ever built, unless a NASA conspiracy managed to build it in secret after failing to make the F-1 work in the open. The development of the Atlas booster was similarly troubled, but records do not show the thirteen consecutive failures of the Atlas that Kaysing claims.^[73] It was later used to launch Mercury flights into space with a 100 percent success record, and also launched numerous satellites and unmanned space probes: the Atlas-F mentioned had 22 failures, but also 79 successful launches^[74]

Kaysing claimed that the supposedly Moon-bound Apollo astronauts didn't even go into orbit: the Saturn V changed course during the launch, dropped the crew in the South polar sea, and then crashed. Communications traffic would be faked at NASA Greenbelt in Washington DC, and the lunar television broadcasts would be filmed at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, California, or perhaps Area 51 in Nevada.^[75] He suggests a "coalition between governments at the highest level" to conceal, amongst other things, the Moon hoax.^[75]

Kaysing claimed that two NASA engineers admitted that the landing was a hoax:

I received a call from a Margaret Hardin of Portland, Oregon. She said that she had met a hooker in Reno in 1970 who admitted to her that two NASA engineers told her the Moon trips were a hoax. (Kaysing 2002:74)

Kaysing contacted the hooker directly in February 1976 and he was "shocked" when she denied knowing anything about the engineers or the hoax. Kaysing also claimed to have met an airline captain who saw a command module being dropped from a cargo plane for a faked 'splashdown', but was unable to provide their name or airline.^[76]

Kaysing later sued^[77] Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell for libel, after Lovell reportedly said of Kaysing:^[78]

"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."

In 1997 a judge dismissed the case^[79] (Plait 2002:173).

[edit] Bart Sibrel

Bart Sibrel, filmmaker and self proclaimed investigative journalist, created a documentary film A funny thing happened on the way to the Moon.

Sibrel claims that the Moon landings provided the US Government with a public distraction from the Vietnam War,^[80] with lunar activities stopping abruptly and planned missions canceled, around the same time that the U.S. ceased its involvement in Vietnam. However, that assertion is not chronologically correct, because the cancellations of the later flights occurred during the budgeting process in 1970 and 1971, when the War was still raging; and the last mission flew in December of 1972, when the war was still a major ongoing conflict.

One of Sibrel's most significant claims is that:

In my research at NASA I uncovered, deep in the archives, one mislabeled reel from the Apollo 11, first mission, to the Moon. What is on the reel and on the label are completely different. I suspect an editor put the wrong label on the tape 33 years ago and no reporter ever had the motive to be as thorough as I. It contains an hour of rare, unedited, color television footage that is dated by NASA’s own atomic clock three days into the flight. Identified on camera are Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, and Michael Collins. They are doing multiple takes of a single shot of the mission, from which only about ten seconds was ever broadcast. Because I have uncovered the original unedited version, mistakenly not destroyed, the photography proves to be a clever forgery. Really! It means they did not walk on the Moon!

However, the website Clavius.org says that analysis of the footage and mission transcripts indicates that the astronauts were practicing for their upcoming live telecast to the world from space, for which they had not been able to rehearse ahead of time.^[38]

Sibrel^[18] and Aron Ranen claim that Wernher Von Braun was complicit in the hoax, collecting samples to be used as the basis for 'Moon rocks' during his trip to Antarctica in 1967.

Sibrel made repeated demands over several years that Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin swear an oath on the Bible that he had walked on the Moon, or admit that it was all a hoax. Aldrin ignored Sibrel, and in September 2002, Sibrel approached Aldrin and a young female relative as they were leaving a building, and called Aldrin "...a coward and a liar and a thief...".^[81] 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), knocking him down. Sibrel suffered no permanent injury: in fact, immediately after being hit, he turned to the cameraman and asked, "Did you get that on camera?" The Beverly Hills police investigated the incident, but no charges were filed. CBS News reports that "witnesses have come forward stating that they saw Sibrel aggressively poke Aldrin with a Bible and that Sibrel had lured Aldrin to the hotel under false pretenses so that he could interview him."^[82]

Apollo 14 Lunar Module Pilot Ed Mitchell says that when Sibrel came to his home with false History Channel credentials, he did swear to the veracity of the Moon landings on Sibrel's Bible.^[83][84]

[edit] William Brian

William Brian is an engineer and author of the self-published book "Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the U.S. Space Program".

Brian reportedly^[85][86] claims that "the Moon's surface gravity is 64 percent of the Earth's surface gravity, not the one-sixth (or 16.7 percent) value predicted by Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation!".^[87]

He does not dispute that astronauts visited the Moon, but claims that "the film speed was adjusted to slow down the action to give the impression that the astronauts were lighter than they actually were. With the slow-motion effects, objects would appear to fall more slowly and the public would be convinced of the Moon's weak gravity."^[87] However, viewing even a moderate amount of video footage of the landings effectively disproves this theory. Only extremely edited clips appear natural when sped up.

[edit] David Percy

David Percy, TV producer and expert in audiovisual technologies and member of the Royal Photographic Society, 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 the main proponent of the "whistle-blower" accusation, arguing 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.^[88]

[edit] Ralph Rene

Ralph Rene is an inventor and 'self taught' engineering buff. Author of NASA Mooned America (second edition ASIN: B0006QO3E2).

[edit] Other proponents

• 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.
• Jan Lundberg a technician for Hasselblad.
• Howard McCurdy space historian at American University.
• 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 (publisher) - British publisher of Nexus magazine said 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." ^[89]
• 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 received a Golden Cine Eagle and two fellowships from the National Endowment for Arts.
• Clyde Lewis, radio talk show host.^[90]
• Dr. David Groves (who works for Quantech Image Processing) and worked on some of the NASA photos. He said 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.^[91][92]

[edit] People accused of involvement in the hoax

• Deke Slayton, NASA Chief Astronaut in 1968: Some hoax proponents (for example, the 'NASA Scam'^[93] website, and Clyde Lewis^[94]) 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 as "NASA East".
• Michael J Tuttle: Some hoax proponents say that he took the job of producing fake photographs in 1994.^[95] 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.
• Stanley Kubrick, and his younger brother Raul Kubrick (alleged to be associated with the American Communist Party) are accused of having produced much of the footage for Apollo 11 and 12.^[90] It has been claimed, without any evidence, that in early 1968 while 2001: A Space Odyssey (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 on 2001. Kubrick also used some 50mm f/0.7 lenses that were left over from a batch made by Zeiss for NASA.
• Douglas Trumbull, a visual effects designer on 2001: A Space Odyssey, is accused of leading the special effects team for the faking of the Apollo 11 and 12 missions.^[90]

[edit] Other evidence and issues

[edit] 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, canceled their commission in the face of protests by hoax skeptics that the book would dignify the accusations. Oberg said that he intends (funding allowing) to finish the project.^[10][96] In November 2002 Peter Jennings (ABC’s World News Tonight anchor) said "[NASA] is going to spend a few thousand dollars trying to prove to some people that the United States did indeed land men on the Moon." Jennings said "[NASA] had been so rattled, [they] hired [somebody] to write a book refuting the conspiracy theorists."

[edit] Academic work

In 2004, Drs Martin Hendry and Ken Skeldon at Glasgow University were awarded a grant by the UK based Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council to investigate 'Moon Hoax' proposals.^[97] In November of that same year, they gave a lecture at a Glasgow planetarium where the top ten so-called lines of 'evidence' proving the Apollo Moon landings to be a 'hoax' were individually addressed, and each subsequently demonstrated to be bogus.^[98]

[edit] Attempts to view the landing site

Leonard David published an article on space.com,^[99][100] 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 Ukraine.

The European Space Agency's modern Moon probe, the SMART-1 unmanned probe, sent back imagery to the ESA of the Apollo Moon landing sites, according to Bernard Foing, Chief Scientist of the ESA Science Program.^[101] Given SMART-1’s initial high orbit, however, it may prove difficult to see artifacts, said Foing in an interview on the website "space.com'. No photos have so far been released, according to the website.

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^[102] (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 at the distance of the Moon) and so it is not surprising that no images sharp enough to resolve the lander have been forthcoming.^[103] Such photos, if and when they become available, would be the first non-NASA produced images of the site at that definition.

The Hubble space telescope can resolve objects as small as 280 feet (86 meters) at the distance of the Moon; again, not good enough to settle this issue.

[edit] Apollo hoax in popular culture and parody

[edit] In print

• Sir David Attenborough, as part of a special celebrating BBC TV's 40th anniversary said "(Apollo) was an enormous event, of course, and overtook the country and the BBC television center too. We devoted 24 hours of television to it, from the big studio ... And it was thrilling - we cleared all the programs and, of course, the Americans had a reserve spacecraft ready, in case something went wrong with the first one." ^{[citation needed]}
• 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."
• Norman Mailer in 1969 wrote "The event (Apollo 11 Moonwalk) was so removed, however, so unreal, that no objective correlative existed to prove it had not been an event staged in a television studio---the greatest con of the century--- and indeed a good mind, product of the iniquities, treacheries, gold, passions, invention, deception, and rich worldly stink of the Renaissance could hardly deny that the event if bogus was as great a creation in mass hoodwinking, deception, and legerdemain as the true ascent was in discipline and technology. Indeed, conceive of the genius of such a conspiracy. It would take criminals and confidence men mightier, more trustworthy and more resourceful than anything in this century or the ones before. Merely to conceive of such men was the surest way to know the event was not staged."
• The book The Loony: a novella of epic proportions (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.

[edit] On film

• The 1978 film Capricorn One portrayed a fictional NASA attempt to fake a landing on Mars.
• In 1971, there was a brief sequence in the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever, in which the action takes place in a "Moon" setting where astronauts were being trained.^[104] Agent 007 steals what appears to be a Moon buggy from the model set, and drives it off to escape from an enemy compound. This scene may have helped to spread the idea of the Moon landings being a hoax (Kaysing 2002:62).
• In 2002, William Karel released a spoof documentary film, Dark Side of the Moon, 'exposing' how Stanley 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).^[105]
• In the 2004 film Man on the Moon, Richard Fortunato fictionally explores the links between Apollo 11, the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon, a Russian spy in an effort to explain the staged moon landing
• In the 1992 movie Sneakers, the character "Mother," played by Dan Aykroyd mentions "It's the same technology that NASA used to fake the Apollo Moon landings, so it shouldn't give us any trouble."
• In the movie Looney Tunes: Back In Action, 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".
• In the movie RV, a character comments that the family's vacation spot is "where NASA faked the Moon landings."

[edit] On television

• A television drama called The News-Benders, the key plot device of which stipulated that all major technological advances since 1945 had been faked in some way, aired in January 1968; it postulated a "Moon landing" falsified with models. It was written by British writer Desmond Lowden.
• In 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 makes a feeble excuse about "solar winds" before killing the man. In the episode "If I'm Dyin', I'm Lyin'," Peter said that his "healing powers" were a fake, "like the Moon landings".
• In 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!!"
• In "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 replies, "Then we'll have to really land on the Moon. Invent NASA and tell them to get off their fannies!"^[106]
• In an episode of The PJs, Thurston said that if people can fake a Moon landing, anything's possible.
• In an episode of King of the Hill, conspiracy theorist Dale Gribble suggests that the Super Bowl is pre-selected and is filmed in an unidentifiable location where they filmed the fake Moon landing, months before the game ever began.
• An episode of the Showtime TV series Penn & Teller's Bullshit! on May 9, 2005, dealt with the lunar landing hoax accusations, and took a position thoroughly against such accusations.
• 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.
• On the July 27, 2006 episode of the Colbert Report, Colbert said "And here's the Smithsonian Institute's Air and Space Museum, where you can see the original rocks from the soundstage where they faked the Moon landing. It's a part of Hollywood history." This was followed by laughter from the audience.

[edit] In video games

• 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.
• In the movie studio in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, there is a fake Moon landing set in one of the warehouses.
• Also in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas 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". Also the character named The Truth states "we never landed on the Moon" and other government conspiracies after CJ questions the tinfoil in the van.
• In the Nintendo 64 video game Body Harvest the American level also has a room containing a lunar landing set and video cameras.

[edit] In music

• The REM song "Man on the Moon" implies that the Moon landings may have involved sleight of hand ("If you believe they put a Man on the Moon, if you believe there's nothing up my sleeve...").
• 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 major conspiracy arguments.
• 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.
• The song "Californication", by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, contains the lyrics "Space may be the final frontier but it's made in a Hollywood basement", referring to the alleged hoax, as well as alluding to the long run of Star Trek movies and TV series.
• There is a song by metal band Margret Heater called "Apollo Conspiracy".
• Swedish experimental punk band Refused recorded a song called "The Apollo Programme Was a Hoax" for their final full-length album, The Shape of Punk to Come.

[edit] Other references

• 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.
• Major League Baseball player Carl Everett has said in interviews with Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy that he doubts the validity of the Moon landings. Shaughnessy would go on to nickname Everett "Jurassic Carl" due to Everett's assertion that dinosaurs never existed.

[edit] 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
• Lloyd Mallin, who wrote a book in the early 1970s saying that all of the Soviet space exploits were faked.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

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

•  Bill Cooke (August 2006). "The Great Interplanetary Rock Swap". Astronomy 34 (8): 64-67.

•   Kaysing, Bill (2002). We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. Health Research Books. ISBN 185810422X.

•   Plait, Philip (2002). Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax" (see chapter 17). John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-40976-6.

• 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.

•   Seeds, Michael (1995). Horizons: Exploring the Universe. Wadsworth. ISBN 0-534-24889-6.

• The Daily Telegraph (2002). World's biggest telescope to prove Americans really walked on Moon, The Daily Telegraph, November 24, 2002 [1]

[edit] External links

• National Geographic: Conspiracy Moon Landing

[edit] Television specials

• Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? (2001) (TV) at the Internet Movie Database
• Opération lune (2002) (TV) at the Internet Movie Database

[edit] 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
• "FAKE MOON LANDING-Classified Apollo 11 NASA video-astronauts faking footage" 54 min (Teasingly labeled, as the video was not actually classified
• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon

[edit] 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," a popular book on the Moon hoax allegation.
• Moon Wide Web
• Photo analysis by Jack White
• The Apollo Hoax Probably the most popular Apollo Hoax page on the net today. Puts forward controversial evidence against the Moon landings.
• The Apollo 11 Hoax Conspiracy Evidence, Motives and photos to argue that the landings were faked.
• Xenophilia - a relatively thorough examination of many of the hoax claims
• Crank Dot Net list of websites about Apollo mostly hoax supporters but may include some parodies and anti-hoax materials
• The moon was the Earth assorted websites from faked Gagarin to faked Apollo with absolute proofs, photos, showing impossibilities, showing competition reasons among the state systems, no conspiracy, but integral presentation

[edit] Hoax rebuttal links

• The Bad Astronomy Web site is run by astronomer Phil Plait
• Who mourns for Apollo? Richard C. 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 Moon landing 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
• Debunking The 'Debunkers' - Why the Apollo Moon Hoax is a Cheap, Cheesy Scam
• Did We Go To The Moon?
• Article about how Apollo 11 astronauts put an array of mirrors pointing toward Earth on the Moon

[edit] Neutral links

• BBC-Did we land men on the Moon?

• 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 article The Wrong Stuff Not quite neutral, but reports both sides
• NASA site explaining lunar surface shadows

[edit] Source material

• The Project Apollo Archive – Collection of publicly released Apollo photography

• 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
• Locations of Apollo hardware
• Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft

[edit] Spoofs

• Parody with The Clangers
• The Mad Revisionist - This web site says the Moon Landings are a hoax because the Moon does not exist.