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Photo courtesy of NASA. |
“You’re the one who said you walked on the moon when you didn’t. . . . You’re a coward, and a liar, and a thief!” That was the charge Bart Sibrel, creator of the documentary A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, leveled at astronaut Buzz Aldrin outside a hotel in Los Angeles on September 9, 2002. Aldrin socked him in the jaw. (1) While Sibrel became the butt of jokes as a result, it didn’t deter him from trying to persuade other astronauts to swear on the Bible that they had walked on the moon. It’s just one example of the depth of feeling over what has been described as the greatest government cover-up of all time—the claim that twelve different Americans walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972.
Most of the theories contain common elements: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is said to have faked various pieces of evidence to make it seem as if there had been six manned landings by Apollos 11, 12, and 14 through 17. Some even claim that the calamitous Apollo 13 mission was a hoax designed to reengage the American public with the space program when it was in danger of losing its funding.
Most of the theories contain common elements: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is said to have faked various pieces of evidence to make it seem as if there had been six manned landings by Apollos 11, 12, and 14 through 17. Some even claim that the calamitous Apollo 13 mission was a hoax designed to reengage the American public with the space program when it was in danger of losing its funding.
Many people at the time challenged the reasons for Neil Armstrong and his Apollo crewmates going, feeling that the huge sums involved might have been better spent on more terrestrial concerns. Among conspiracy theorists, there are those who think that NASA wasn’t be prepared to be embarrassed if something went wrong with an actual moon-landing attempt, so the agency spent the allotted money to create a fake event that it could control properly. Others posit that NASA was so desperate to keep money flowing into its coffers that it would rather deceive the public than admit that the task of putting a man on the moon was beyond it. Others suggest that the American government wasn’t prepared to lose face in front of the Soviets in the middle of the Cold War by not responding to the challenge set out by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, so it created a fiction that it could use as a propaganda weapon. Finally, there’s a school of thought that the moon landings were created in order to divert public attention away from the conflict in Southeast Asia. There’s only one thing the theorists agree on: the American people were lied to about the Apollo missions.
The space program was given impetus by JFK’s pledge in May 1961 that “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth” would be a top priority for his administration, and accusations that NASA were not really sending men into space stretch back almost as far. One theory regarding the moon landings suggests that NASA was so impressed with acclaimed film director Stanley Kubrick’s imagined moon footage in his 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey that they hired him to create the material that was eventually broadcast from Apollos 11 and 12; in 1980, the Flat Earth Society’s Charles Johnson maintained that the scripts for the moon landings had been written by Arthur C. Clarke, Kubrick’s partner on 2001. (2)
Some theorists linked the allegedly fake footage to Area 51, since the ground in the part of Nevada where the secret installation is located is very similar to the lunar surface seen in the NASA footage. The 1978 Peter Hyams film Capricorn One—in which a mission to Mars is falsified—added fuel to the fire, although Hyams told Wired magazine in 1994, “I was aware that there were people who believed that we never walked on the moon, but I never read their books or consulted with them. And frankly, I think they are being totally ludicrous.” (3)
In the same article, conspiracy theorist Bill Kaysing, former head of technical publications for Rocketdyne, the engine contractors for the Apollo missions, was convinced that the landings were fakes; William L. Brian, the author of Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the U.S. Space Program, explained that he thought the missions were a cover for something else. (4)
According to a 1970 poll, 30 percent of the 1,721 respondents thought the landings were fake; one person believed the footage was shot in the Arizona desert, while a Georgia resident couldn’t understand how her television could get signals from the moon when it couldn’t even pick up New York stations! There was obviously something about the Apollo missions that didn’t ring true with many of those watching. In 2002, NASA commissioned a book by James Oberg to lay the myths to rest once and for all, but criticism that the space agency was displaying poor judgment and a lack of confidence in commissioning the book caused it to abort the project very quickly, according to its spokesman, Bob Jacob.
The argument most commonly used to refute the arguments is that there were so many people involved to a greater or lesser degree with the moon landings that it would be totally impossible for a hoax to be kept secret. Sooner or later, someone would reveal the truth—whether to a family member they’d lied to for countless years, or just accidentally. The odds that nearly half a million people could keep quiet are appropriately astronomical; no one directly connected to the Apollo program has indicated that the landings are faked. To be fair, this is an argument that can be leveled against many of the conspiracies that we are examining in this book; so what are the specific charges that the conspiracy theorists make?
One school of thought suggests that a trip to the moon isn’t possible at all. The astronauts wouldn’t be able to survive exposure to the high radiation in the Van Allen belt surrounding the earth. The huge solar flare of 1972 should have fried the crew of Apollo 16—and if theirs was a faked mission, then they all were.
As to the solar flares that should have caused a problem for the crew of Apollo 16, the question is, what solar flares? The astronauts were away from the Earth between April 16 and April 27, 1972. The large sunspot that caused the flares happened on August 2. Even had the astronauts been caught in the flares, according to NASA radiation health officer Francis Cucinotta, they wouldn’t necessarily have been fatal, if the men had returned to earth for treatment quickly. (5)
Most theorists simply say that NASA never tried to go to the moon (or at the very most, kept the astronauts in Earth orbit for the requisite time). The primary evidence quoted for alleged deceit comes from the photographic record made of the missions. The photographs simply couldn’t have been taken on the moon for a number of reasons: The film wouldn’t have survived the radiation on the journey or the heat of the lunar surface. The quality overall is too good. Crosshairs appear to be behind objects. An astronaut who is standing on the lander steps should be in full shadow, but is seen in clear contrast. Shadows fall in different directions, indicating more than one primary light source. Some shots appear to show identical backgrounds, although the locations they depict are said to be far apart. And there are no stars in any of the shots.
Some of these details are simpler to explain than others. Many of the faults, such as the crosshairs, appear only on copies or scans of the pictures, and as with any form of duplication, the later the generation a copy is, the more chance there is of deviation from the original. When checked, the NASA originals do not have many of the various faults ascribed to them. (6)
The films were kept in metal containers to prevent radiation damage and kept out of direct sunlight to prevent melting.
As far as the general quality being too good is concerned, firstly, the astronauts took some state of the art equipment with them; Apollo 11, for example, was equipped with one 70-mm Hasselblad electric camera, two 70-mm lunar-surface superwide-angle cameras, one Hasselblad El data camera, two 16-mm Maurer data-acquisition cameras, one 35-mm surface-close-up stereoscopic camera, and a television camera. But even then, faults happened, and for obvious reasons, NASA does not regularly distribute all the end-of-film-roll shots, misfires, and other erroneous pictures. What is generally circulated marks the best of the many hundreds of shots that were taken by the various astronauts when they were on the moon and by the remote-control cameras the men were also operating.
The question about the picture of Buzz Aldrin on the ladder (NASA photo AS11-40-5869) is slightly trickier to answer. Logically, you would expect him to be within shadow when standing on the ladder leading into the lander, but he is well lit. This lighting is actually caused by the reflectiveness of the lunar soil, which has an albedo of around eight and threw back enough light from the sun onto his white spacesuit to illuminate it. (7)
NASA photo AS14-68-9487, taken during Apollo 14’s time on the moon, is equally famous for “proving” that there was more than one light source, since the shadows aren’t parallel. However, those who believe this photo is a fake don’t take into account the uneven nature of the lunar surface; if shadows fall onto a slope rather than a level surface, then they will seem to be caused by a different light source. (8)
The “painted backgrounds” theory is especially applied to shots taken by the Apollo 15 crew; what appears to be the same backdrop is present with the lunar module in some shots and not in others. This theory doesn’t take into account the lack of atmosphere on the moon; with no air, it’s harder to judge distances and sizes because of the lack of haze. The two shots were taken a few hundred yards apart, with the mountains some miles away. (9) Apollo 16 lander pilot Charlie Duke has commented on the difficulty of judging distances because of the difficulty in assessing the size of rocks.
As to why there aren’t any stars visible in the photos, the most concise explanation is provided by the “Bad Astronomer,” Dr. Philip Plait, at his website badastronomy.com. The pictures being taken by the astronauts were in lighting conditions that weren’t conducive to allowing the maximum amount of light in, and on the lunar surface, the stars are a lot less bright than a white spacesuit lit by the sun. As Plait explains, “To take a picture of a bright object with a bright background, you need to set the exposure time to be fast, and close down the aperture setting.”
One of the key claims that supposedly proves the landings were faked in a film studio centers on the American flag planted in the lunar soil during the first mission. If you look at the footage of Aldrin planting the flag, it does appear to flutter for a moment. However, careful examination shows that it moves only when it is being handled by the astronaut or immediately thereafter; when the flag is in place, it doesn’t move (nor, rather surprisingly if there were a breeze, does any of the dust). NASA designed a telescoping horizontal support to keep the flag in position; once that support was erected, it acted as a pendulum, allowing the flag to move briefly in the vacuum.
Do the footprints that were left by the astronauts also “prove” that they weren’t on the moon? There’s no moisture on the moon’s surface, goes the argument, so the prints wouldn’t have had the clarity visible in the pictures. This might be true if we were talking about Earth sand, but the moon dust doesn’t react the same way. Because it hasn’t been weathered, the particles that form it have sharp edges, which don’t bond together until they’re impacted—say, by the boot of an astronaut—at which point, they retain the shape of the impact.
The video footage of the astronauts is also challenged. Was it filmed on a sound stage, like the scene in the 1971 James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever, which shows a fake lunar landscape with a marked similarity to the footage shown over the previous two years? Was it perhaps filmed at Area 51 or, as the Flat Earth Society maintained, in the California hills? The slow-motion movements that supposedly demonstrated that the astronauts were in one-sixth gravity could have been achieved either by running the camera at a faster speed and then replaying the footage at the correct rate, or by using harnesses that lifted the men over the “lunar” surface. However, while these methods were used for various fictionalized accounts of the lunar landings, it’s clear that the dust kicked up by the astronauts’ boots or moved by the lunar rover was reacting in a way consistent with one-sixth gravity, rather than as it would on Earth; a controlled experiment in forced one-sixth gravity demonstrated similar patterns of movement were the most logical. (10)
The movement of the dust is also raised in two other theories. First, the lander’s arrival should have blown all the dust away from the area and created a huge blast crater. In fact, with no air, the only impetus for the dust to move was the physical contact with the lander, which was being brought in at a very low speed, and the vacuum on the moon means that there was no “blast” of air from the lander as it arrived. And again, because of the vacuum, there wasn’t air constraining the thrust into a narrow column, so the pressure was spread out.
As with so many conspiracy theories, there are accusations of lost or deliberately mislaid documents proving a conspiracy was at work. The often-repeated notion that the blueprints and plans for the lunar module and the rover were destroyed, and that the Saturn V plans are somehow “off limits” was exposed as a hoax by Paul Shawcross from NASA’s Office of Inspector General in 2005. The Marshall Space Flight Center holds the Saturn V blueprints, while redacted versions of the lander and rover blueprints appear on the NASA website.
There are some queries about the status of some of the slow-scan television tapes from Apollo 11, which do seem to have disappeared. Were these still available, then modern technology would be able to create very high-quality versions of the pictures. However, NASA suspects that what the Sydney Morning Herald, which broke the story in 2005, called “[o]ne giant blunder for mankind” came about because the original analog data tapes were simply routinely erased and reused; since the pictures they contained had been converted in real time and broadcast around the world, there were multiple copies available and no need to keep the original tapes.
There is also ample evidence of the astronauts’ presence on the moon: the lunar reconnaissance orbiter, a robotic spacecraft that was launched on June 18, 2009, has photographed the landing sites of all six successful moon missions. The laser ranging retro reflectors from the lunar laser-ranging experiment continue to function and are regularly used by the Observatoire de la Côte D’Azur, McDonald, Apache Point, and Haleakala observatories.
The Apollo crews also brought moon rocks back to Earth. Although there are claims that these specimens are really rocks retrieved from Antarctica by the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who was Marshall Space Flight director in 1967, they demonstrate different geochemical traits than ordinary Earth rocks—and most of them are more than 200 million years older than their terrestrial counterparts. As Dr. Marc Norman, a lunar geologist at the University of Tasmania, explained in 2001, “Lunar samples have almost no water trapped in their crystal structure, and common substances such as clay minerals that are ubiquitous on Earth are totally absent in Moon rocks. We’ve found particles of fresh glass in Moon rocks that were produced by explosive volcanic activity and by meteorite impacts over three billion years ago. The presence of water on Earth rapidly breaks down such volcanic glass in only a few million years. These rocks must have come from the Moon!”
Rocks blasted from the lunar surface by meteorite impacts have been discovered in Antarctica, it is true, but not until 1979, and their origin was not confirmed for another three years—a decade after the moon missions had come to an abrupt end. It’s also worth noting that no scientist who has studied the samples brought back from the moon has challenged their provenance.
So did Neil Armstrong and his successors in the Apollo project really walk on the moon? Until there is a piece of unchallengeable evidence that shows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Armstrong’s “one small step” really was not on the lunar surface, then the idea of a conspiracy simply fails.
Footnotes
1. The incident, complete with slow motion replay, can be seen on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUI36tPKDg4.
2. "The Flat-Out Truth" by Robert J. Schadewald, in Science Digest, July 1980, reprinted at http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/fe-scidi.htm.
3. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.09/moon.land.html?pg=5&topic=&topic_set=
4. ”Alternative 3”, the British hoax TV program from 1977, was based in part on this theory.
5. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/27jan_solarflares/
6. A comprehensive, image-by-image discussion of these issues can be found at http://www.clavius.org/index.html.
7. The straight science can be found at clavius.org, but a more fun version debunking this and other prevalent moon-landing-hoax theories can be seen in the Mythbusters special episode “NASA Moon Landing,” first broadcast by the Discovery Channel on August 27, 2008. Of course, theorists have claimed that NASA’s cooperation with the program renders the evidence invalid!
8. Also demonstrated on the Mythbusters special.
9. http://www.studyphysics.ca/apollo2.pdf, page 19, has far more detail on this particular idea.
10. Mythbusters again.
