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. Folklorist Linda Degh suggests that writer-director Peter Hyams's 1978 film Capricorn One, which depicts a hoaxed journey to Mars in a spacecraft that looks identical to the Apollo craft, may have given a boost to the hoax theory's popularity in the post-Vietnam War era. She notes that this occurred during the post-Watergate era, when segments of the American public were inclined to distrust official accounts. Degh writes: "The mass media catapult these half-truths into a kind of twilight zone where people can make their guesses sound as truths. Mass media have a terrible impact on people who lack guidance."[2] In 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 similar conspiracy ideas were already in circulation.
[edit] Public opinion
See also: Apollo hoax in popular culture
There are subcultures worldwide which advocate the belief that the Moon landings were faked. James Oberg of ABC News stated that claims made that the Moon landings were faked are actively taught in Cuban schools and wherever Cuban teachers are sent.[3][4] A 1999 Gallup poll found that 6% of the American public doubted that the Moon landings had occurred and that 5% had no opinion on the subject,[5][6][7][8] which roughly matches the findings of a similar 1995 Time/CNN poll.[5] Officials of Fox television stated that such skepticism increased to about 20% after the February 15, 2001 airing of that network's TV show entitled Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? Seen by approximately 15 million viewers,[6] the 2001 Fox special is viewed as having promoted the hoax claims.[9][10]A 2000 poll conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Fund found that 28% do not believe that American astronauts have been on the Moon, and this percentage is roughly equal in all social-demographic groups.[11] In 2009, a poll conducted by the British Engineering & Technology magazine found that 25% of Britons do not believe that humans have walked on the Moon.[12] Similarly, 25% of Americans between the age of 18 and 25 are not sure the landings happened.[13]
[edit] Predominant hoax claims
Numerous conspiracy theories have been advanced that outline concerted action by NASA employees (and sometimes others) to perpetuate false information about landings that never occurred, or to cover up accurate information about the landings that occurred in a different manner than have been publicized. Believers have focused on perceived gaps or inconsistencies in the historical record of the missions. The Flat Earth Society was one of the first organizations to accuse NASA of faking the landings, arguing that they were staged by Hollywood with Walt Disney sponsorship and based on a script by Arthur C. Clarke and directed by Stanley Kubrick.[14]The most predominant idea is that the entire human landing program was a complete hoax from start to finish. Some claim that the technology to send men to the Moon was insufficient or that the Van Allen radiation belts, solar flares, solar wind, coronal mass ejections and cosmic rays made such a trip impossible.[15]
Bart Sibrel has claimed that the crew of 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 retroreflectors and other observable human-made objects on the Moon. British publisher 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 the United States 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". He suggests that NASA sent robot missions because radiation levels in space would be 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.[16]
Philippe Lheureux, French author of Moon Landings: Did NASA Lie? and Lights on the Moon: Did NASA Lie? (Lumières sur la Lune: La NASA a-t-elle menti?), said that astronauts did land on the Moon but in order to prevent other nations from benefiting from scientific information in the real photos, NASA published fake images.[17]
[edit] Motives
Proponents of the view that the Moon landings were faked give several differing theories about the motivation for the U.S. government to fake the Moon landings. Cold War prestige, monetary gain and providing a distraction are some of the more notable motives given.The U.S. government considered it vital that the U.S. win the Space Race against the Soviet Union. Going to the Moon would be risky and expensive, as exemplified by John F. Kennedy famously stating that the U.S. chose to go because it was hard.[18] Proponents also claim that the U.S. government benefited from a popular distraction from the Vietnam War; and so lunar activities suddenly stopped, with planned missions canceled, around the same time that the U.S. ceased its involvement in the Vietnam War.[19]
Bill Kaysing maintains that, despite close monitoring by the Soviet Union, it would have been easier for the U.S. to fake the Moon landing, thereby guaranteeing success, than for the U.S. to actually go there. Kaysing claimed that the chance of a successful landing on the Moon was calculated to be 0.017%.[20] NASA raised approximately US$30 billion in order to go to the Moon as well, and Kaysing claims that this amount could have been used to pay off a large number of people, providing significant motivation for complicity.[21] The issue of delivering on the promise is often brought up as well. Since most proponents believe that the technical issues involved in getting people to the Moon either were insurmountable at the time or remain insurmountable, the Moon landings had to be faked in order to fulfill President Kennedy's 1961 promise "to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."[18]
Others have made the claim that, with all the known and unknown hazards of traveling into deep space,[22] NASA would not have risked the public humiliation of astronauts crashing to their deaths on the lunar surface, broadcast on live TV. So, with time running out, instead of risking a national fiasco and embarrassment and a cut-off of funding of billions of dollars should some catastrophe happen, it is argued that NASA had to stage and fake the Moon landing to avoid such a major risk.[23]
[edit] Involvement of the Soviet Union
Main article: Soviet space program conspiracy accusations
A primary reason for the race to the Moon was the Cold War. Philip Plait states in Bad Astronomy that 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 United States tried to fake a Moon landing,[24] especially since their own program had failed. Successfully pointing out a hoax would have been a major propaganda coup. Bart Sibrel has responded, "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."[25]However, the Soviet Union had been sending unmanned spacecraft to the Moon since 1959,[26] 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",[27] the latter having a 100 million km range.[28] The Soviet Union monitored the missions at the Space Transmissions Corps, which was "fully equipped with the latest intelligence-gathering and surveillance equipment".[29] Vasily Mishin, in an interview for the article "The Moon Programme That Faltered" (Spaceflight, March 1991, vol. 33, 2-3), describes how the Soviet Moon programme lost energy after the Apollo landing.
[edit] Hoax proponents and their proposals
- Bill Kaysing (1922–2005) an ex-employee of Rocketdyne,[30] the company which built the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V rocket. Kaysing was not technically qualified, and worked at Rocketdyne as a librarian. Kaysing's self published book, We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle,[15][31] made many allegations, effectively beginning the discussion of the Moon landings possibly being hoaxed. NASA and others have debunked the claims made in the book.
- Bart Sibrel, a filmmaker, produced and directed four films for his company AFTH,[32] including a film in 2001 called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon,[33] examining the evidence of a hoax. The arguments that Sibrel puts forward in this film have been debunked by numerous sources, including Svector's video series Lunar Legacy,[34] which disproves the documentary's primary argument that the Apollo crew faked their distance from the Earth command module, while in low orbit. Sibrel has stated that the effect on the shot covered in his film was produced through the use of a transparency of the Earth. Some parts of the original footage, according to Sibrel, were not able to be included on the official releases for the media. On such allegedly censored parts, the correlation between Earth and Moon Phases can be clearly confirmed, refuting Sibrel's claim that these shots were faked. Sibrel was also punched in the face by Buzz Aldrin after Sibrel confronted Aldrin with his theories about the moon hoax[35] while accusing the former astronaut of being "a coward, and a liar, and a thief". Sibrel attempted to press charges against Aldrin but the case was thrown out of court when the judge ruled that Aldrin was within his rights given Sibrel's invasive and aggressive behavior.[36]
- William L. Brian, a nuclear engineer who self-published a book in 1982 called Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the U.S. Space Program, in which he disputes the Moon's surface gravity.
- 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.[37]
- Ralph Rene - An inventor and 'self taught' engineering buff. Author of NASA Mooned America (second edition OCLC 36317224).
- James M. Collier (d. 1998) - American journalist and author, producer of the video Was It Only a Paper Moon ? in 1997.
- Jack White - American photo historian known for his attempt to prove forgery in photos related to the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
- Marcus Allen - British publisher of Nexus who said that photographs of the lander would not prove that the U.S. 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".[38]
- Aron Ranen states in his documentary film Did We Go? (2005) "at this point right now I'm about 75% believing we went". On July 20, 2009, Ranen appeared on Geraldo at Large (Fox News Channel) to argue that no one has landed on the moon.
- Clyde Lewis - Radio talk show host.[39]
- David Groves - Works for Quantech Image Processing and worked on some of the NASA photos. Notably he has examined the photo of Aldrin emerging from the LM. He said he can pinpoint the exact point at which an 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 to 36 centimetres (9.4 to 14 in) to the right of the camera.[40] This corresponds with the sunlit part of Armstrong's spacesuit.[41]
- Yuri Mukhin - Russian opposition politician, publicist and writer and author of the book The Moon affair of the USA (2006) in which he denies all Moon landing evidence and accuses the U.S. establishment of plundering the money paid by the American taxpayers for the Moon program and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and some Soviet scientists for helping NASA commit the hoax without being denounced.[42]
- Alexander Popov - Russian doctor of physical-mathematical sciences and author of the book Americans on the Moon - a great breakthrough or a space affair? (Moscow, 2009, ISBN 978-5-9533-3315-3) in which he aims to prove that Saturn V was in fact a camouflaged Saturn 1B[43] and denies all Moon landing evidence.[44]
- Stanislav Pokrovsky - Russian candidate of technical sciences and General Director of a scientific-manufacturing enterprise Project-D-MSK who calculated that the real speed of the Saturn V rocket at S-IC staging time was only half of what was declared. His analysis appears to assume that the solid rocket plumes from the fusellage and retro rockets on the two stages came to an instant halt in the surrounding air so they can be used to estimate the velocity of the rocket. He ignored high altitude winds and the altitude at staging, 67 km, where air is about 1/10,000 as dense as at sea level, and claimed that only a loop around the Moon was possible, not a manned landing on the Moon with return to the Earth. He also determined the reason for this - problems with the Inconel superalloy used in the F-1 engine.[45][46][47]
[edit] Critical examination of hoax accusations
Main article: Third-party evidence for Apollo Moon landings
According to James Longuski, Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering at Purdue University, the size and complexity of the alleged conspiracy theory scenarios make their veracity an impossibility. More than 400,000 people worked on the Apollo project for nearly ten years, and a dozen men who walked on the Moon returned to Earth to recount their experiences. Hundreds of thousands of people, including astronauts, scientists, engineers, technicians, and skilled laborers, would have had to keep the secret. Longuski also contends that it would have been significantly easier to actually land on the Moon than to generate such a massive conspiracy to fake such a landing.[48][49]Vince Calder and Andrew Johnson provided a detailed rebuttal to the conspiracy theorists' claims, in a question and answer format, on the Argonne National Laboratory web site.[50] They show that NASA's portrayal of the Moon landing is fundamentally accurate, allowing for such common errors as mislabeled photos and imperfect personal recollections. Through application of the scientific process, any hypothesis that is contradicted by the observable facts may be rejected. 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, and this variation is considered a key indicator that the hoax hypothesis actually constitutes a conspiracy theory.[51]
[edit] Imaging the landing sites
Leonard David published an article on space.com,[53][54] on April 27, 2001 which displayed a picture taken by the Clementine mission showing a diffuse dark spot at the location that NASA says is the Apollo 15 Lunar Module Falcon. 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 SMART-1 unmanned probe sent back imagery of the Apollo Moon landing sites, according to Bernard Foing, Chief Scientist of the ESA Science Program.[55] "Given SMART-1’s initial high orbit, however, it may prove difficult to see artifacts", said Foing in an interview on space.com.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched their SELENE lunar orbiter on September 14, 2007 (JST) from Tanegashima Space Center. SELENE orbited the Moon at about 100 kilometres (62 mi) altitude. In May 2008 JAXA reported detecting the "halo" generated by the Apollo 15 lunar module engine exhaust from a Terrain Camera image.[58] A 3-D reconstructed photo also matched the terrain of an Apollo 15 photograph taken from the surface.
While the LRO images have been enjoyed by the scientific community as a whole, they have not done anything to convince conspiracy theorists that the landings took place.[63] The main reason for this doubt is because the LRO is a NASA project, and is therefore assumed to be biased.
