Conspiracy Encyclopedia

Theorists claim that some or all of the Apollo moon landings were “staged” in a Hollywood movie or other studio either because they never happened or to conceal some aspect of the truth of the circumstances of the actual landing.

Apollo Moon Landing hoax conspiracy theories are claims that some or all elements of the Apollo Moon landings were faked by NASA and possibly members of other involved organizations. Some groups and individuals have advanced various theories which tend, to varying degrees, to include suggestions that the Apollo astronauts did not land on the Moon, that NASA and possibly others intentionally deceived the public into believing the landings did occur by manufacturing, destroying, or tampering with evidence, including photos, telemetry tapes, transmissions, and rock samples, and that the deception continues to this day.

There is abundant independent evidence for Apollo Moon landings, and these conspiracy theories have been generally discounted. Nevertheless many commentators have published detailed rebuttals to the hoax claims. A 1999 poll by The Gallup Organization found that 89 percent of the US public believed the landings were genuine, while 6 percent did not and 5 percent were undecided.

Origins and history

The first book dedicated to the subject, Bill Kaysing’s self-published We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle was released in 1974, two years after the Apollo Moon flights had ceased.

Folklorist Linda Degh suggests that the 1978 film Capricorn One, which depicts a hoaxed journey to Mars in spacecraft that look identical to the Apollo craft, may have given a “boost” to the hoax theory’s popularity in the post-Vietnam War, post-Watergate era when segments of the American public were disinclined to trust official accounts. Degh writes: “The mass media catapult these half-truths into a kind of twilight zone where people can make their guesses sound as truths. Mass media have a terrible impact on people who lack guidance.”

In his book A Man on the Moon, published in 1994, Andrew Chaikin mentions that at the time of Apollo 8’s lunar-orbit mission in December 1968 similar ideas were already in circulation.

Predominant hoax claims

A number of different hoax theories have been advanced. No one has proposed a complete narrative of how the hoax could have been perpetrated, but instead believers focus on perceived gaps or inconsistencies in the historical record of the missions. Several of these ideas and their most readily identifiable proponents are described below:

1. Complete hoax — The idea that the entire human landing program was completely falsified from start to finish. Some claim that the technology to send men to the Moon was insufficient or that the Van Allen radiation belts, solar flares, solar wind, coronal mass ejections and cosmic rays made such a trip impossible.
2. Partial hoax / unmanned landings — Bart Sibrel has stated that the crew of Apollo 11 and subsequent astronauts had faked their orbit around the Moon and their walk on its surface by trick photography, and that they never got more than halfway to the Moon. A subset of this proposal is advocated by those who concede the existence of retroreflectors and other observable human-made objects on the Moon. British publisher Marcus Allen represented this argument when he said “I would be the first to accept what [telescope images of the landing site] find as powerful evidence that something was placed on the Moon by man.” He goes on to say that photographs of the lander would not prove that America put men on the Moon. “Getting to the Moon really isn’t much of a problem – the Russians did that in 1959, the big problem is getting people there.” His argument focuses around NASA sending robot missions because radiation levels in space were lethal to humans. Another variant on this is the idea that NASA and its contractors did not recover quickly enough from the Apollo 1 fire, and so all the early Apollo missions were faked, with Apollo 14 or 15 being the first authentic mission.
3. Manned landings, with cover-ups
   • William Brian believes that the astronauts may have used “a secret zero gravity device” derived from technology found on a “captured extraterrestrial spaceship,” but that NASA was compelled to cover up these facts and others relating to the gravity and the presence of atmosphere on the moon in order to maintain secrecy surrounding the alien space ship.
   • Philippe Lheureux, in Lumières sur la Lune (Lights on the Moon), said that astronauts did land on the Moon, but that, in order to prevent other nations from benefiting from scientific information in the real photos, NASA published fake images.

Suggested motives for a hoax

Several motives are given by hoax proponents for the U.S. government to fake the Moon landings.

1. Cold War prestige — The U.S. government considered it vital that the U.S. win the space race against the Soviet Union. Going to the Moon was risky and expensive (John F. Kennedy famously said that the U.S. chose to go because it was hard). Despite close monitoring by the Soviet Union, Bill Kaysing maintains that it would have been easier for the U.S. to fake it, and consequently guarantee success, than for the U.S. actually to go. p. 29
2. Money — NASA raised approximately $30 billion to go to the Moon. Bill Kaysing claims that this amount could have been used to pay off a large number of people, providing significant motivation for complicity. p. 71
3. Risk — This argument assumes that the problems early in the space program were insurmountable, even by a technology team fully motivated and funded to fix the problems. Kaysing claimed that the chance of a successful landing on the moon was calculated to be 0.017%. pp. 26–40
4. Distraction — According to hoax proponents, the U.S. government benefited from a popular distraction from the Vietnam war. Lunar activities suddenly stopped, with planned missions cancelled, around the same time that the U.S. ceased its involvement in the Vietnam War. (However, the Apollo program was cancelled several years before the Vietnam War ended.)
5. Delivering the promise — To seemingly fulfill President Kennedy’s 1961 promise “to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

Critiques of hoax accusations

Conspiracy theory

Hoax accusations have been characterized as conspiracy theories since believers claim that conspirators in the possession of secret knowledge are misleading or have misled the public in pursuit of a hidden agenda—namely, hiding that the Moon landings were faked. This is the central argument of the prominent critics of the conventional history of the Apollo program. The 2001 Fox special, which was seen as promoting the hoax claims, used that term in its title (Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?). However, the term “conspiracy theory” is highly charged, and many people consider it to be pejorative.

The Apollo Moon landing hoax accusations have been debunked. An article in the German magazine Der Spiegel places the Moon hoax in the context of other well-known 20th century conspiracy theories which it describes as “the rarefied atmosphere of those myths in which Elvis is alive, John F. Kennedy fell victim to a conspiracy involving the Mafia and secret service agents, the Moon landing was staged in the Nevada desert, and Princess Diana was murdered by the British intelligence services.”

Scientific method

Application of the scientific method to this scenario allows each explanation of an event to be presented as a separate hypothesis, such as:

• Real landing hypothesis – NASA’s portrayal of the Moon landing is fundamentally accurate, allowing for such common errors as mislabeled photos and imperfect personal recollections.
• Hoax hypothesis – NASA’s portrayal of the Moon landing is an orchestrated hoax.

In this type of evaluation, any hypothesis that is contradicted by the observable facts may be rejected. The lack of narrative consistency in the hoax hypothesis occurs because hoax accounts vary from proponent to proponent. The ‘real landing’ hypothesis is a single story, since it comes from a single source, but there are many hoax hypotheses, each of which addresses a specific aspect of the Moon landing.

Hoax claims examined

As mentioned above, many hoax claims focus on perceived problems with specific portions of the historical record surrounding the moon landings. Below is an overview of these claims as well as associated debunking from various sources:

• Missing data
• Technological capability of USA compared with the USSR
• Photographs and films
• Ionizing radiation and heat
• Transmissions
• Mechanical issues
• Moon rocks
• Deaths of key Apollo personnel
• Involvement of the Soviet Union
• Large telescopes and the Moon hoax

Major hoax proponents and proposals

• Bill Kaysing (1922-2005) an ex-employee of Rocketdyne,[84] (the company which built the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V rocket). Kaysing was not technically qualified, and worked at Rocketdyne as a librarian. Kaysing’s self published book, We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, p. 157, made many allegations, effectively beginning the discussion of the moon landings possibly being hoaxed. NASA, and others, have debunked the claims made in the book.
• Bart Sibrel, a filmmaker, produced and directed four films for his company AFTH, including a film in 2001 called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, examining the evidence of a hoax. Again, the arguments put forward therein have been debunked by numerous sources, including svector’s video series Lunar Legacy which attempts to disprove the documentary’s primary argument that the Apollo crew faked their distance from the Earth command module, while in low orbit. Sibrel believes that the effect on the shot covered in his film was produced through the use of a transparency of the Earth. Sibrel was also famously punched in the face by Buzz Aldrin while accusing the former astronaut of being “a coward, and a liar, and a thief.” Sibrel attempted to press charges against Aldrin but the case was thrown out of court when the judge ruled that Aldrin was within his rights given Sibrel’s invasive and aggressive behavior.
• William L. Brian, a nuclear engineer who self-published a book in 1982 called “Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the U.S. Space Program,” in which he disputes the Moon’s surface gravity.
• David Percy, TV producer and expert in audiovisual technologies and member of the Royal Photographic Society, is co-author, along with Mary Bennett of Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers (ISBN 1-898541-10-8) and co-producer of What Happened On the Moon?. He is the main proponent of the “whistle-blower” accusation, arguing that the errors in the NASA photos in particular are so obvious that they are evidence that insiders are trying to ‘blow the whistle’ on the hoax by deliberately inserting errors that they know will be seen.
• Ralph Rene – An inventor and ’self taught’ engineering buff. Author of NASA Mooned America (second edition OCLC 36317224).
• Charles T. Hawkins – Author of How America Faked the Moon Landings,
• Philippe Lheureux – French author of Moon Landings: Did NASA Lie?, and Lumières sur la Lune (Lights on the Moon): La NASA a-t-elle menti?.
• James M. Collier (d. 1998) – American journalist and author, producer of the video Was It Only a Paper Moon? in 1997.
• Jack White – American photo historian known for his attempt to prove forgery in photos related to the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
• Marcus Allen (publisher) – British publisher of Nexus magazine said that photographs of the lander would not prove that the US put men on the Moon. “Getting to the Moon really isn’t much of a problem – the Russians did that in 1959 – the big problem is getting people there.”
• Aron Ranen – Directed Did we go? (co-produced with Benjamin Britton and selected for the 2000 “New Documentary Series” Museum of Modern Art, NYC, the 2000 Dallas Video Festival Awards and the 2001 Digital Video Underground Festival in San Francisco). He received a Golden Cine Eagle and two fellowships from the National Endowment for Arts.
• Clyde Lewis – Radio talk show host.
• Dr. David Groves – Works for Quantech Image Processing and worked on some of the NASA photos. He said he can pinpoint the exact point at which the artificial light was used. Using the focal length of the camera’s lens and an actual boot, he has calculated (using ray-tracing) that the artificial light source is between 24 and 36 cm to the right of the camera.
• Donald Kent “Deke” Slayton, NASA Chief Astronaut in 1968: Some hoax proponents (for example, the ‘NASA Scam’ website, and Clyde Lewis) say that Slayton was one of the primary leaders of the hoax. He visited the film set of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the UK, which he referred to as “NASA East.”
• Stanley Kubrick is accused of having produced much of the footage for Apollo 11 and 12. 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. Kubrick did hire Frederick Ordway and Harry Lange, both of whom had worked for NASA and major aerospace contractors, to work with him on 2001. Kubrick also used some 50mm f/0.7 lenses that were left over from a batch made by Zeiss for NASA. (However, Kubrick only acquired this lens for Barry Lyndon (1975). The lens was originally a still-photo lens and required modifications to be used for motion filming.)