Apollo moon landing hoax accusations: Encyclopedia - Apollo moon landing hoax accusations

Apollo moon landing hoax accusations

Proponents of the Apollo moon landing hoax accusations allege that the Apollo Moon Landings never took place, and were faked by NASA with possible CIA support.

According to a 1999 Gallup poll, about 6 percent of the population of the U.S. has doubts that the Apollo astronauts walked on the moon.

"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."

Nearly all interested scientists, technicians, and space enthusiasts have rejected the claim, considering it to be baseless.

The landing hoax proponents believe that the Moon landings of Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969 and subsequent missions never happened, but were faked on Earth. The idea grew significantly in popularity after 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. It should perhaps be noted that British playwright Desmond Lowden wrote a play called 'The News-Benders' in 1967 in which all major technological advances since 1945 were shown to have been simulated; the play was televised in January 1968 and showed a moon landing faked with models. In his book A Man on the Moon, Andrew Chaikin mentions that at the time of Apollo 8's lunar orbit mission in Dec. 1968, the conspiracy theories were already in full bloom.

A more subtle version of the idea is that although the Apollo missions were not faked, some of the photographs were doctored. According to this, the U.S. government feared the humiliation that would occur if the mission failed and fake photographs were prepared on Earth "just in case." By this account, 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.

The first published presentation of the claims was Bill Kaysing's We Never Went to the Moon in 1974, although perhaps the best known is NASA Mooned America by Ralph Rene.

Apollo moon landing hoax accusations - Conspiracy theory

Skeptics evaluating hoax accusations characterize them as a type of conspiracy theory — a belief that conspirators in the possession of secret knowledge are misleading or have misled the public in pursuit of a hidden agenda. While conspiracy theories vary widely in their plausibility, common standards of assessment can be applied to all:

• Occam's razor – is the alternative story more, or less, probable than the mainstream story? Is an elaborate hoax and cover-up involving the collusion and lying of thousands of individuals more probable than the belief that the evidence (including materials, machines, designs, and lunar rock samples) was part and parcel to an actual event?
• Psychology – does the alternative story satisfy an identifiable psychological need for the believer? Does it fit with the worldview propounded by many of its supporters?
• Falsifiability – are the "proofs" offered for the alternative story constructed with scientifically sound methodology?
• Whistleblowers – how many people — and what kind — have to be loyal conspirators? Any hoax claim has to account for a vast number of NASA employees who would have to maintain the conspiracy for over 35 years.

Apollo moon landing hoax accusations - Motives

Several motives have been suggested for the U.S. government to fake the moon landings - some of the recurrent elements are:

1. Distraction - The U.S. government could have benefited from a popular distraction to take attention away from the Vietnam War. Conspiracy theorists note that lunar activities stopped abruptly, with planned missions cancelled, around the same time that the U.S. ceased its involvement in the Vietnam War.
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. They argue that despite close monitoring by the Soviet Union, it would have been easy for the US to fake it and consequently guarantee success.
3. Money - NASA raised approximately 30 billion dollars going to the moon. This could have been used to pay off a large number of people, providing significant motivation for complicity. In variations of this idea, the space industry is characterized as a political economy, creating fertile ground for its own survival.
4. Risk - The available technology at the time was such that the landing might fail if genuinely attempted.

The Soviets, with their own competing moon program and an intense economic, political and military rivalry with the USA, could be expected to have cried foul if the USA tried to fake a Moon landing. Conspiracy theorist Ralph Rene responds that shortly after the alleged Moon landings, the USA silently started shipping hundreds of thousands of tons of grain as humanitarian aid to the allegedly starving USSR. He views this as evidence of a cover-up, the grain being the price of silence, despite the fact that no such conspiracy has appeared in the decades since the Soviet Union collapsed.

Proponents of the Apollo hoax suggest that the Soviet Union (and later Russia) 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, as do many other nations that are popularly believed to be enemies. However, this suggestion is challenged by the impression of intense international competition that was under way during the Cold War and is not supported by the accounts of participants on either side of the Iron Curtain. Many argue that the fact that the Soviet Union and other Communist bloc countries, eager to discredit the United States, have not produced any contrary evidence to be the single most significant argument against such a hoax. Soviet involvement might also implausibly multiply the scale of the conspiracy, to include hundreds of thousands of conspirators of uncertain loyalty.

Skeptics of the hoax point out that the last Apollo mission was in December of 1972, when the Vietnam War was still raging. Three additional planned missions were cancelled due to lack of funding. Public interest in the program, and especially in funding it, eroded quickly once the United States had "won the race" with Apollo 11.

Skeptics of the hoax also point out the flurry of conspiracy theories that arose during the Vietnam era, thanks in no small part to the distrust that the Johnson and Nixon administrations engendered, especially the Watergate incident, whose final chapter played itself out, with Nixon's resignation, the same year that the first Apollo conspiracy book appeared. The burgeoning interest in conspiracies began with skepticism about the official version of the JFK assassination, which viewpoint expanded to include the other political assassination of the 1960s. Added to this was intrigue about the Vietnam War, growing assertions in denial of the Nazi holocaust and other historical events, coupled with the rising interest in exotica and supernatural phenomena such as Unidentified Flying Objects, the Bermuda Triangle and Bigfoot. Social observers note that this accelerated interest coincides with the decline in traditional church attendance, the implication being that conspiracy theories, being an alternative to "conventional wisdom", also serve as an alternative to conventional religion.

A version of the idea postulates that the Apollo mission did land on the Moon but the actual footage was never shown to the masses for it included the sight of extraterrestrial beings or artifacts. In order to cover up the actual existence of these, the alleged faked studio footage took place.

Apollo moon landing hoax accusations - Issues cited in accusations

A brief treatment of some of the arguments and counter-arguments is given below. For more detail and discussion see the external links.

Apollo moon landing hoax accusations - Issues of photographs

Believers in the hoax have alleged various issues with photographs claimed to have been taken on the Moon.

Claims and rebuttals

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.

• In photography, the light white color (the object behind the crosshair) makes the black object (the crosshair) invisible due to saturation effects in the film emulsion. [1]

2. The quality of the photographs is implausibly high.

• NASA selected only the best photographs for release to the public and the popular press selected only the best from these. In addition, some of the photos were cropped to improve their composition. There are many badly exposed and badly focused images amongst the thousands of photos that were taken by the Apollo Astronauts. Many of these images can be seen at the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. Also, the photos were taken on high-quality Hasselblad cameras with high-quality Zeiss lenses, using high-quality 70mm medium format film.

3. There are no stars in any of the photos, and astronauts never report seeing any stars from the capsule windows.

• 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 to prevent overexposing the film for the brightly lit daylight scenes. The dim light of the stars simply does not have a chance to expose the film. (This effect can be demonstrated on earth by taking a picture of the night sky with exposure settings for a bright sunny day. Science fiction movies and television shows do confuse this issue by depicting stars as visible in space under all lighting conditions.) Stars were easily seen by every Apollo mission crew except for the unfortunate Apollo 13 (they couldn't see the stars due to the fact that oxygen and water vapor created a haze around the spacecraft). Stars were used for navigation purposes and were occasionally also seen through cabin windows when the conditions allowed.

• Believers in the hoax theory contend that the stars were removed from the photographs because they would have looked identical to the stars as seen from the Earth, i.e. no parallax view. However, the distance from the Earth to the Moon is very small compared to the distance to the stars, so no parallax would have been visible anyway. (The nearest star is over 100,000,000 times farther away than the Moon, and most stars are much farther away than that.)

4. The color and angle of shadows and light.

• 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 into shadows. Additionally, the Moon's surface is not flat and shadows falling into craters and hills appear longer, shorter and distorted from the simple expectations of the hoax believers. More significantly, perspective comes into play. This effect leads to non-parallel shadows even on objects which are extremely close to each other, and can be observed easily on Earth wherever fences or trees are found.

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

• 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. Furthermore, as there is no atmosphere on the Moon, very distant objects will appear clearer and closer to the human eye. What appears as nearby hills in some photographs, are actually mountains several kilometers high and some 10-20 kilometers away. Changes in such very distant backgrounds are quite subtle, and can be mistaken for no change at all. As the Moon is also much smaller than the Earth, the horizon is significantly nearer in photographs than Earthbound observers are used to seeing (an eye 1.7 m above completely flat ground will see the horizon 4.7 km away on Earth, but only 2.4 km away on the Moon). This can lead to confusing interpretations of the images.

6. The number of photographs taken is implausibly high. When the total number of official photographs taken during EVA of all Apollo missions is divided by the total amount of time of all EVAs, one arrives at 1.19 photos per minute. That is one photo per 50 seconds. Moreover, this number does not take into account the astronauts' other activities on the lunar surface such as the experiments, inspection, moonwalking, planting and saluting the flag. When taking these into account, one would arrive at one photo per 15 seconds for Apollo 11. This is even more remarkable considering that many locations in the photographs are situated miles apart and would have taken considerable travel time, especially in bulky pressure suits. On top of this, the cameras were neither equipped with a viewfinder nor with automatic exposure, which means that taking good pictures would take considerably longer.

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

Apollo moon landing hoax accusations - Ionizing radiation and heat

Claims and rebuttals

1. The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation from the Van Allen radiation belt and galactic ambient radiation.

• The Moon is ten times higher than the van Allen radiation belts. The spacecraft moved through the belts in just 30 minutes, and the astronauts were protected from the ionizing radiation by the metal hulls of the spacecraft. In addition, the orbital transfer trajectory from the Earth to the Moon through the belts was selected to minimize radiation exposure. Even Dr. James Van Allen, the discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts, has rebutted the claims that radiation levels were too dangerous for the Apollo missions. Dosimeters carried by the crews showed they received about the same cumulative dosage as a chest X-ray or about 1 milligray. [2]
• The radiation is actually evidence that the astronauts went to the moon. 33 of 36 of the Apollo astronauts 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).

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.

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.

Apollo moon landing hoax accusations - Transmission issues

Claims and rebuttals

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

• The round trip light travel time of more than 2 seconds is apparent in all the real-time recordings of the lunar audio, but this does not always appear as expected. There may be some documentary films where the delay has been edited out. Principal motivations for editing the audio would likely come in response to time constraints or in the interest of clarity. [3]

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. 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. [4]

4. 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. [5]

5. 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.

• The transmissions from the Moon would have needed to be decoded by NASA facilities prior to their distribution to the media for broadcast to the public. The first raw signals from the NASA ground station at Honeysuckle Creek in the Australian Capital Territory would have been unintelligible by local stations, as they were slow-scan television. Later images of the descent to the surface were normal television signals, and were received at Parkes.

Apollo moon landing hoax accusations - Mechanical issues

Claims and rebuttals

1. No blast crater appeared from the landing

• No crater should be expected. The Descent Propulsion System was throttled very far down during the final stages of landing. The Lunar Module was no longer rapidly decelerating, so the descent engine only had to support the module's own weight, which by then was greatly diminished by the near exhaustion of the descent propellants, and the Moon's lower gravity diminished downward pull. 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, 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, per 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".

2. The launch rocket produced no visible flame.

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

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

• Chemical analysis of the rocks confirms a different oxygen isotopic composition and a surprising lack of volatile elements. There are only a few 'identical' rocks, and those few fell as meteorites after being ejected from the Moon during impact cratering events. The total quantity of these 'Lunar Meteorites' is small compared to the more than 840 lb (380 kg) of lunar samples returned by Apollo. 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.

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

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

Apollo moon landing hoax accusations - Moon rocks

The many rocks brought back from the Moon are substantial evidence that the landings took place. It has been suggested that the only explanation for Wernher von Braun's trip to Antarctica two years prior to Apollo missions was to collect lunar meteorite rocks to be used as fake moonrocks. Because von Braun was a former Nazi, it is suggested, he would have been susceptible to pressure to agree to the conspiracy in order to protect himself from recriminations over the past. A few meteorites found in Antarctica bear close resemblance to moonrocks.

However, the first Antarctic meteorite discovery was made in 1969 by a Japanese team. The first United States led team began searches in the mid to late 1970s and the first meteorite identified as a lunar meteorite was not found until 1981 and identified as such by its similarity with the lunar samples returned by Apollo which in turn are similar to the few grams of material returned from the Moon by Soviet sample return missions (see ANSMET). The total collection of identified Antarctic lunar meteorites presently in the collection at JSC amounts to only about 2.5 kilograms, less than 1% of the 381 kilograms of moonrocks and soil returned by Apollo.

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

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 analysis of the lunar rocks show no evidence of their having been on Earth prior to their return during Apollo. They are also entirely consistent with our understanding of the environment that they existed in on the Lunar surface since their formation many billions of years ago and 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.

Apollo moon landing hoax accusations - People claimed to be included in the hoax

Apollo moon landing hoax accusations - Stanley Kubrick

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.

During the mission, however, the supposedly Earth orbiting spacecraft was never noticed during the time it was supposed to be hiding in orbit, and the actual spacecraft was seen during its trans-Lunar coast by observers on Earth. Amateur astronomers were able to sight the Apollo spacecraft, exactly where they should have been, during the trans-Lunar coast and amateur radio operators were able to listen-in on the command module in Lunar orbit [6]. The explosion of Apollo 13 was caught on video tape by an amateur astronomer. Russia and radio telescope observatories not owned or controlled by the USA also tracked the Apollo spacecrafts and transmissions. Finally, it seems inconsistent with this theory that in the Kubrick film 2001, the moon has soft, curving features, as if they have been smoothed by wind. In reality (as in the Apollo footage) the moon's surface has sharp features and harsh craters, because there is no wind or force to smooth them.

In 2002, William Karel released a spoof documentary film, Dark Side of the Moon, 'exposing' how Kubrick was recruited to fake the Moon landings, and featured interviews with, among others, Kubrick's widow and a swag 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). [7]

Apollo moon landing hoax accusations - Deaths of key people involved with the Apollo program

In a television program about the hoax theory, Fox Entertainment Group listed the deaths of 10 astronauts and of two civilians related to the manned spaceflight program as having possibly been killings as part of a coverup.

• Ted Freeman (T-38 crash, 1964)
• Elliott See and Charlie Bassett (T-38 accident, 1966)
• Virgil "Gus" Grissom (supposedly an outspoken critic of the Space Program) (Apollo 1 fire, January 1967)
• Ed White (Apollo 1 fire, January 1967)
• Roger Chaffee (Apollo 1 fire, January 1967)
• Ed Givens (car accident, 1967)
• C. C. Williams (T-38 accident, October 1967)
• X-15 pilot Mike Adams (the only X-15 pilot killed in November 1967 during the X-15 flight test program - not a NASA astronaut, but had flown X-15 above 50 miles).
• Robert Lawrence, scheduled to be an Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory pilot who died in a jet crash in December 1967, shortly after reporting for duty to that (later cancelled) program.
• NASA worker Thomas Baron train crash, 1967 shortly after making accusations before Congress about the cause of the Apollo 1 fire, after which he was fired. Ruled as suicide.
• Paul Jacobs, a private investigator from San Francisco, interviewed the head of the US Department of Geology in Washington about the 'moon rocks'. Did you examine the Moon rocks, did they really come from the Moon? Jacobs asked - the geologist did not respond, only laughed. Paul Jacobs and his wife died from cancer within 90 days.
• Lee Gelvani claims to have 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 Kaysing about it; however he died of a heart attack in 1991, before any such telephone call occurred.

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

Apollo moon landing hoax accusations - Observing the landing sites

Some hoax advocates have proposed that the only convincing evidence that the landings did indeed occur would be in the form of observations of the landing sites. This would require the diversion of astronomical resources to a task of no scientific value. It is also unclear as to why this would be considered convincing evidence when other material items of evidence are not. So there is no reason to believe that hoax enthusiasts would be convinced by images taken of a landing site. At scope resolutions soon to be available, only outlines of landers might be glimpsed, leaving the possibility that these, like the retroreflectors mentioned below, are robot spoofs; if a revolutionary telescope was in the future able to resolve footprints, etc, its print-outs could easily be dismissed as more NASA 'fakery'.

Apollo missions 11, 14, and 15 left retroreflectors on the Moon [8], which scientists routinely use to measure the distance between Earth and the Moon to high precision (see Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment). A common explanation by hoax proponents is that reflectors could have been placed by robot missions, a task that stands as a particularly challenging engineering feat. The Lunokhod 2 mission, for example, left a French-built mirror on the surface of the moon that, due to a mechanical failure, was not placed in a suitable position for measurements. [9]

The Clementine mission has returned images of the scuffed up landing site of Apollo 15 [10] that was described as conclusive evidence for the lunar landings.

It would be possible for future unmanned spacecraft in orbit around the Moon to produce high resolution images of the Apollo sites. NASDA's SELENE, for example, will carry instruments that are capable of detecting leftover Apollo hardware. However, since the mission is primarily intended for geological study, there is uncertainty as to whether or not SELENE will photograph the Apollo landing sites. ESA's SMART-1 might also be able to photograph the Apollo with its AMIE camera, but, like SELENE, considering (1) the fact that SMART-1 is a purely scientific mission and (2) the camera's resolution and altitude, such an opportunity is unlikely. A NASDA or ESA press photo of Apollo hardware is not an impossibility, however.

European scientists were reported to have announced in 2002 that they intend to use the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope to obtain images of the Moon landing sites, which might show the Moon lander bases still in place. However, no firm schedule for such observations or results has been forthcoming, and it appears doubtful that the VLT's highest resolutions (using interferometry across four mirrors) would be available for observing the Moon, a relatively dim celestial target. In any event, as with retroreflector evidence, any pictures of the lander remains are likely to be dismissed by hoax enthusiasts as artifacts from an unmanned mission.

Apollo moon landing hoax accusations - NASA's rebuttal cancelled

In early November 2002, NASA announced that it was cancelling publication of a manuscript by Jim Oberg that was intended to refute the claims that the Moon landings were a hoax. NASA said that this decision was based on the possibility of an outcry raised by people who felt such a book would "legitimize" the very belief it would have debunked.

Apollo moon landing hoax accusations - Flat Earth Society

The Flat Earth Society lodged one of the earliest complaints about the veracity of the Apollo missions. They argued that the various "earthrise" photos from Apollo 8, with the Moon in the foreground and the Earth in the background, was a fake. The primary basis of their claim was that it did not square with their belief that the Earth is flat.

Apollo moon landing hoax accusations - Pop culture

The music video for the song "Amerika" by Rammstein satirizes the hoaxers' claims. The band performs the song on a movie set that looks like the moon, and they wear spacesuits.

In the Family Guy episode Don't Make Me Over, Neil Armstrong finishes filming a faked moon landing in "Stage 51" (presumably a subtle reference to Area 51). A person greets him but asks "Aren't you supposed to be on the moon?" Armstrong tries to make something up, but instead knocks the person unconscious.

In the video game Grand Theft Auto:Vice City there is a film studio that houses props set in an arrangement that shows a faked moon landing.

In the 2005 video game Area-51, a sound stage is accessible in which the moon landing was filmed. The game's storyline explicitly states that, while a legitimate landing did take place, the oddities that were found would never make for "quaint" American television. Apollo's journey was thus staged in order to provide a mundane explanation and to conceal the true horrors from the general public.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Apollo moon landing hoax accusations", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki