Moon landing conspiracy theories
Various groups and individuals have made claims since the mid-1970s that NASA and others knowingly misled the public into believing the landings happened, by manufacturing, tampering with, or destroying evidence including photos, telemetry tapes, radio and TV transmissions, and Moon rock samples.
[8] An early and influential book about the subject of a Moon-landing conspiracy, We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, was self-published in 1976 by Bill Kaysing, a former US Navy officer with a Bachelor of Arts in English.
[15][16] In 1980, the Flat Earth Society accused NASA of faking the landings, arguing that they were staged by Hollywood with Walt Disney sponsorship, based on a script by Arthur C. Clarke and directed by Stanley Kubrick.
Dégh writes: "The mass media catapult these half-truths into a kind of twilight zone where people can make their guesses sound as truths.
"[18] In A Man on the Moon,[19] first published in 1994, Andrew Chaikin mentions that at the time of Apollo 8's lunar-orbit mission in December 1968,[20] similar conspiracy ideas were already in circulation.
[26] Conspiracist Bart Sibrel responded, incorrectly asserting that, "the Soviets did not have the capability to track deep space craft until late in 1972, immediately after which, the last three Apollo missions were abruptly canceled.
[34] In May 2023 Dmitry Rogozin, former director general of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, expressed doubt that U.S. astronauts landed on the Moon.
[39] Mary Bennett and David Percy claimed in the 2001 book Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers, that, with all the known and unknown hazards,[40] NASA would not risk broadcasting an astronaut getting sick or dying on live television.
[41] The counter-argument generally given is that NASA in fact did incur a great deal of public humiliation and potential political opposition to the program by losing an entire crew in the Apollo 1 fire during a ground test, leading to its upper management team being questioned by Senate and House of Representatives space oversight committees.
[13] Scientists Vince Calder and Andrew Johnson have given detailed answers to conspiracists' claims on the Argonne National Laboratory website.
[47] They show that NASA's portrayal of the Moon landing is fundamentally accurate, allowing for such common mistakes as mislabeled photos and imperfect personal recollections.
A woman named Una Ronald (a pseudonym created by the authors of the source[75]) from Perth, Australia, said that she saw a Coca-Cola bottle roll across the lower right quadrant of her television screen that was displaying the live broadcast of the Apollo 11 EVA.
Nafzger praised Lowry for restoring "crispness" to the Apollo video, which will remain in black and white and contains conservative digital enhancements.
[130] Grumman appears to have destroyed most of its LM documentation,[121][131] but copies exist in microfilm for the blueprints for the Saturn V.[132] Four mission-worthy Lunar Roving Vehicles (LRV) were built by Boeing.
Bart Sibrel cites the relative level of the United States and USSR space technology as evidence that the Moon landings could not have happened.
The documentary reinvigorated the public's interest in conspiracy theories and the possibility that the Moon landings were faked, which has provoked NASA to once again defend its name.
Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick is accused of having produced much of the footage for Apollos 11 and 12, presumably because he had just directed 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is partly set on the Moon and featured advanced special effects.
It parodies conspiracy theories with faked interviews, stories of assassinations of Stanley Kubrick's assistants by the CIA, and a variety of conspicuous mistakes, puns, and references to old movie characters, inserted through the film as clues for the viewer.
Nevertheless, the claim was taken up in earnest;[151] Clyde Lewis used it almost word-for-word,[150] whereas Jay Weidner gave the brother a more senior status within the party: No one knows how the powers-that-be convinced Kubrick to direct the Apollo landings.
[158] In 2004, Martin Hendry and Ken Skeldon of the University of Glasgow were awarded a grant by the UK-based Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council to investigate Moon landing conspiracy theories.
[160] In November 2004, they gave a lecture at the Glasgow Science Centre where the top ten claims by conspiracists were individually addressed and refuted.
The evidence was noticed by Misha Kreslavsky, of the Department of Geological Sciences at Brown University, and Yuri Shkuratov of the Kharkiv Astronomical Observatory in Ukraine.
The European Space Agency's SMART-1 uncrewed probe sent back photos of the landing sites, according to Bernard Foing, Chief Scientist of the ESA Science Program.
In 2002, Alex R. Blackwell of the University of Hawaii pointed out that some photos taken by Apollo astronauts[165] while in orbit around the Moon show the landing sites.
[168] The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched their SELENE Moon orbiter on September 14, 2007 (JST), from Tanegashima Space Center.
Analyses by scientists worldwide all agree that these rocks came from the Moon[citation needed] – no published accounts in peer-reviewed scientific journals exist that dispute this claim.
[176] Conspiracists argue that Marshall Space Flight Center Director Wernher von Braun's trip to Antarctica in 1967 (about two years before the Apollo 11 launch) was to gather lunar meteorites to be used as fake Moon rocks.
[196][197] A 2000 poll conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation [ru] (ФОМ) in Russia found that 28% of those surveyed did not believe that American astronauts landed on the Moon, and this percentage is roughly equal in all social-demographic groups.
[198][199][200] In 2009, a poll held by the United Kingdom's Engineering & Technology magazine found that 25% of those surveyed did not believe that men landed on the Moon.
[207] conducted size This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
