The moon landing conspiracy

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, said astronaut Neil Armstrong from Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969

The day humankind set foot on the moon should be considered nothing short of a triumph, and many think it to be precisely that

However, as with anything of this magnitude, there will be detractors

There will be people who see things a lot differently

So who is right? Who is wrong? Who is lying and who is not? We will let you be the judge as we dive down the moon landing conspiracy rabbit hole

In a nutshell, moon landing conspiracy theories allege that either some or all Apollo program elements and the associated moon landings were nothing but hoaxes

Some believe that these hoaxes were staged by NASA who may have gotten help from other organizations to pull off the world's most famous trick

So where did these theories originate? In 1976, a former US Navy officer with a bachelor's degree in English named Bill Kaysing self-published what would become an influential and highly controversial book called We Never Went to the Moon, America's $30 Billion Swindle

Although he had no prior knowledge of rockets or technical writing, in 1956, Kaysing landed a job as a senior technical writer with Rocketdyne, the company that built the F1 engines used on the Saturn V rocket

Kaysing worked at the company's propulsion field laboratory until the year 1963

It was the many allegations in Kaysing's book that effectively sparked a discussion about the moon landings being faked

According to the book, the chance of a successful crewed landing on the moon was believed to be 0

0017%

Kaysing insists that even though the USSR was closely monitoring NASA, it would have been easier for them to fake the moon landings than to actually go there

In the year 1980, NASA was accused of staging the moon landings by a group known as the Flat Earth Society

The FES contended that the moon landings were staged by Hollywood and sponsored by Walt Disney, based on a script by legendary writer Arthur C

Clarke and directed by noted filmmaker Stanley Kubrick

A folklorist by the name of Linda Degg suggests that writer-director Peter Hyam's 1978 movie Capricorn 1 shows a fake journey to Mars in a spacecraft that looks almost exactly like the Apollo craft

This may have inadvertently given a boost to the hoax theory's popularity during the post-Vietnam War era

The main question is, what, if anything, is there to gain from faking a moon landing? The answer goes all the way back to the Cold War

Back in the 60s, the United States engaged in a space race with the Soviet Union

The ability to land a manned craft on the moon was viewed as being both a technical and national accomplishment

However, doing so would have significant risks

It would also be costly

During a famous 1962 speech, then President John F

Kennedy famously stated that the United States chose to go because it was hard

Conspiracy theorists allege that NASA hoaxed the landings as a means to avoid humiliation and ensure that it would receive continued government funding

Kaysing claimed in his book that NASA raised about 30 billion US dollars to go to the moon and that some of this money could have been used to pay off lots of people

Most conspiracists believe that sending men to the moon was an impossibility at the time

They maintain that the landings had to be hoaxed to fulfill Kennedy's 1961 goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth

In 1973, NASA accounted for Apollo's cost to the US Congress and it totaled out to 25

4 billion US dollars

Many conspiracists focus on the inconsistencies or perceived gaps in the historical record of the moon landing missions

Their main point of contention is that the entire crude landing program was a hoax from start to finish

Some claim that the technology to send men to the moon was lacking

Others say that solar flares, the Van Allen radiation belts, coronal mass ejections, solar wind and cosmic rays would make such a trip completely impossible

A pair of scientists from Argonne National Laboratory named Vince Calder and Andrew Johnson offered detailed answers to conspiracists' claims

They maintained that NASA's portrayal of the moon landing is fundamentally accurate

According to James Longusky, an American scientist, inventor, writer and educator known for his contributions to astrodynamics and space mission design, given their size and complexity, the conspiracy theories are impossible

Let's run the numbers

A moon landing hoax would require the participation of more than 400,000 people who worked on the Apollo project for nearly a decade, the 12 men who walked on the moon, the six others who flew with them as command module pilots, and another half-dozen astronauts who orbited the moon

That's just the start, too

The secret would need to be kept by hundreds of thousands of people, including scientists, technicians, engineers, astronauts, scientists and skilled laborers

Longusky contends that it would have been far easier to land on the moon than to generate such a massive conspiracy to fake the landings

As of this documentary, no one from NASA or the United States government has said that the moon landings were hoaxes

Surely by now, someone would have come forward to blow the whistle on a hoax of this magnitude, but you never know

The majority of the moon landing conspiracists focus mainly on NASA's photos

They point out artifacts and oddities in the films and pictures taken on the moon

Over the decades, many photography experts, including those who were unrelated to NASA, have reported that the oddities in question are entirely consistent with what should be expected from a real moon landing

They are not at all consistent with tweaked or studio imagery

Some of the photographic inconsistencies are as follows

Theory

The cameras used in the landing were fitted with a transparent plate glass with the reticle etched on

This would make it impossible for any photographed objects to appear in front of its grid

Despite this fact, some photos appear to show the crosshairs of the reticle behind objects

Conspiracists frequently cite this as evidence that particular objects were pasted over the photographs, and that's why the reticle was obscured

Official explanation

This obscured object effect only appears in scanned and copied photos, not the originals

This effect is caused by overexposure

The bright white areas of the emulsion bleed over the thin black crosshairs

The crosshairs are only about 0

004 inches thick

Therefore, emulsion would only have to bleed about half that much to obscure its entirety

Theory

Crosshairs are sometimes rotated or appear in the wrong place

Official explanation

This effect is a result of popular photos being manipulated and or cropped to have a more significant aesthetic impact

Theory

The quality of the photographs is impossibly high

Official explanation

The Apollo astronauts employed high resolution Hasselblad 500EL cameras with Carl Zeiss optics and a 70mm medium format film magazine to take photos

Theory

The pictures have to be fake because there are no stars in any of the photos

Official explanation

Whether you're examining photos taken from the space shuttle or even photos captured during sporting events being held at night, you'll notice that stars are rarely seen

The light from the sun in outer space, in the Earth-Moon system, is at least as bright as the sunlight that reaches the Earth's surface on a clear day at noon

Cameras used for imaging subjects illuminated by sunlight are set for daylight exposure

Simply put, the dim light of the stars cannot provide enough exposure to record visible images

All crewed landings happened during the lunar daytime

That is why the stars were outshone by the sun and by sunlight that was being reflected off the Moon's surface

Theory

The angle and color of shadows are inconsistent, suggesting the use of artificial lights

Official explanation

Shadows on the Moon are complicated by reflective light, uneven ground, wide angle lens distortion and lunar dust

There are several light sources on the Moon

The Sun, sunlight reflected from the Earth, sunlight reflected from the Moon's surface, and sunlight reflected from the astronauts and the lunar module

All of these sources are further complicated by lunar dust, wide angle lens distortion and uneven ground

Because of this, shadows that fall into craters and hills may look longer, shorter and distorted

Theory

Identical backgrounds appear in photos which, according to their captions, were taken miles apart

This is clear evidence of a painted background

Official explanation

The backgrounds seen in the photos were similar, but not identical

On Earth, objects that are further away will look less detailed and fainter

The Moon has no atmosphere or haze to obscure objects

Therefore, mountains that could be many miles away will appear both clearer and nearer from different angles

Theory

The number of photos taken is questionably high

Speeds indicate that one image was taken every 50 seconds

Official explanation

Simplified gear with fixed settings allowed two photos a second

The calculation of one image per 50 seconds was based upon there being a lone astronaut on the surface

It doesn't take into account two astronauts taking photographs at the same time during their extra-vehicle activity

Theory

The photos have strange artifacts, such as the two seemingly matching seas on a rock found on the ground

These have been labelled as possible studio props

Official explanation

The sea-shaped artifacts are likely printing imperfections and don't appear in the original film from the camera

Theory

A Western Australian citizen claimed that during the live broadcast of the lunar landing, a Coca-Cola bottle appeared for two or three moments across the lower right part of her television screen

The resident also claimed that several letters appeared in the Perth newspaper, The Western Australian, mentioning the Coca-Cola bottle incident within 10 days of the lunar landing

Official explanation

No such newspaper reports or recordings have been found

Theory

Who filmed Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon? Official explanation

Cameras on the lunar module did

There are tons of arguments and theories about the moon landing, which run the gamut from mechanical issues to environmental issues

These are too numerous to even begin to comb through

No one has brought to light a single shred of evidence that couldn't be explained

However, there are two particular issues that are hard to ignore

The blueprints and design and development drawings of the machines involved in the Apollo moon landing are missing

If that wasn't strange enough, the original Apollo 11 data tapes, which contain telemetry and the high-quality video of the first moonwalk, are also missing

You would think that such vital documents would be almost impossible to misplace

Who could do such a thing? How could this even happen? NASA archivist at Goddard Space Flight Center, Dr

David R

Williams, alongside Apollo 11's flight director Eugene F

Krantz, have both admitted that the original high-quality Apollo 11 telemetry data tapes are currently missing

Conspiracists point to this as evidence that they never really existed

Apollo 11's telemetry tapes differed from other telemetry tapes of previous moon landings because they were home to the raw television broadcast

Let's look at some technical aspects of the footage itself

The Apollo 11 lander had a slow-scan television camera installed on it

As a means to broadcast the images to regular television sets, a scan conversion had to be performed

The radio telescope at Parks Observatory in Australia was able to receive the telemetry from the moon at the time of the Apollo 11 moonwalk

Parks had a larger antenna than NASA's antenna in Australia at the Honeysuckle Creek tracking station

Therefore, it received a higher-quality picture

In addition to that, it received better image quality than NASA's antenna at Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex

This direct television signal, along with the telemetry data, was recorded onto 1-inch 14-track analog tape at Parks

The original slow-scan television transmission had better contrast and detail than the scan-converted pictures

There's just one problem

It's also the original tape that is missing

A crude, real-time scan conversion of the slow-scan television signal was done in Australia before it was broadcast worldwide

That being said, still photos of the original slow-scan television image are available

There's also about 15 minutes of footage that was filmed by an amateur 8-millimeter film camera currently available

Later Apollo missions did not use slow-scan television cameras

According to Dr

Williams, some of the telemetry tapes from the scientific experiments from the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments package left on the Moon still exist

The program ran until 1977, and copies of those tapes have been located

Others are seeking the missing telemetry tapes for far different reasons

The recordings are home to the original and highest-quality video feed from the Apollo 11 landing

Many former Apollo personnel want to locate the tapes for posterity, whilst NASA engineers looking towards future Moon missions believe the recordings could come in handy for their design studies

Here are the facts as we know them

The original Apollo 11 tapes were sent to be stored at the United States National Archives in 1970

However, by 1984, all the Apollo 11 tapes were returned to the Goddard Space Flight Center at their request

In November 2006, Cosmos Online reported that about 100 data tapes that were recorded in Australia during the Apollo 11 mission were located in a small marine science laboratory housed inside the main physics building at the Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia

NASA was sent one of the old tapes for analysis, but the slow-scan television images were not on the tape

Then things got even stranger

In July 2009, NASA suggested that it must have erased the original Apollo 11 Moon footage years ago so that it could reuse the tape

Again, why would anyone delete something of such historical significance? NASA issued a final report on the Apollo 11 telemetry tapes in December 2009

Senior engineer Dick Navska, who was in charge of the live television recordings during the Apollo missions, was put in charge of the restoration project

According to Navska, after a three-year search, the inescapable conclusion was that about 45 tapes of Apollo 11 video were erased and reused

The 45 tapes consisted of an estimated 15 tapes recorded at each of the three tracking stations

Was this human error or an unfortunate coincidence? We may never know

American conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel cites the relative level of the United States and USSR space technology as evidence that the moon landings could not have happened

For much of the early stages of the space race, the USSR was ahead of the United States, yet in the end, the USSR was never able to fly a crewed craft to the moon, let alone land one on the surface

It is argued that because the USSR was unable to do this, the United States should have also been unable to develop the technology to do so

Sibrel claims that during the Apollo program, the USSR had five times more crewed hours in space than the United States and notes that the USSR was the first to achieve many of the early milestones in outer space

However, most of the Soviet milestones were matched by the United States within a year and sometimes within weeks

In 1965, the United States started to achieve many firsts, such as the first successful space rendezvous, which were essential steps in a mission to the moon

In terms of spacecraft hours, the USSR had 460 hours of space flight, the United States had 1024 hours

In terms of astronaut and cosmonaut time, the USSR had 534 hours of crewed space flight and the United States had amassed 1,992 hours

By the time of Apollo 11, the United States had a lead much more extensive than that

Moreover, the USSR didn't develop a successful rocket capable of a crewed lunar mission until the 80s

Their N1 rocket failed on all four launch attempts between 1969 and 1972

The Soviet LK Lunar Lander was tested in uncrewed low-Earth orbit flights three times in 1970 and 1971

In a televised program about the moon landing hoax allegations, Fox Entertainment Group listed the deaths of 10 astronauts and two civilians related to the crewed space flight program as part of an alleged cover-up

All of the deaths they cited, except for one, occurred at least 20 months before Apollo 11 and subsequent flights

As of November 2018, four of the 12 Apollo astronauts who landed on the moon between 1969 and 1972 are still alive, including Buzz Aldrin

Nine of the 12 Apollo astronauts who flew to the moon without landing between 1968 and 1972 are still alive, including Michael Collins

The number of deaths within the American Astronaut Corps during the run-up to Apollo and during the Apollo missions is similar to the number of deaths incurred by the Russians

During the period 1961 to 1972, at least eight Russian-serving and former cosmonauts died

Has NASA ever formally responded to all of the hoax allegations? Yes, yes they did

In June 1977, NASA issued a fact sheet responding to recent claims that the Apollo moon landings had been hoaxed

The fact sheet is unusually blunt and regards faking the moon landings to be absurd and outlandish

NASA refers to the rocks and particles collected from the moon as being evidence of the program's legitimacy as they claim that these rocks could not have been formed under conditions on Earth

NASA also notes that all of the operations and phases of the Apollo program were closely followed and under the scrutiny of the news media from liftoff to splashdown

NASA responds to Bill Kaysing's book, We Never Went to the Moon, by identifying one of his claims of fraud regarding the lack of a crater left on the moon's surface by the landing of the lunar module and refuting it with facts about the soil and cohesive nature of the surface of the moon

The fact sheet was reissued on February 14, 2001, the day before the Fox television broadcast of Conspiracy Theory, Did We Land on the Moon? The documentary reinvigorated the public's interest in conspiracy theories and the possibility that the moon landings were faked, which has provoked NASA to defend its name once again

Legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick has been accused of having produced a good portion of Apollo's 11 and 12's footage, probably because he had just directed 2001 A Space Odyssey

Kubrick's film is set partly on the moon and it featured advanced special effects for its time

Conspiracists claim that when Kubrick was in post-production on 2001, in early 1968, NASA secretly approached him to direct the first three moon landings

Whilst the launch and splashdown would be authentic, the spacecraft would never leave Earth's orbit

The fake footage would be broadcast as live from the moon

There's never been official evidence to support this theory, which overlooks many facts

Kubrick's movie, 2001, was released before the first Apollo landing

Kubrick's depiction of the moon's surface significantly differs from the way that it appeared in the Apollo footage

The movement of characters whilst on the moon in 2001 is vastly different from that of the filmed behaviours of the Apollo astronauts

In addition to that, the fictitious moon itself doesn't resemble an environment with one sixth the gravity of Earth

Several scenes in 2001 show dust billowing as the spacecraft landed

The vacuum-like environment of the moon would make the scattering of dust an impossibility

Kubrick did hire Frederick Ordway and Harry Lang, who had worked for NASA and major aerospace contractors, to work with him in 2001

Kubrick also utilised some leftover lenses from a batch made by Zeiss for NASA

Kubrick only got this lens for his 1975 film

The lens was initially crafted to be a still photo lens

As a result, changes had to be made to it to be used for motion filming

An article entitled Stanley Kubrick and the Moon Hoax appeared on the computer message service Usenet in 1995

One passage regarding how Kubrick was supposedly convinced to participate in the conspiracy reads, NASA further leveraged their position by threatening to publicly reveal the heavy involvement of Mr Kubrick's younger brother Raoul with the American Communist Party

This would have been an intolerable embarrassment for Mr Kubrick, especially since the release of Dr Strangelove

Kubrick had no such brother

The article was a spoof, complete with a giveaway sentence describing Kubrick shooting the moonwalk on location on the moon

In spite of its obvious silliness, the claim was taken up in earnest

Paranormal radio host Clyde Lewis used it almost word for word, whereas conspiracy theorist Jay Wheatner gave the brother a more senior status within the party

He said no one knows how the powers that be convinced Kubrick to direct the Apollo landings

The fact that his brother Raoul Kubrick was the head of the American Communist Party may have been one of the avenues pursued by the government to get Stanley to cooperate

In July 2009, Wheatner posted on his webpage Secrets of the Shining that Kubrick's 1980 film based upon the Stephen King novel is a veiled confession of his role in the scam project

This thesis was the subject of refutation in an article published on a website called Seeker nearly half a year later

In December 2015, a video surfaced which supposedly featured Kubrick being interviewed shortly before his 1999 death

The footage showed the director confessing to filmmaker T

Patrick Murray that the Apollo moon landings were faked

Some quick research found that the now infamous video was a hoax

Talks of the moon landing conspiracy eventually made its way into academia

In the year 2002, NASA commissioned 15,000 USD to American space journalist and historian James Oberg to write a point-by-point rebuttal of the hoax claims

Later on, NASA cancelled the commission a few months later after complaints that the book would lend credence to the accusations

Oberg says that belief in the hoax theories is not the fault of the conspiracists but rather that of teachers and people, including NASA, who should provide information to the public

He hopes one day to finish his book

In the year 2004, Ken Skelton and Martin Hendry of the University of Glasgow were awarded a grant by the United Kingdom-based Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council to investigate the various moon landing conspiracy theories

In November 2004, they gave a lecture at the Glasgow Science Centre where the top 10 claims by conspiracists were individually addressed and thoroughly refuted

Investigation of moon landing conspiracies have been featured on several popular television programmes over the years and has even become a part of pop culture

A 2008 episode of Mythbusters was dedicated to the moon landings

The Mythbusters crew tested many of the conspiracists' claims

Some of their tests were even conducted in a NASA training facility

All of the conspiracists' allegations examined on the show were labelled as having been busted, meaning that the conspiracists' claims were not valid

Moon landing conspiracists insist that observatories under Hubble Space Telescope should have the ability to photograph the landing sites on the moon

This allegation directly implies that the world's major observatories and the Hubble programme are complicit in the hoax by refusing to take photos of the landing sites

Pictures of the moon have been made by Hubble, including at least two Apollo landing sites

However, the Hubble resolution limits viewing of lunar objects to sizes no smaller than 60 to 75 yards, which is insufficient to see the features of any landing site

In April 2001, Leonard David published an article on the website Space

com that showed a photo taken by the Clementine mission, a joint space project between the Ballistic Missile Defence Organisation and NASA

The image showed a scattered dark spot at the site identified as being the landing site of the Apollo 15

The evidence was noticed by Yuri Shkurotov of the Kharkiv Astronomical Observatory in Ukraine and Misha Kreslavsky of the Department of Geological Sciences at Brown University

According to Bernard Foying, chief scientist of the European Space Agency, their uncrewed probe, SMART-1, sent back photos of the landing sites

During an interview on the website, Foying said, given SMART-1's initial high orbit, however, it may prove difficult to see the artefact

Alex R

Blackwell of the University of Hawaii pointed out that some 2002 photos taken by Apollo astronauts whilst in orbit around the Moon show the landing sites

In 2002, a United Kingdom newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, published an article saying that European astronomers at a telescope facility operated by the European Southern Observatory, called the Very Large Telescope, would use their technology to view the landing sites

According to the story, Dr

Richard West said that his team would take a high-resolution image of one of the Apollo landing sites

Noted conspiracist Marcus Allen answered that no photos of hardware on the Moon would convince him that crewed landings had ever happened

The telescope was used to image the Moon and provided a resolution of 430 feet, which was not good enough to resolve the 14-foot-wide lunar landers or their long shadows

The CELINE Moon Orbiter was launched from Tanegashima Space Center on September 14, 2007, by JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

CELINE orbited the Moon at about 62 miles altitude

JAXA reported during May 2008 that they had detected the halo generated by the Apollo 15 lunar module engine exhaust from a terrain camera image

A three-dimensional reconstructed photo matched the terrain of an Apollo 15 photo taken from the Moon's surface

On July 17, 2009, NASA released low-resolution engineering test photos of the Apollo 11, Apollo 14, Apollo 15, Apollo 16, and Apollo 17 landing sites that have been photographed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter as part of the process of starting its primary mission

The images show the descent stage of the landers from each mission on the Moon's surface

Whilst the scientific community as a whole has enjoyed the LRO images, they have not done anything to convince conspiracists that the landings happened

On September 1, 2009, India's lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 took photos of the Apollo 15 landing site as well as tracks of the lunar rovers

The Indian Space Research Organisation launched its uncrewed lunar probe on September 8, 2008, from Satish Dhawan Space Centre

The photos were taken by a hyperspectral camera fitted as part of the mission's image payload

In 2010, China launched its second lunar probe, the Chang'e 2

The probe has the ability to photograph the lunar surface with a resolution of up to 4

3 feet

It also spotted traces of the Apollo landings

But what about the moon rocks brought back to Earth? The very objects that NASA touts as irrefutable proof

Could they be fake? During its lifespan, the Apollo program collected 840 pounds of moon rocks during its six crewed missions

Analyses by scientists worldwide all agree that these rocks came from the Moon

No published accounts in peer-reviewed scientific journals exist that dispute this claim

The Apollo samples are easily distinguishable from both meteorites and Earth rocks

They show a lack of hydrous alteration products, show evidence of having undergone impact events on an airless body, and have unique geochemical traits

Furthermore, most are more than 200 million years older than the oldest Earth rocks

NASA's moon rocks also share the same characteristics as Soviet samples

Conspiracists argue that Marshall Space Flight Center director Verner von Braun's 1967 trip to Antarctica, which took place about two years before the Apollo 11 launch, was made to gather lunar meteorites that were to be passed off as fake moon rocks

Von Braun was a former SS officer who was detained by the Gestapo

According to the documentary film Did We Go?, von Braun may have been pressurized into agreeing to the conspiracy

It is believed that doing so would have been the easiest way for him to protect himself from recriminations over his past

NASA has indicated that von Braun's mission was to look into environmental and logistical factors that might relate to the planning of future space missions and hardware

NASA regularly sends teams to work in Antarctica to mimic the conditions on other planets

It is now accepted by the scientific community that rocks have been blasted from both the Martian and lunar surface during impact events and that some of these have landed on the Earth as meteorites

However, the first Antarctic lunar meteorite was located in 1979 and its lunar origin wasn't recognized for several years afterwards, not until 1982

Lunar meteorites are rare, so rare that it is unlikely that they could account for the moon rocks that NASA collected between the years 1969 and 1972

To date, only about 66 pounds of lunar meteorites have been found on Earth

Whilst the Apollo missions gathered 840 pounds of moon rocks, the Soviet Luna 16, Luna 20 and Luna 24 robots collected only 11

5 ounces combined, that is less than one thousandth as much

On the moon rocks' makeup, Kaesing once inquired, why was there never a mention of gold, silver, diamonds or other precious metals on the moon? Wasn't this a viable consideration? Why was this fact never discussed in the press or by the astronauts? Geologists know that gold and silver deposits on Earth are the result of hydrothermal fluids action concentrating the precious metals into veins of ore

Since in 1969 water was thought to be absent on the moon, no geologist discussed finding these on the moon in any significant amount

Aside from NASA, several individuals and groups have tracked the Apollo missions as they transpired

On later missions, NASA shared information with the public explaining when and where the spacecraft could be sighted

Flight paths were followed using radar and the crafts were sighted and photographed using telescopes

In addition to that, radio transmissions between the astronauts on the surface and in orbit had been independently recorded

According to scientists, retroflectors from the laser-ranging retroflector experiment are evidence that there were landings

Retroflectors are mirrors used as targets for Earth-based tracking lasers

Lick Observatory tried to detect from Apollo 11's retroflector whilst Armstrong and Aldrin were still on the moon, but did not succeed until August 1, 1969

The Apollo 14 astronauts deployed a retroflector on February 5, 1971 and McDonald Observatory detected it the same day

The Apollo 15 retroflector was implemented on July 31, 1971 and was recognized by McDonald Observatory within a few days

Retroflectors were also put on the moon by the uncrewed Russian lunar rovers, Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2

We've talked a lot about conspiracy theories and alleged scientific facts

What does the public at large believe? In a 1994 poll by the Washington Post, 9% of the respondents said that it was possible that astronauts didn't go to the moon and another 5% said that they weren't sure

A 1999 Gallup poll indicated that 6% of the Americans polled doubted that the moon landings happened

5% of those surveyed gave no opinion

For the most part, this roughly matches the findings of a similar 1995 poll from Time and CNN

Fox network officials say that skepticism rose to about 20% after the February 2001 airing of their network's television special, Conspiracy Theory, Did We Land on the Moon? The Fox program was watched by about 15 million viewers

Many believe that it was this television special that fostered and promoted the hoax claims

A 2000 poll conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation in Russia found that 28% of those polled didn't believe that American astronauts had landed on the moon

This percentage is nearly equal in all social demographic groups

A 2009 poll held by the United Kingdom's Engineering and Technology magazine found that 25% of those surveyed didn't believe that men landed on the moon

Another poll indicates that over 20% of 18 to 25-year-olds surveyed weren't sure if the moon landings transpired

There are subcultures worldwide that encourage the belief of fake moon landings

By the year 1977, the Hare Krishna magazine Back to Godhead called the landings a hoax

The publication claimed that since the sun is 93 million miles away, and according to Hindu mythology the moon is 800,000 miles further away than that, the moon would be nearly 94 million miles away

To travel that span in just 91 hours would require a speed of over a million miles per hour, a patently impossible feat even by the scientists' calculations

Ouch, it hurts even trying to think about that

James Oberg of ABC News said that the conspiracy theory is taught in Cuban schools and wherever Cuban teachers are sent

A poll conducted in the 70s by the United States Information Agency in several countries including Latin America, Asia and Africa found that most respondents were unaware of the moon landings

Many of the others dismissed them as propaganda or science fiction and many thought that it had been the Russians that landed on the moon

In 2019, Ipsos, a global leader in market research, conducted a study for C-SPAN to assess the level of belief that the 1969 moon landing was faked

6% of respondents believed it was not real, but 11% of millennials were the most likely to believe it was not factual

At the end of the day, people are going to believe what they want to believe

This has led to ongoing arguments that will no doubt resonate for ages to come

We live in a world where perception trumps fact in the eyes of many

Believe what you want

Research what you can

Come to your own conclusions

Thank you