The landing skeptics believe that the Moon landings of Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969 and subsequent missions never happened, but were faked on Earth. The theory grew significantly in popularity since the release of the movie Capricorn One (1978), which portrays a NASA attempt to fake a landing on Mars. It is possible that a brief sequence in the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever (1971) which appears to show a Moon landing being simulated may coincide with some of the first suggestions of the landings being faked.

A more subtle version of the theory is that although the Apollo missions were not faked, some of the photographs were. According to this theory, the US government feared the humiliation that would occur if the mission failed and fake photographs were prepared on Earth "just in case." Although the mission was a success, some of these fake photographs were so impressive that it was decided to release them anyway for propaganda purposes. This version of the theory has the advantage — or disadvantage — that it is more difficult to disprove.

Regarding Apollo 11 there are many claims and counter-claims. Theorists protest that most rebuttals address statements they never made, or else ignore the relevant facts.

Table of contents

1 Motive 2 Issues of photographs 3 Issues of radiation 4 Transmission issues 5 Mechanical issues 6 Moon rocks 7 Stanley Kubrick 8 Deaths of key people involved with the Apollo program 9 Falsifiability 10 Buzz Aldrin assault incident 11 NASA's rebuttal cancelled 12 Use of the Very Large Telescope 13 Verifiability 14 External links

Motive

Regardless of whether one accepts the accusation that the landings were faked, several motives existed for the U.S government to fake the moon landings - some of the major elements are:

1. Distraction - The U.S. government benefitted from a popular distraction to take attention away from the Vietnam war. Landing skeptics point out that lunar activities abruptly stopped around the same time that the Vietnam War ended.
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. It would have been much easier to fake the landing, thereby ensuring success.
3. Money - NASA raised approximately 30 billion dollars pretending to go 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 there was a good chance that the landing might fail if genuinely attempted.

Other skeptics of the Apollo missions suggest that the former Soviet Union and the United States were allied in the exploration of space, during the cold war and after. The United States and the former Soviet Union today routinely engage in cooperative space ventures.

Issues of photographs

Landing skeptics have alleged various issues with photographs claimed to have been taken on the Moon.

• Landing skeptics:
  1. Crosshairs on some photos appear to be behind objects, rather than in front of them where they should be, as if the photos were altered.
  2. Quality.
  3. There are no stars in any of the photos, and astronauts never report seeing any stars from the capsule windows.
  4. The color and angle of shadows and light.
  5. Identical backgrounds in photos that are listed as taken miles apart.
• Landing believers:
  1. In photography, the light white color (the object behind the crosshair) makes the black object (the crosshair) invisible due to saturation affects in the film emulsion.
  2. Hoax proponents claim that the images were too perfect. NASA selected only the best for release to the public and the popular press selected only the best from these. There are many badly exposed and badly focused images amoungst the thousands of photos that were taken by the Apollo Astronauts.
  3. There are also no stars seen in Space Shuttle, Mir, International Space Station and Earth observation photos. Cameras used for imaging these things are set for quick shutter speeds in order not to over-expose the film for the brightly lit daylight scenes. The dim light of the stars simply doesn't have a chance to expose the film. (Science fiction movies and television shows confuse this issue by inaccurately depicting the stars as visible in space under all lighting conditions.) Stars were easily seen by every Apollo mission crew except for the ill-fated 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.
  4. Shadows on the Moon are complicated because there are several light sources; the Sun, Earth and the Moon itself. Light from these sources is scattered by lunar dust in many different directions, including 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.
  5. Detailed comparison of the backgrounds claimed 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.

• Landing skeptics
  1. The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation from van Allen radiation belt and galactic ambient radiation.
  2. Film in the cameras would have been fogged by this radiation.
• Landing believers
  1. The Moon is ten times higher than the van Allen radiation belts, and the astronauts were protected by very sophisticated spacesuits. 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. Dr. James Van Allen, the discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts, has even rebuked the claims that radiation levels were too dangerous for the Apollo missions.
  2. The landing skeptics consistently overstate the radiation hazard and side effects and ignore actual measured effects of the radiation.

• Landing skeptics
  1. The lack of a blast crater from the landing
  2. That the launch rocket produced no visible flame
  3. The rocks brought back from the Moon are identical to rocks collected by scientific expeditions to Antartica
  4. The presence of deep dust around the module
  5. The flapping flag
• Landing believers
  1. Exhaust from the propulsion system was throttled low during the final stages of low gravity descent and the lack of air-pressure on the Moon causes those exhaust gases to rapidly expand well beyond the landing site. Therefore there was in fact little pressure right below the landing site. Expectations that a blast crater should have been present is not supported by the physics involved.
  2. Hydrazine (a fuel) and dinitrogen tetroxide (an oxidizer) were used as the propellants. These two chemicals ignite hypergolically - upon contact - producing a transparent jet of particles. They simply produced an equal and opposite motive force, pushing the rocket. See Newton's laws of motion. This combination has been also been used on the American Titan, Russian Proton and Chinese Long March launchers.
  3. 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 number and amount of these 'Lunar Meteorites' is small compared to the more than 840 pounds of lunar samples returned by Apollo.
  4. 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.
  5. 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 it's being folded during flight and gave it an appearance which could be mistaken for motion in a still photograph.

• Telemetry
• Prior missions
• The rocks brought to Earth from the Moon
• The presence of retroreflectors left on the Moon

Landing believers claim that rocks allegedly brought back from the Moon prove that the landings took place, however, skeptics raise concerns about ex-Nazi and NASA's chief rocket scientist Wernher von Braun's trip to Antarctica two years prior to Apollo missions. They contend that no credible explanation for the trip was ever offered, and that he would have been susceptible to pressure to agree to the conspiracy in order to protect himself from recriminations for his Nazi past. Others counter that secretly obtaining extraterrestrial-seeming rocks from Antarctica could have been more easily done by anonymous CIA operatives.

The claim that the rocks are the same as ones found on Earth does carry some weight in the scientific community, but only in context of meteorites found on Earth. It is believed that rocks dislodged from the Moon by meteoric impacts occasionally land on Earth. The physics of this process is well understood. A handful of rocks believed to be from Mars have also 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. Furthermore, detailed analyis 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 our understanding of the environment that they existed in on the Lunar surface since their formation many billions of years ago. 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.

Stanley Kubrick

Hoax believers allege 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. Hoax believers claim he initially said he was not interested, but apparently NASA convinced him using a combination of carrot and stick; he was given exclusive access to the alien artifacts and autopsy footage from the alleged Roswell UFO crash site, and threats to publicly reveal Raul's (Kubrick's younger brother) links with the American Communist Party. Kubrick is alleged to have spent sixteen months working on the project with a special effects team led by Douglas Trumbull on a sound stage in Huntsville, Alabama, with the Apollo 11 mission being staged in July of 1969.

These proponents hypothesize that the superb "realistic" outer space effects of the movie were developed and perfected in special CIA film sets while preparing the faked Moon landings. However, the state of the art Hollywood special effects technology from the Apollo time and even those used since then do not stand up to the consistency of the film and images taken during Apollo and has apparently not found its way into present day Hollywood special effects. Comparison of films from the late 1960s and early 1970s with Apollo images is very telling. Any film contains errors in science, effects, plot inconsistencies and so on. The Apollo images contain none of those errors, despite the claims of the hoax believers. Every film and image is entirely consistent with the laws of physics and contain no effects artifacts or inconsistencies in the location of lunar equipment for example. You never see anything like a hammer jumping from location to location in scenes as items in Hollywood films often do.

Allegedly a Saturn V rocket was launched into low Earth orbit with astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins remaining there while Kubrick's footage of the 'landing' was released to the press. The return to Earth and splashdown were, of course, real. 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. Several months later, the Apollo 12 mission was successfully staged in a similar manner. Randall Cunningham was later recruited to direct a 'failed mission'.

In 2002, a French documentary maker released a documentary film, Dark Side of the Moon, which purported to tell the story of how Kubrick was recruited to fake the Moon landings, and featured interviews with, among others, Kubrick's widow and a swag of American statesmen including Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld. In fact, 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). [1]

Deaths of key people involved with the Apollo program

10 astronauts and others related to the program died in accidents - landing skeptics claim that these are part of a cover-up, and that NASA or other U.S. government agencies were disposing of people who they feared would 'blow the whistle'.

• Ed Givens (car accident)
• Ted Freeman (T-38 crash)
• C. C. Williams (T-38 accident)
• Elliot See and Charlie Bassett (T-38 accident)
• Virgil "Gus" Grissom (a supposed outspoken critic of the Space Program) (Apollo 1 fire)
• Ed White (Apollo 1 fire)
• Roger Chaffee (Apollo 1 fire)
• X-15 pilot Mike Adams (the only X-15 pilot killed 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 shortly after reporting for duty to that (later cancelled) program.
• NASA worker Thomas Baron (claimed to be a coverup of a 500 page report on the Apollo 1 accident).
• Bill Kaysing contacted Paul Jacobs, a private investigator from San Francisco and asked him to help him with his Apollo anomalies investigations. Mr. Jacobs went to see the head of the U.S. Department of Geology in Washington and asked: "Did you examine the Moon rocks, did they really come from the Moon?" The geologist just laughed. Paul flew back from Washington and told Keysing that the people in high office of the American Government knew of the cover-up. Paul Jacobs and his wife both died from cancer within 90 days.
• Lee Gelvani claims to have almost convinced informant James Irwin to confess about the cover-up. Irwin was going to ring Kaysing about it, however he died of a heart attack within 3 days.

Unlike some other theories, this is claimed by some to be falsifiable. Observations could be made—for example, through powerful telescopes or via new Moon landings—of the physical evidence—landing bases, equipment, footprints, etc.—that would prove or disprove the theory.

For example, the Apollo astronauts reportedly left reflectors on the Moon, during Apollo missions 11, 14, and 15, which scientists routinely use to very precisely measure the distance between Earth and the Moon. Skeptics contend that those data could also be faked, or that reflectors, if they exist, could more easily have been placed by robot missions (such as the French-built mirror was on the Soviet Lunokhod 2) and do not prove a human landing. However, Apollo believers claim that the Apollo retroreflectors are apparently more accurate than the Lunokhod mirror--they claim that this was only possible through manned placement.

Buzz Aldrin assault incident

NASA's rebuttal cancelled

Use of the Very Large Telescope

Verifiability

External links