Date: 1969–1972
Location: An undisclosed movie set
The Conspirators: NASA, unknown filmmakers
The Victims: Soviet Union
Despite overwhelming historical and physical evidence, a moonrock-solid community of believers worldwide hold that NASA’s Apollo missions did not actually land any humans on the Moon. Some believe the spacecraft did actually launch, but were unmanned; others say the astronauts did fly, but never went farther than Earth’s orbit; still others say the Apollo spacecraft merely orbited the Moon and returned; and yet another group insists that nothing was ever actually launched at all. The only thing they seem to agree on is that the official acknowledged history of the Apollo program is false, and no humans have ever set foot on the Moon. They claim the pictures and videos were faked on a movie set, and that all the other evidence is fake as well.
Why do they think the Moon landings were hoaxed? Because the United States was in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, and wanted the ultimate propaganda victory.
NASA’s Apollo missions did land twelve Americans on the Moon, a fact that even the Soviets don’t dispute.
Doubting the Moon landings has its roots in an unexpected place: Christian fundamentalism. The original International Flat Earth Research Society was dedicated to proving the literal truth of the Bible, and some do interpret a few Bible passages as meaning that the Earth is flat. The Society’s founder, Samuel Shenton, first began arguing against the reality of the Gemini program—which preceded the Apollo Moon program—as soon as we started to get the first photos of the Earth taken from space.
The hoax narrative did not really go mainstream until 1976, when Bill Kaysing, who had been a publications analyst at Rocketdyne (a rocket engine design and production company) in the early 1960s, self-published a pamphlet titled We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. In it, he proposed a plot that was echoed in Peter Hyams’s 1977 movie Capricorn One about a fake Mars launch, in which the astronauts sneak out of the capsule and transfer to a safe location to make counterfeit TV transmissions.
As far as evidence, theorists point to the photos taken on the Moon and note the following:
• Light seems to be coming from angles that could only be consistent with studio lighting and not a distant sun.
• Dust behaved impossibly, including not having been blown away by the rocket motor.
• American flag flaps in a wind that is supposed to be nonexistent in space.
One science-based argument that many Moon hoax believers make is that the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts are a region of space too lethal for humans to pass through. If true, it would be impossible for humans to ever fly outside of a low Earth orbit.
The very best proof that humans went to the Moon is the rocks that were brought back. They bear physical proof of having been in space, specifically on the Moon, and brought to Earth in a protected artificial environment. The characteristics of these rocks aren’t even things NASA can fake:
• Using rubidium-strontium dating, the rocks are shown to be 4.46 billion years old, older than any on Earth. We have no way to fake this result.
• They also bear what are called zap pits, microscopic craters from impacts with micrometeors at up to 80,000 kph. We don’t have any way to fire projectiles that fast on Earth.
• They contain cosmogenic nuclides, which are isotopes that damage the crystals in the rocks. These cosmogenic nuclides can only be created by bombardment from high-energy cosmic rays, but the Earth’s atmosphere blocks cosmic rays from doing this to rocks on Earth.
• We know these rocks didn’t come to Earth naturally as meteors, because their pitted surfaces are pristine. All meteors that pass through Earth’s atmosphere are covered in fusion crusts, or a melted outer layer.
Perhaps the best certification of the Moon rocks’ authenticity comes from foreign scientists who have studied them. Even the United States’ enemies at the time couldn’t dispute them (the Soviet scientists especially would have loved nothing better than to prove them fake, but they couldn’t).
Apollo 12 astronauts also retrieved about 10 kg of pieces from Surveyor 3, an unmanned probe that landed on the Moon in 1967. The glass from its camera lens shows the same type of cosmic ray damage found in the rocks, incontrovertible proof that men brought it back from space.
It is true that traveling through the Van Allen radiation belts does expose the astronauts to high levels of radiation, but people can survive going through it. The Apollo engineers chose a trajectory that carried the astronauts through a narrow part of the radiation belts as quickly as possible. Nevertheless, they were exposed for about an hour. This exposes astronauts to about 1 rem, which is what you get from about 100 chest X-rays. That’s only about 1 percent of what you’d need to get the first signs of radiation sickness.
Once on the Moon, the astronauts place retroreflectors on the ground at each landing site. A retroreflector is a panel covered with little cubical right-angled mirrors that reflect laser light back at exactly the same angle it came in. During the Apollo program, many nations, including the Soviet Union, verified these retroreflectors by shining their own lasers at them.
For a long time, hoax believers questioned why there were no photographs of the Apollo landing sites taken from Earth. Surely our best observatories’ telescopes should be able to see that, including the Hubble space telescope. The science here is actually a bit surprising. In fact, the Apollo landing sites are too small for Hubble to see them. Hubble is great at seeing things extremely far away, so long as they are incredibly enormous—the size of a star, nebula, or galaxy. The biggest objects we left on the Moon are no bigger than a car—simply too small to be seen from Earth, even using our biggest telescopes. It wasn’t until 2009 that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft was able to take close-up photos of the sites from lunar orbit. Why was its camera able to see what even Hubble could not? Simple: the LRO was 17,000 times closer to the Apollo sites than Hubble. Although Hubble’s telescopic lens is much bigger and better than the LRO’s smaller telescopic lens, it isn’t 17,000 times better.
Perhaps the most important takeaway from any discussion of the Moon landing hoax is that no scientific rebuttal will ever be able to keep up with every claim made by the conspiracy theorists. That’s why you will easily find loads of information online that claims to prove the Moon landings were faked that is not addressed here. Unfortunately, pseudoscience will always spread faster and more aggressively than science.