Conspiracy Encyclopedia

Moon hoax proponents devote a substantial portion of their efforts to examining NASA photos. They point to various issues with photographs and films purportedly taken on the Moon. Experts in photography (even those unrelated to NASA) respond that the anomalies, while sometimes counter-intuitive, are in fact precisely what one would expect from a real Moon landing, and contrary to what would occur with manipulated or studio imagery. Hoax proponents also state that whistleblowers may have deliberately manipulated the NASA photos in hope of exposing NASA.

1. Crosshairs appear to be behind objects.
   • Overexposure causes white objects to bleed into the black areas on the film.
2. Crosshairs are sometimes misplaced or rotated.
   • Popular versions of photos are sometimes cropped or rotated for aesthetic impact.
3. The quality of the photographs is implausibly high.
   • There are many, many poor quality photographs taken by the Apollo astronauts. NASA chose to publish only the best examples.
4. There are no stars in any of the photos. The Apollo 11 astronauts also claimed in a press conference after the event to have not remembered seeing any of the stars.
   • The sun was shining. Cameras were set for daylight exposure, and could not detect the faint points of light, pp. 158–160Even the brightest stars are dim and difficult to see in the daytime on the Moon. Harrison Schmitt saw no stars from the Moon.[44] The astronauts eyes were adapted to the brightly sunlit landscape around them so that they could not see the relatively faint stars.
5. The color and angle of shadows and light are inconsistent.
   • Shadows on the Moon are complicated by uneven ground, wide angle lens distortion, light reflected from the Earth, and lunar dust pp. 167–172 Shadows also display the properties of vanishing point perspective leading them to converge to a point on the horizon.
   • This theory was demonstrated to be unsubstantiated on the MythBusters episode “NASA Moon Landing”.
6. Identical backgrounds in photos are listed as taken miles apart.
   • Shots were not identical, just similar. Background objects were mountains many miles away. Without an atmosphere to obscure distant objects, it can be difficult to tell the relative distance and scale of terrain features.[45] One specific case is debunked in Who Mourns For Apollo? by Mike Bara.
7. The number of photographs taken is implausibly high. Up to one photo per 50 seconds.
   • Simplified gear with fixed settings permitted two photographs a second. Many were taken immediately after each other. Calculations are based on a single astronaut on the surface, and does not take into account that there were two persons sharing the workload during the EVA.
8. The photos contain artifacts like the two seemingly matching ‘C’s on a rock and on the ground.
   • The “C”-shaped image was from printing imperfections not in the original film from the camera.
9. A resident of Perth, Australia, with the pseudonym “Una Ronald”, said she saw a soft drink bottle in the frame.
   • No such newspaper reports or recordings have been verified. “Una Ronald”‘s existence is authenticated by only one source. There are also flaws in the story, i.e. the emphatic statement that she had to “stay up late” is easily discounted by numerous witnesses in Australia who observed the event to occur in the middle of their daytime, since this event was an unusual compulsory viewing for school children in Australia.
10. The book Moon Shot contains an obvious composite photograph of Alan Shepard hitting a golf ball on the Moon with another astronaut.
    • It was used in lieu of the only existing real images, from the TV monitor, which the editors of the book apparently felt were too grainy to present in a book’s picture section. The book publishers did not work for NASA.
11. There appear to be “hot spots” in some photographs that look like a huge spotlight was used at a close distance.
    • Pits in moon dust focus and reflect light in a manner similar to minuscule glass spheres used in the coating of street signs, or dew-drops on wet grass. (see Heiligenschein)
12. Footprints in the extraordinarily fine lunar dust, with no moisture or atmosphere or strong gravity, are unexpectedly well preserved, in the minds of some observers – as if made in wet sand.
    • The dust is silicate, and this has a special property in a vacuum of sticking together like that. The astronauts described it as being like “talcum powder or wet sand”.
    • This theory was demonstrated to be unsubstantiated on the MythBusters episode “NASA Moon Landing”.