Silver-level articleMoon landing hoax

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The Moon landing hoax refers to the belief of a small,[1] but persistent, percentage of people who think that the Apollo Moon landings of the late 60s and early 70s were propaganda films produced by NASA in pursuit of embarrassing the USSR in the Cold War. The exact form of such beliefs vary and can cover anything from "the Apollo astronauts never went to space" to "they eventually landed on the Moon, but the first landing was faked," not to mention wilder claims ("the Apollo program was a front – they went, but on flying saucers").

In the US, the Moon landing hoax claim was originated by libertarian writer Bill Kaysing (1922 - 2005) with his 1976 book We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. It is a shame Kaysing is mostly remembered for that, because he also wrote some great books on sustainable living, privacy, hot springs, homelessness, cooking, and other topics.

The hoax allegations have since reached the level of being a pop-culture meme, much in the way JFK assassination theories are, and have been referenced in a number of works, from a Rammstein music video to a Red Bull TV commercial. Nevertheless, true believers are limited to the ranks of die-hard conspiracy theorists, and, outside the United States, belief in it is usually correlated with general anti-US sentiment.


[edit] Basic facts

A surprising number of people are not terribly well-informed about something that happened over 40 years ago. So, let's get some facts straight first:

  • The US Moon landing program was started by JFK in response to the Soviet Union's early successes in space exploration, just in case the world decided that those Commies were right and Communism was the way to go. (See also the whole Cold War thing.) Unsurprisingly, this is the thing most people Americans seem able to remember...
  • There have been SIX[2] landings on the Moon, between 1969 and 1972: the historic Apollo 11 (1969), Apollo 12 (1969), Apollo 14 (1971), Apollo 15 (1971), Apollo 16 (1972) and Apollo 17 (1972). Each landing delivered two astronauts to the surface, with a third one waiting for them in lunar orbit.
  • There have been three more flights to the Moon: the first ever lunar fly-by of Apollo 8 in 1968 to beat the Soviets, the Apollo 10 "general rehearsal" of a landing without actually landing (1969) and the "successful failure" Apollo 13 (1970) which had slight technical difficulties was badly damaged by an explosion during the flight, but managed to get the astronauts back to Earth alive. There is a (mostly accurate) movie with Tom Hanks about it.
  • Each of the last three flights, 15, 16 and 17, carried the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), an electric car frame with wheels which allowed astronauts to get several miles away from the landing site and cover a lot more ground than they could have on foot.
  • Three more flights were originally planned (18, 19 and 20), but they were canceled when the public decided that the US had more pressing concerns than "Whitey on the Moon", such as the Vietnam War, and politicians pulled the plug. The extra spacecraft were used for the Skylab space station (occupied 1973-1974) and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (1975, Americans meeting Russians in orbit for a few shots of vodka borscht). The Apollo/Saturn combination was supposed to be replaced by a more versatile, "safer" and cheaper system known as the Space Shuttle.
  • The footage of Neil Armstrong going down the ladder and saying the "small step" line was shot by a TV camera cunningly attached to the side of the lander and deployed by pulling a cord. (One of the ways to troll space nerds is to ask them who filmed Neil Armstrong coming out if he was the first man on the Moon.)
  • The footage of the Lunar Module lifting off was shot by the lunar rover's TV camera that could be operated remotely from Earth. There are actually three attempts to film the ascent: on Apollo 15 the camera broke, on Apollo 16 the operator was too late and the LM flew out of the frame, on Apollo 17 he nailed it. (See the Take-off video section below.)
  • The Soviets did have a manned lunar program, but it started in earnest three years later (1964) and never managed to get there due to a variety of problems (political, financial and technical, including all four test flights of their heavy launch rocket ending in massive explosions). Like the other Soviet space programs, the project was secret unless it succeeded (or failed really badly), which allowed the Soviets to pretend that they never intended to go, claiming that the Moon could be explored by robots instead of risking human lives. The Lunokhod[wp] program was hastily developed and managed to land and operate two remotely-controlled rovers on the lunar surface (in 1970 and 1973), scoring another Soviet first. After the US successes, the support for a Moon landing mission evaporated and the Russian space program focused on orbital stations.

If you want to know more, you can start by reading the Wikipedia article on the Apollo program. If you really want to know more, you can read the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, a collection of transcripts, photos, videos and other information about the landings. Or see the External links section below.

[edit] A variety of conspiracy beliefs

There is, in fact, no single Moon landing conspiracy narrative. There are several, depending on the believers' gullibility or desire to believe. The following is only a brief summary:

[edit] Flat Earth belief

Obviously faked!

Flat Earthers believe space travel to be impossible, so the astronauts never left the Earth and the whole thing was filmed on the ground. Charles K. Johnson, president of the Flat Earth Society described the Space Shuttle as "a joke," claiming that he has observed bits falling off it in testing which prove that it can't really go into space.[3] Presumably, he thinks the same of high altitude airliners such as Concorde, from which people could also see the curvature of the Earth.

[edit] Vedic fundamentalist belief

Members of the Hare Krishna movement refuse to accept the landings, because it would contradict what their holy texts say about the Moon (for example, that it is further away than the Sun, surrounded by fire and ice, and the source of planetary vegetation). This attitude dates back to the founder of the movement and the time of the landings themselves.[4]

[edit] No orbit belief

A number of people are silent on the shape of the Earth but nevertheless believe that no people ever went into Earth orbit. An example is Jared Lee Loughner, who apparently believed that the Space Shuttle carried no crew (or that it did, but didn't reach orbit).

[edit] Only orbit belief

This group believes that the astronauts only went into Earth orbit. This is usually connected to the claim that the space outside low Earth orbit is filled with deadly radiation,[5] as made for example by Bart Sibrel. Apparently, the proponents of this idea never bothered to check the facts, such as what kinds of ionizing radiation exist in space, what are their sources, what are the expected radiation levels and what protective measures are taken against them. This idiocy can lead to amusing results, such as claiming that the radiation in the Van Allen belts would literally melt the spacecraft.[6]

[edit] Moon orbit belief

Obviously not faked!

This group believes that NASA went to the moon but only to orbit it. Why NASA would stop there after all that effort and fake the rest is anyone's guess — the final landing, while complex and difficult, would not have been impossible for such a large, well-prepared organization.

[edit] Landed, but later belief

These people believe that the earlier landings were faked, but that NASA finally managed to get there some time in the seventies. They assert that the United States faked reports of the original landing to thwart the Soviet Union's attempts during the Space Race of the Cold War.

[edit] Moon alien belief

See also: Richard Hoagland, Mars Anomaly Research and a number of other pareidolia aficionados.

This group accepts that NASA went to the moon, and — with unmanned probes — the rest of the Solar System; however, the things they saw were so incredible they had to doctor the photographs to hide the evidence of aliens (or Space Nazis). As usual with this kind of conspiracy theory, a logical reason has never been given for anyone wanting to conceal such a discovery. Filmmaker Jose Escamilla takes the conspiracy one step further. He claims, after applying Earth hues to the Moon's surface, that it is simply swarming with life and bases and craft.[7] Having discovered this during the Apollo 11 mission, NASA never returned to the moon, but instead launched nuclear missiles into space to defend us from the aliens.

A slightly less insane subgroup of the "real landings, fake footage" school postulates that the moon landings did happen, but the footage was so poor that it was re-recorded on Earth, thus explaining the "evidence" of forgery without the incredulous claims associated with a full hoax, such as the vast expense at faking the launches and keeping everyone quiet.[8]

[edit] Moon landing belief

ARRRRR, this picture be obviously not faked! (Note: Ninjas also landed on the moon, but we're still looking for hints on where they landed, as no sign of a pirate/ninja conflict has been found.)

This group swallowed hook, line, and sinker the low-quality, video footage propaganda released by NASA (and covered up by the USSR in return for wheat subsidies) and seriously thinks that men walked on the moon and returned to Earth unharmed. They bought all the "evidence" given by NASA as proof that a moon landing did, in fact, occur.[9] What gullible fools!

[edit] Moon landing hoax hoax

This group believes that the moon landing hoax was itself a hoax, to cover up the fact that Chinese filmmakers had successfully filmed a "moon landing" video before NASA. The CIA intercepted the video, dubbed it into English,[10] and broadcast it to the world.[11] There are rumors that this theory is itself a hoax, but the rumors have been dismissed as a hoax.[12]

[edit] Tito did it

At the start of 2012, someone spammed various websites with the trailer of a "documentary" claiming that the technology for the moon landing was in fact developed by Yugoslavia using writings of the Slovenian space exploration visionary/pioneer Herman "Noordung" Potočnik[wp] (died 1929) and that it was sold later to the USA.[13] While it may be a fun semi-nationalist speculation (even the authors of the documentary say it's just a hypothesis), why Yugoslavia would hide such a space program once again remains a solid argument against it. Although the documentary may turn out to be a perfect example of Poe's Law.[14] In all cases, it was discovered in December 2012 to all be a load of incoherent nonsense.

[edit] Evidence for a conspiracy

The amount of drivel written about the Apollo landings could fill a wiki on its own. Following is just a sample of the kind of "evidence" and misinterpretations that are used to prop up the various conspiracy theories. However, none of it stands up to scrutiny. A lot of the arguments are various forms of argument from incredulity and exploit laypeople's ignorance and/or misconceptions about space, space travel or even more mundane things like photography.

[edit] Suppression

It is reported that Bill Kaysing, whose 1976 book started the madness, was originally requested by his publishers to write his book as a satire, but he somehow "lost the plot" and became convinced of the truth.[15] Kaysing alleged that his own publishers were in cahoots with NASA to suppress the book after he received a letter from his own editor saying that the manuscript wasn't good enough for publication. Kaysing then self-published both the book and the letter, creating a false Streisand effect.

[edit] Stars

No, we're not referring to the video casting Hollywood A-listers. This is about actual stars, the burning nuclear fusion kind. Proponents of the hoax theory insist that there are no stars visible in any of the footage or photographs taken on the moon. This is very true. Take any image at night and you'll very rarely see stars in the sky. This is because stars are faint things, which is the very reason you can't see them during the day. It takes the human eye a good few minutes to an hour to adjust to seeing all the stars in the sky, even on a clear night with little light pollution, because the rhodopsin in our retinal photoreceptors need time to unbleach (the widening of our irises is a secondary contributor, but occurs quickly compared to unbleaching).

Cameras have the same issue, they expose their shots for a certain length of time and with a certain iris size (aperture). During the day, when it's nice and bright, exposure can be short and the aperture small. But at night the exposure must be long, or the aperture large. To see stars effectively, exposure times for the average camera need to be on the order of seconds (indeed, so long that even the shortest exposures can reveal motion in the stars), which is hardly conducive to video footage. Alternatively, the aperture can be increased to let more light into the exposure. This could work for the video, but it would overexpose the rest of the footage—turning astronauts and the lunar surface into one big bright white blob of nothing, along with reducing the depth of field and requiring a larger camera. Lacking any nice HDR technology, the cameras used could see the astronauts nice and clearly, but not the stars. Consider that, on a clear night with a full moon, it reflects enough sunlight for a person on Earth to see their shadow. Imagine how bright it is on the surface!

This isn't just a handwave to explain the moon landing photos, the exposure problem for observing stars exists on Earth and is very demonstrable.[16]

[edit] Prop C

One image purports to show the letter "C" on a rock.[17] Conspiracy theorists say that this is a label for a prop piece and that the letter indicates which position it goes in for the shot.[18] There are numerous problems with this, not least of which is the fact that the "letter" is clearly a case of pareidolia. Secondly, this is not seen anywhere else in any of the moon footage or photos. If NASA was dumb enough to put a prop the wrong way up, you'd expect it to be visible on most rocks, or the moon buggy, or the lander itself. Third, and most importantly, no one in film or television labels their set pieces like this precisely because such labels might be seen if the director picks a new angle to shoot from.

[edit] Lunar paparazzi

Alan Bean, Apollo 12. Note the camera attached to his chest. The guy reflected in his visor is "Pete" Conrad.

If you look carefully in the reflection of Buzz Aldrin's visor, it is possible to see Neil Armstrong taking the photo... but wait! He isn't holding up a camera, so how could he be taking the picture? It must be fake!

One would expect that, if it were fake, the visor would be reflecting a full film crew complete with their cameras. Of course, the simpler explanation is to look at the cameras used on the Apollo missions. Unlike technology we use down on Earth, NASA's equipment has to be specialized for use in space and for operation while wearing a space suit. So holding up a compact camera, peering through the viewfinder and snapping away like you're on a holiday just isn't a sensible option. The cameras used were attached to the chest of the suit.[19] Despite the restricted ability to aim the cameras (shooting from the hip, as it were), it's still possible to take very good images, particularly once they had been selected, processed and cleaned up. This explains why we keep repeatedly seeing the same few "great shots" despite there being several thousand photos taken on the moon.

In fact, the sheer number of exposures taken on the moon has been used in the Gish Gallop of evidence in favour of a hoax. With the EVAs on the moon lasting 4834 minutes and 5771 photos taken, some people seem incredulous that the astronauts managed to do anything but take photos during their time on the lunar surface.[20] These figures are highly misleading, not least because the presence of two astronauts immediately doubles the amount of time spent on the moon. Next, ask any professional photographer and they'll tell you that if you get less than 5000 images from nearly 6000 minutes of their time you need to fire your photographer and get a new one.[21] It takes about 1 second to take a photo, many done in batches and also done while they were working. So it wasn't a case of traveling halfway across a lunar crater to take the snaps and then traveling all the way back to the other side to do the work. Really, this is beyond silly.

[edit] Take-off video

The GCTA and the high-gain antenna on Apollo 15's Lunar Rover. On the moon.

The video of the Apollo 17 lunar module taking off (technically, only the ascent stage takes off) often puzzles people, because the camera tilts up to follow it in flight, implying that someone was there operating the camera, much to the delight of conspiracy nuts. In reality, the lunar rover had a television camera, the Ground-Commanded Television Assembly[wp] (GCTA), and it could receive remote control commands from an operator on Earth, which were used to shoot the launch. There are other examples of the GCTA panning and zooming "on its own" when both astronauts are in the frame, away from its controls. It was also used to look around the landing site after the ascent stage has departed (MPEG video).

Another common twist of the claim is that the camera movement in the video appears to have "perfect timing," following the module closely despite the signal delay between the Earth and the Moon. This is easily explained: the take-off time was known in advance and the operators were able to plan ahead, taking into account the signal delay, the camera tilt speed and the angular velocity of the ascent stage. In addition to that, the Apollo 17 clip was the third (and final) try: the first mission to carry the Lunar Rover and the GCTA was Apollo 15, but the camera broke and couldn't tilt up, so it captured only the moment of the launch (video); on Apollo 16 the camera worked correctly, but the lunar module flew out of the frame due to a miscalculation (the astronauts had parked the lunar rover on the wrong spot). "Third time's the charm," indeed. The camera system operator, Ed Fendell, became briefly famous among space buffs because of his spectacular last-chance success.

Holy crap, this picture must be faked!

[edit] Shadows

In some shots, astronaut shadows appear to be cast in different directions. Conspiracy buffs with little-to-zero understanding of how light works claim that this is proof of two light sources; if they were really on the moon there would only be one light source, the sun. However, anyone with even a vague knowledge of reality knows that multiple light sources create two shadows for each object and not one shadow that points in a different direction. The different orientations of the shadows are due to the angles of the background and perspective illusions. This was the first in a series of refutations by MythBusters.[22]

[edit] Image bleed

For various purposes, photographs from the moon feature black crosshairs at regular intervals. In some images, the crosshairs appear behind parts of the image.[23] This suggests, to the mind of the conspiracy hack, that the images have been tampered with, much in the style of Photoshop Disasters. However, careful examination of this shows that only very bright white areas seem to cover the crosshairs.[24] This is a very well known optical and image processing phenomenon where the bright white areas bleed across the exposure, covering the crosshairs as the image was captured. In fact, higher-quality scans of the same photos, which involved better processing techniques, showed the crosshairs intact.

[edit] The flag

The US flag planted during the moon landing visibly shakes while it is being handled. This is claimed to be evidence of wind, and therefore proof that it was filmed on Earth on a soundstage, rather than in the vacuum of space.

In fact, and very counter-intuitively, the vacuum of space is exactly why you can see it wave the way it does. When surrounded by air, the flag would be subject to air resistance, and so, while it would flap in a strong wind, it would also settle down very quickly as the air buffers against its motion. In space, where there is no air to prevent this, any slight movement of the flag will continue until the friction of the material alone slows it down.[25] The American flag on the moon, on the other hand, can only be seen to wave and move while the astronauts are handling it directly. The motion comes not from any wind, but from their movements while positioning it. This gives the material a large kick of kinetic energy and, very importantly, there is no air resistance to slow it down. When on its own and not touched for a significant portion of time it doesn't move, as expected. This is seen with most flapping material on the moon footage, which is often cited as proof of a forgery, but in each case the material is reacting exactly how one would expect it to react in a near vacuum and with a fraction of the Earth's gravity. Oh, and if it was filmed on a soundstage, why would there be wind?

MythBusters cleverly demonstrated the effect by waving a flag in a vacuum chamber, comparing motion with air around it and then under vacuum. This shows the exact behaviour of the material seen on the moon footage.[26] Cloth effects simulators used in computer graphics and animation specifically have functions to simulate air resistance in order to get a fully realistic motion from the simulation - otherwise the simulations spit out exactly the motion observed on the moon. There is also a slight bit of common sense at play here because we're used to living in a 1 atm environment, where flags move because some wind is blowing them about. No one, in their everyday lives at least, sees material waving in a vacuum without the air resistance, so we don't have any experience to compare the moon footage to. So when the flag is seen moving in any way, it's attributed to the presence of air, not the lack of it, as is the case when the motion is examined more closely.

[edit] Arguments against a conspiracy

[edit] Basic reasoning

Tens of thousands of people worked on the Apollo project at NASA, as did a variety of contractors. There were also many people around the world working peripherally on the project, e.g. relay stations in Australia and Spain. Anyone who came forward to demonstrate it was a hoax would have become quite wealthy and famous. This has not happened.

The moon landings took place at the height of the Cold War, and transmissions came from the surface of the Moon. These were picked up all over the world, including by the Soviet Union, the party that had the largest possible interest in exposing a hoax. Had NASA faked it, the world would have known.

In an effort to counter this rather gaping hole in the conspiracy theory, hoax believers claim that the Soviets were bribed in secret with large grain shipments. But there are a number of reasons why this is obviously fallacious:

  1. It is difficult to believe that this bribe would have paid for 40+ years of silence.
  2. It is especially difficult to believe that the information would have remained secret after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  3. Grain shipments were stopped in 1980 and yet the Soviets still kept silent about the moon landings, even though it would have been a massive propaganda coup.
  4. It would seem patently absurd to secretly prop the Soviet Union up with vast amounts of free grain while at the same time spending even more money on a faked moon shot to publicly humiliate the same entity.
  5. The Soviets were not the only other nation which picked up the signals.

[edit] Direct evidence

"Protons, neutrons, I ate a rock from the shocked once, shocked twice, let's see what it can do!"

It is frankly difficult to imagine a project for which there is more real evidence than there is for the landings:

  • We have a large quantity of lunar surface samples (rocks and regolith) that was brought back by the Apollo missions. These samples resemble those brought back by Soviet unmanned missions and do not resemble anything on Earth. Many international scientists have spent their entire careers studying the stuff. If they could prove it did not come from the Moon, they would be household names in an instant.
  • We have a vast number of photographs and video taken on the Moon.
    • Close up footage of dust being kicked up by the astronauts on the Moon or raised by the wheels of the lunar rover shows that the dust fell parabolically, as expected in a vacuum. If the landing footage was shot on Earth, the dust would float around in the air before falling to the ground.
    • There are other little tell-tale signs that the footage was shot over a large area with low gravity and near-perfect vacuum, such as the video of the "feather and hammer fall" demonstration, Armstrong's five foot jump up the ladder of the LM, etc.
  • We have the spacecraft which made the journey and returned, including parts of the Surveyor 3 robotic probe[27] that were brought back by Apollo 12.
  • Many of the people who made the journey are still alive and able to testify to the fact along with the thousands of people who worked on the project.
  • Amateur radio operators are witnesses to the fact the lunar television signal could be picked up with antennae pointed at the moon.
  • Three sets of retroreflectors[wp] (mirrors that reflect incoming light in the direction it came from) were placed on the Moon by Apollo 11, 14 and 15 to be targets for ranging lasers. These retroreflectors have been used extensively by independent parties. The laser ranging experiment in particular is a difficult one for conspiracy theorists to get beyond, and it seems that this fact is what causes regulars to conspiracy websites to tell moon hoaxers to STFU and stop being so stupid.[28][29]
  • Just watch the Saturn V in all its glory.

[edit] Photographic evidence from later missions

LRO image of the Apollo 11 landing site, November 2011, from 15 miles above the surface. The descent stage of the LM is visible, as well as the trails of regolith disturbed by the astronauts and the experiment packages they left on the surface. Resolution? 25 cm/pixel.

In 2007, the Japanese probe SELENE (aka. Kaguya) started mapping the lunar surface. The resolution of its cameras was not enough to image directly the leftover Apollo hardware, but it did spot an area of lighter regolith on an Apollo landing site that could have been caused by its engine.[30] Its data was used to create 3D reconstructions of lunar terrain that matched pictures made by the Apollo astronauts.[31][32]

In 2009, the Indian moon orbiter Chandrayaan-1 took photographs of the Apollo 15 landing site and lunar rover tracks.[33] Also in 2009, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was sent to map the Moon's surface in unprecedented detail.[34] Even before the launch, it was pointed out that the resolution of its cameras would allow, for the first time, a spacecraft to image the Apollo landing sites in sufficient detail to see the descent stages of the Lunar Modules that were left behind. The LRO has imaged the landing sites at least four times:

  • The first images were taken in July 2009, shortly after the LRO reached Moon orbit, but before it had settled down in its proper mapping orbit.[35]
  • In 2009 the LRO imaged several human-made objects on the lunar surface, including both the Apollo missions and the Soviet rovers (including the Lunokhod 2 rover, which had been "lost" for 30 years). The debris left behind by the astronauts is visible and identifiable as clearly artificial. Also visible are the double tracks of the rovers, Soviet and American.[36]
  • On the 6th of September 2011, NASA released even higher quality photographs taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter after it had been lowered from 50 km above the moon's surface to just 25km.[37][38] In these photographs, even the trails left by the astronauts are visible, showing up as dark lines.
  • In mid-2012 LRO scientists confirmed that all but one of the American flags are still standing.[39] (The Apollo 11 flag was set up too close to the LM and was knocked over when the ascent rocket fired.)

And in 2013, China's Yutu rover landed on the moon, the first to do so since Lunokhod 2. The footage taken from the surface is so blatantly consistent with Apollo's that it's adding insult to injury.[40]

[edit] Conclusions

Given the overall context of the moon landings and that of the Space Race with the Soviet Union, there are many, many reasons why people would come forward to conclusively prove that the landings were faked: political gain, monetary gain, pure fame, and so on. Disproving the landings by a first-hand account, or evidence (such as a sneaky photograph of the studio used or something more concrete) would be relatively simple. However, this still flies in the face of what is known. Man-made objects are still on the moon and transmissions came from the moon, there is no "faking" this.[41]

If we assume a conspiracy exists, we need to know what it involves. Given the number of people that would need to be paid off to stay silent, the effort required to pull the wool over the USSR's eyes, the ground based fakery – rockets, launches, control rooms – fakery such as moon rocks and the photography and video taken from the moon... wouldn't it seem more logical and far simpler to just go to the moon?

[edit] See also

Si vous voulez cet article en français, il peut être trouvé à Moon hoax (français).

[edit] External links

[edit] General information about the landings

[edit] Fox Network special responses

These are responding to Conspiracy Theory: Did We Go to the Moon? produced by Bruce Nash, which first aired on February 15, 2001.

[edit] Parodies

[edit] Footnotes

  1. 6% in the USA, according to a 1999 Gallup poll. A more recent poll says 7%.
  2. You'll be amused at the number of people who think that the first one was also the only one.
  3. The Flat-out Truth
  5. ie. "NASA Admits Cosmic Radiation Makes Space Travel Too Dangerous" thread at Godlike Productions, started 1 April 2008
  6. Was the Apollo moon landing real or a hoax?, Nicole Oickle,
  7. Read this for a good laugh
  8. This is pretty much the most weak-ass conspiracy theory ever.
  9. See Occam's Razor
  10. Thus proving that the CIA are a bunch of posers. Real fans prefer the subtitled version.
  11. A webcomic said it, so it must be true.
  12. According to recent theories, the dismissal itself seems to be a hoax. However, these theories need closer investigation due to their highly dubious nature.
  13. Žurnal24 - Tito's Space Program
  14. "Houston, we have a problem!" (Yugoslavian space program) thread at the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum, started 1 January 2012
  15. The Rough Guide To Conspiracy Theories by James McConnachie & Robin Tudge (2005). "The Apollo Moon Landing," p.318
  16. Tower Bridge at night - look! No stars! Must be fake!
  17. The original, and the one with the C.
  18. Humorously rejected by Penn and Teller
  19. Victor Hasselblad was a very lucky man.
  20. Was the moon landing fake? - specifically this image if you can't be bothered to Ctrl-F your way through.
  21. For comparison, the average wedding photographer will take around 1,500 shots through the course of the day. Even assuming they work all day, that's 1,500 shots in about 400 minutes. Then the really expensive ones work as a duo and can take 4,000 shots without breaking sweat. And of course, anyone who has been to a sufficiently sized party will immediately notice a couple of hundred pop up on Facebook the next day, and it's not like everyone spent every second of the night posing for photos, right?
  22. MythBusters Moon Landing Hoax - Part 1
  23. OMG FAKE
  24. Not so simple now, is it?
  25. Here's a video of how a flag waves in the breeze, there are notable differences in the motion compared to how the flag on the moon "flaps."
  26. MythBusters - Moon Flag Waving Hoax
  27. JPL
  28. Above Top Secret - If the moon landing was faked, why are retro reflectors returning light?
  29. Godlike Productions - Game Over for NASA Moon-Landing Hoax
  30. [1]
  31. [2]
  32. [3]
  33. [4]
  34. See the Wikipedia article on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
  35. NASA: LRO Sees Apollo Landing Sites July 17, 2009
  36. - Apollo 16: Footsteps Under High Sun - LRO Gets Additional View of Apollo 11 Landing Site (obviously photoshopped...)
  37. NASA: NASA Spacecraft Images Offer Sharper Views of Apollo Landing Sites September 6, 2011
  38. Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera: Skimming the Moon September 6, 2011
  39. BBC
  40. Chang’e-3 Lunar Landing Video gives Astronaut Eye View of Descent & Touchdown, Universe Today
  41. Someone on the ATS forums tries to get across the absurdity of the scale of the fraud these people believe in.
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