Was the moon landing an elaborate hoax?

[wildhorses]

I always felt that the moon landing was real. They really walked on the moon. But the film is fake. It looks fake to me. Maybe they forgot to put film in the camera....or they forgot the camera on the moon when they left. "Hey where is the camera?" "I thought you had it" "I dont have it, I thought you had it"

The film and pictures do look fake to me.

[Nomad]

Was it all a hoax?

Yes. In fact Ive been to Cape Canaveral and seen the moon landing set.
The control room looks like a cheap Star Trek mock up.
They have the original space suits and fake rocket that took them....well nowhere.
Its all quite elaborate but cmon ! The moon ?

[Clodhopper]

So my mind is always open.

Are you then prepared to accept that there MAY be no conspiracy theory here?

That Armstrong and co DID land on the Moon?

[fuzzywuzzy]

I don't believe they did . We know today that to send men to the moon that we don't have the appropriate sheilding to protect humans from the radiation of the sun ..........doesn't that interest anyone?
And with the all the technology we cant' take pics of the litter they left there? How come, when we can apparently go to Mars and take pics?

No, I believe it was an elaborate hoax to put the Russians off. Just my understanding of it

[Galbally]

Okay, to get away from the generalized slagging of conspiracy theories, and annoying themis. I will get particular on the moon one.

1. 40,000 people worked directly on the moon shot, hundreds of thousands indirectly, the Apollo mission involved NASA, several Presidential Administrations, the US Military, the Navy, and various other news organizations and space and astronomy/science agencies world wide. So they all lied, continually for 40 years, not one leak, ever.

2. All the stuff they put on the moon is still there, you can see it directly with your own eyes through a powerful enough telescope. Check it out. How did that stuff get up there? Who drove the buggy around if no one ever went there? Who set the US flag up, its still there.

3. The astronauts put a small 1 meter square mirror on the landing site. The NASA Laser Interferometer telescope mission (which is still going BTW) has been bouncing laser beams off it every night for the past 40 years in order to get a precise reading of the distance between the earth and the moon, the readings confirm that the moon is moving very slowly away from the earth in line with predictions made by General Relativity and Newton. If the Apollo astronauts didn't put it there, who did?

4. The science, technology, people, organizations to achieve this were all there, this was technically difficult, and extraordinary achievement, but they did it. Its all recorded how it was done, the Saturn V rocket had enough thrust, the radiation levels were not a problem for the moon (they are for Mars because of the length of journey), the people who did this are still alive, the Russians, Chinese, Europeans, everyone concurs with the events as NASA described them, and as the world watched live on TV in July 1969.

5. Scientists worldwide worked on this mission, as did astronomers, engineers, etc etc, none of them ever questioned for one second whether it was feasible, or whether it was hoaxed, why would they lie? What interest would they have in doing so?

Basically, this happened, its not a hoax.

[spot]

Originally Posted by fuzzywuzzy

I don't believe they did . We know today that to send men to the moon that we don't have the appropriate sheilding to protect humans from the radiation of the sun ..........doesn't that interest anyone?

Just how far away do you think the moon is for goodness sake?

We've had astronauts in earth orbit for over a year at a time between going up and coming back. There's no more risk to life between there and the moon than there is sat going round in a space station.

[spot]

Originally Posted by fuzzywuzzy

And with the all the technology we cant' take pics of the litter they left there? How come, when we can apparently go to Mars and take pics?

They left a reflector there that bounces light straight back on the path it arrives from. Anyone on earth with a telescope and a laser can illuminate it and see the reflection. It's there to measure distance accurately. I'd not call it litter but it's in the astronauts' moonshot photos not far from the lander.

[Galbally]

Originally Posted by spot

They left a reflector there that bounces light straight back on the path it arrives from. Anyone on earth with a telescope and a laser can illuminate it and see the reflection. It's there to measure distance accurately. I'd not call it litter but it's in the astronauts' moonshot photos not far from the lander.

I just made that point as well, I don't understand why people are so fixated on this moon shot thing, its obvious that it happened, I just don't get it.

[Daniyal]

Originally Posted by oscar

The Dark Side of the Moon: 40 years after moon landing the doubts persist - mirror.co.uk

Was it all a hoax?


In the words Neil Armstrong chiselled into history, it was one small step for a man

But were the Moon landings really mankind's greatest scientific leap or the most fantastic hoax ever pulled?

The thrilling TV pictures, so faint and grey that we might have been peering at a ghost moving through a thick fog, certainly showed a bulky shape in a spacesuit backing down a ladder, stretching out a leg, tentatively putting one booted foot on to the surface.

The surface of where, though? The Moon or an elaborate mock-up in a movie studio somewhere in a remote corner of an Earthly desert?

As the world prepares to celebrate the 40th anniversary of that July day in 1969 when the Apollo 11 mission completed the first manned Moon landing allegedly the doubts live on.

The conspiracy theorists, the lunatics, call them what you like, insist that Armstrong and his fellow astronauts, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, never got further than a few orbits of the Earth.

They claim what the world was watching as it goggled at its TVs was all a fake, filmed months in advance and broadcast as if it were real and happening live.

The landing. The footprints in the dust. Those phantom figures bunny-hopping around in a barren landscape. They were all part of the scam.

A loopy idea? Consider this:

In 1979, when the first suggestions began to emerge that NASA might have been up to some dirty tricks, six per cent of Americans thought the Moon landing was a hoax. In 1999, the number had risen to 11 per cent.

When they counted again recently, they discovered no fewer than 22 per cent believed that the Apollo 11 Moon landing never happened.

That's more than 60 million suspicious Americans. And many more millions worldwide. The internet now teems with claims and allegations.

Mankind was conned, they argue, and there are good reasons for suspicion. First, the motive.

Ever since President John F Kennedy pledged at the start of the 60s that man would travel to the Moon and back within a decade, the Americans were desperate to beat the Russians in the space race.

That summer of 1969, Moscow was only a month from launching its own manned Moon shot.

Washington, burdened with the Vietnam war and civil unrest, benefited from a popular distraction to take attention away from its problems.

And then, the practicalities.

Technology then was positively primitive. The computer developed for the Apollo programme had only a tiny fraction of the power in a home PC today. The satnav that guides your car is many times more sophisticated than the machine which, so we are assured, steered a mission 250,000 miles to a few square yards of the Sea of Tranquility and back.

Even recently, when President George W Bush announced the USA's ambition to return to the Moon, he was told it would take 11 years to put the engineering together.

It's embarrassing now for NASA to realise that, as a four-decade anniversary approaches, a rapidly-growing body of public opinion is convinced the greatest moment was a fake.

At NASA headquarters in Washington, the men in suits even have a code for them. HBs the Hoax Believers. Area 51, the HBs argue, is the most likely spot where he put down his foot. Its a top-secret military installation in the Nevada desert, also known as Groom Lake, or Dreamland.

It would be the ideal place to hide a shed big enough to house an area of make-believe Moon.

NASA had raised $40billion of funding to go to the Moon. Plenty for a high-class production and, HBs say, enough to pay off a large number of people.

Of course, NASA has its photographic proof. Thousands of pictures, in fact. They were taken on Moon missions between 1969 and 1972, showing men and their machines, against a backdrop that had become very familiar to a public growing almost bored with the adventure by the end.

The HBs, though, kept picking over every detail. They began to notice strange tricks of the light.

How, for example, could an astronaut (below) be walking through a shadow, or have the sun at his back, and yet be brightly lit from the front, showing off all those bits of his spacesuit, especially the Stars and Stripes flag, in technicolour?

If you were posing this in a studio, with so-called in-fill lights blazing from every angle, you couldn't have produced a better result. The response from NASA? Well, you have to understand that on the Moon light can behave in odd ways.


There isn't the atmosphere to spread it around like on Earth, but there is an open surface to reflect it where you might least expect it. So where are the stars? In every photo, the sky was ink black, with nothing at all twinkling out there.

Another lunar phenomenon, NASA said. Because the sun was so bright, and the surface so reflective, the stars would be too dim for a camera to capture, or an astronauts eye to register.

It didn't take long, either, before questions were raised about moondust. Just like moonlight, it seemed to have strange properties. An astronauts foot would leave a print, for example. Yet the lunar rover, with an Earthly weight of 10 tons, would not.

And how come, when the spidery landing vehicle hovered above the surface and fired blasts from its retro-jets to lower itself down, it didn't even appear to have disturbed the very ground underneath it.


To questions such as this, NASA scientists would sigh wearily, like teachers trying to educate the dullest kid in class in the simplest physics.

Surely everyone knew, they pointed out, how to work out the pressure from 3,000lb of thrust, across the square area of the engine nozzle, how a man's boot could exert a greater force on the ground than a large wheel and, for Heavens sake, how all these calculations change in a vacuum, such as on the airless Moon.

And the flag planted by Armstrong and Aldrin. The sceptics say the shadows cast by the astronaut, the lander and various rocks seem to go in all directions when they should be parallel, while the flag doesn’t cast any shadow at all.


Nasa's version is that the shadows don’t run parallel because of the distortions in perspective, projecting a 3D scene on to a

two-dimensional photograph. Some shadows disappear because the lunar surface has a peculiar property and reflects light back in the direction it came from.

But the HBs have begun to gather important allies.

A former engineer who worked on the design of Apollo rockets Bill Kaysing had his doubts during the 1960s about whether the Moon programme would ever get off the ground.

What I saw on TV made me a sceptic, he says. The whole thing seemed phoney to me.

He was particularly puzzled by the landing vehicle itself, which didn't seem to make any engine noise.

Almost as if, Bill points out, it was a prop being lowered by wires on to a movie set.

The chances of getting a man to the Moon and bringing him back again were something like 0.0017 per cent in other words, a virtual impossibility, he adds.

My view is they were told if you cant make it, fake it.

He's not alone in his doubts.

Brian OLeary says: "I can't be sure 100 per cent that man actually walked on the Moon."

Considering Brian was an astronaut in the 1960s, and an adviser during the Apollo programme, that's a bombshell.

Perhaps most outrageous of all conspiracies is that three men did indeed go to the Moon but there was not the technology to bring them back.

They were sacrificed for US pride. The Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, who reappeared on Earth were lookalike actors.

Today only Aldrin, now 78, keeps a high public profile.

He was confronted two years ago by a TV reporter who demanded he swear on the Bible that the landing wasnt a hoax.

Aldrin's response? He punched the guy on the nose and narrowly escaped prosecution. More proof, said the HBs, of the pressure of keeping a 40-year secret.

The most telling evidence, say the HBs, is that the Moons still there, 250,000 miles away, but we dont go there any more.

And we haven't been since we abruptly abandoned the missions 37 years ago.

Has science moved so far backwards? Or are we about to celebrate the day when it really took all of us for a ride?

That small step begins to look even more mysterious than ever.

The First Called Moon Landing Was A Fake / Hoax / Stage . .

[Galbally]

Originally Posted by Daniyal

The First Called Moon Landing Was A Fake / Hoax / Stage . .

Thanks, that clears that up then.