Moon landing conspiracy theories claim that some or all elements of the Apollo program and the associated Moon landings were hoaxes staged by NASA, possibly with the aid of other organizations. The most notable claim is that the six crewed landings (1969–1972) were faked and that twelve Apollo astronauts did not actually walk on the Moon. 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.
Much third-party evidence for the landings exists, and detailed rebuttals to the hoax claims have been made. Since the late 2000s, high-definition photos taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of the Apollo landing sites have captured the Lunar Module descent stages and the tracks left by the astronauts. In 2012, images were released showing five of the six Apollo missions' American flags erected on the Moon still standing. The exception is that of Apollo 11, which has lain on the lunar surface since being blown over by the Lunar Module Ascent Propulsion System.
Despite the fact that they are demonstrably false and universally regarded as pseudoscience, these conspiracy theories have held public interest for more than 40 years. Opinion polls taken in various locations have shown that between 6% and 20% of Americans, 25% of Britons, and 28% of Russians surveyed believe that the crewed landings were faked. Even as late as 2001, the Fox television network documentary Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? claimed NASA faked the first landing in 1969 to win the Space Race.
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. Despite having no knowledge of rockets or technical writing, Kaysing was hired as a senior technical writer in 1956 by Rocketdyne, the company that built the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V rocket. He served as head of the technical publications unit at the company's Propulsion Field Laboratory until 1963. The many allegations in Kaysing's book effectively began discussion of the Moon landings being faked. The book claims that the chance of a successful crewed landing on the Moon was calculated to be 0.0017%, and that despite close monitoring by the USSR, it would have been easier for NASA to fake the Moon landings than to really go there.
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. Folklorist Linda Dégh suggests that writer-director Peter Hyams' film Capricorn One (1978), which shows a hoaxed journey to Mars in a spacecraft
Much third-party evidence for the landings exists, and detailed rebuttals to the hoax claims have been made. Since the late 2000s, high-definition photos taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of the Apollo landing sites have captured the Lunar Module descent stages and the tracks left by the astronauts. In 2012, images were released showing five of the six Apollo missions' American flags erected on the Moon still standing. The exception is that of Apollo 11, which has lain on the lunar surface since being blown over by the Lunar Module Ascent Propulsion System.
Despite the fact that they are demonstrably false and universally regarded as pseudoscience, these conspiracy theories have held public interest for more than 40 years. Opinion polls taken in various locations have shown that between 6% and 20% of Americans, 25% of Britons, and 28% of Russians surveyed believe that the crewed landings were faked. Even as late as 2001, the Fox television network documentary Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? claimed NASA faked the first landing in 1969 to win the Space Race.
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. Despite having no knowledge of rockets or technical writing, Kaysing was hired as a senior technical writer in 1956 by Rocketdyne, the company that built the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V rocket. He served as head of the technical publications unit at the company's Propulsion Field Laboratory until 1963. The many allegations in Kaysing's book effectively began discussion of the Moon landings being faked. The book claims that the chance of a successful crewed landing on the Moon was calculated to be 0.0017%, and that despite close monitoring by the USSR, it would have been easier for NASA to fake the Moon landings than to really go there.
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. Folklorist Linda Dégh suggests that writer-director Peter Hyams' film Capricorn One (1978), which shows a hoaxed journey to Mars in a spacecraft
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FunTranscript
00:00 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, liftoff!
00:06 50 years on, the feud continues,
00:09 as a surprising number of people still believe that we never landed on the moon.
00:14 The question lies at the heart of one of the greatest conspiracy theories of all time.
00:19 A theory born from an era of global suspicion, political mistrust and fake news.
00:26 The whole Apollo program was a complete fabrication.
00:30 Any idea it could have been hoaxed is quite frankly insane.
00:34 But when put to the test, can we unlock the scientific truth?
00:40 And once and for all, put these conspiracy theories to rest.
00:46 Apollo 11
01:13 In the 21st century, one of the greatest achievements in history still remains a source of controversy.
01:20 That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
01:31 Did the Apollo moon landings really happen?
01:35 Or were they the biggest hoax of all time?
01:40 Trevor Weaver has dedicated years of research to the Apollo missions,
01:44 and was once a supporter of the moon landings.
01:47 We didn't go to the moon, and that is an established fact.
01:51 NASA provided all the topographical data they had, all the photographs,
01:56 all their massive models to Stanley Kubrick, so they could actually fake moon scenes.
02:02 Could the moon landings actually have been faked by Hollywood director Stanley Kubrick?
02:09 The history books say otherwise.
02:12 That Apollo 11 astronaut, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, spent three days travelling to the moon,
02:17 and was the first to follow Neil Armstrong's historic footsteps.
02:21 Beautiful, beautiful. Is that something?
02:24 I'm totally in favour of freedom of speech.
02:27 But I think people need to be responsible when they think about intentionally,
02:33 for their own benefit, misleading the young people who are the future leaders of our world.
02:40 Moon conspiracy theorists have been a small but persistent and vocal group,
02:46 over the years often confronting and accusing astronauts of lying.
02:51 In 2002, when conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel buttonholed Buzz Aldrin,
02:57 his temper got the better of him.
03:00 You're the one who said you walked on the moon when you didn't.
03:03 Calling the kettle black, if you ever thought of saying I misrepresented myself.
03:06 Will you get it away from me?
03:07 You're a coward and a liar and a thief.
03:10 The punch stirred a generation less trusting of traditional media,
03:15 more open to believing fake news and theories spread on the internet,
03:19 and revived the moon landings hoax theories.
03:22 NASA never realised that we would have something called the internet.
03:28 It's only now, when all those videos are available,
03:32 that people can see what the problems are.
03:35 I think the propagation of so-called fake news,
03:39 the spread which is very welcome of access to the internet,
03:43 means that we have far more sources than we're used to.
03:46 There is a real crisis in understanding the strength of those sources.
03:50 People often have some kind of distrust of authority, governments and so on,
03:54 and they assume that there's some kind of plot to keep the information from us,
03:59 that actually the propaganda victory of going to the moon
04:03 could be based on something that was entirely fabricated.
04:06 But if the Apollo missions were faked,
04:09 it would mean NASA had managed to keep one of the biggest secrets ever created.
04:14 50 years ago, the Soviet Union and the USA were locked in a struggle for global dominance.
04:23 Then, on October 4th, 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik,
04:27 the world's first satellite, into orbit.
04:30 A breakthrough that hit America hard and made the race to space even more crucial.
04:35 There's no doubt that the space race in the 1960s was driven by superpower rivalry.
04:42 There was a degree of anxiety in the West about the advancement in Soviet technology,
04:47 and the feeling that the West somehow had lost its leadership and needed to catch up.
04:52 We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,
04:56 not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
05:00 At the peak of the Apollo program, NASA employed 400,000 people.
05:09 But was putting a man on the moon so important that the United States government faked it?
05:16 If so, a legion of NASA employees not only participated in the deception,
05:21 but they kept the secret from the rest of the world.
05:24 That was such a seminal event that it wasn't just about the mission itself,
05:29 but the way that that influenced wider life.
05:31 People began to think, "Oh, we can do space travel, we can actually go to other worlds."
05:36 On July 16th, 1969, the three Apollo 11 astronauts prepared for liftoff.
05:50 But while the world eagerly awaited for history to be made, one man was already skeptical.
05:56 During the 1960s, Bill Kaysing was the head of technical publications for Rocketdyne,
06:05 the company that helped manufacture the Apollo rockets.
06:08 Kaysing, who claimed he had access to some of its top-secret documents,
06:13 questioned the competence of the Apollo project.
06:16 I really believe that they weren't in the command capsule at launch.
06:22 They did a little bit of a magician act with the astronauts.
06:28 They went up the elevator, but they came down the elevator.
06:31 In other words, they did not want to risk the lives of the astronauts in case the Saturn blew up.
06:38 An explosive claim, which Kaysing said the CIA tried to silence
06:43 by making three attempts on his life.
06:46 Like Kaysing, Marcus Allen, British publisher of Nexus,
06:51 a magazine of alternative politics, history and science,
06:54 also questions NASA's engineering capability at the time of the launches.
06:59 The problem is the whole Apollo program was a complete fabrication
07:04 in order to be seen to succeed in the Cold War.
07:08 The myth of Apollo is what is holding NASA back from future space travel.
07:14 It's a tragedy.
07:16 We didn't go the first time, we can't go now, we've never been.
07:20 They lied to us.
07:22 But if NASA didn't put a man on the Moon, it would have had to fake the evidence.
07:28 And its own visual images have done the most to fuel conspiracy theories.
07:34 Every photograph taken on the lunar surface is online.
07:38 5,771.
07:40 Some of them are not particularly good, some are out of focus,
07:44 some are light-struck, some just don't show very much of interest,
07:48 and some of them are very good indeed.
07:51 And it's the very good ones I question.
07:53 I do not believe they were taken on the Moon.
07:56 They were taken here on Earth.
08:00 Conspiracy theorists believe NASA faked all six of the Apollo Moon landings
08:06 and point to these NASA photographs as proof.
08:09 Some of the most renowned claims suggest that areas lit from behind
08:14 should be in dark shade, when in fact they reveal full detail.
08:19 In others, the shadows don't run parallel.
08:22 Is this because they were lit by separate sources, suggesting film lighting?
08:28 Despite being taken in space, no stars are visible in any of the Apollo photographs.
08:34 Gravity on the Moon is one-sixth of that on Earth.
08:38 But when archive footage is sped up,
08:41 the astronauts appear to be running at normal speed in Earth's gravity.
08:45 And with no atmosphere on the Moon, why does the flag seem to wave in a breeze?
08:52 [Music]
08:55 For the purpose of this program, we filmed an experiment on a lunar set
09:03 built in the Trona Pinnacles in the Californian desert
09:06 to challenge the hoax theories and put these claims to the test.
09:10 By testing some of the most famous conspiracy arguments and addressing new evidence,
09:18 can we put the lunar hoax theories to rest once and for all?
09:22 This is Apollo Control, Houston, at 105 hours, now into the flight to Apollo 11.
09:31 People all over the world were eagerly tuned in to the historic event.
09:35 [Speaking in Russian]
09:45 Astronomer Sir Patrick Moore reported the mission live on British television.
09:50 Ever since the dawn of human history, we've dreamed about going to other worlds,
09:55 and this was the first time it had been done.
09:57 And of course it was an exciting time, and also a very tense one.
10:07 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, liftoff! We have a liftoff!
10:15 There were some amateur radio enthusiasts who built a very large dish
10:19 and were able to actually listen in to the astronauts talking from the Moon's surface.
10:23 They didn't hear mission control, and were able to pick up just the astronauts by themselves.
10:27 Ian Morrison witnessed the event from a unique perspective.
10:33 A student at the Jodrell Bank radio telescope near Manchester, England,
10:37 he took advantage of the facilities and listened in to the mission of his own accord.
10:42 I should say that we were not officially tracking the Apollo craft.
10:46 We were doing this for fun, our own fun and our own interests.
10:49 Houston, Apollo 11, enter and give us a magnificent ride.
10:54 We could hear the whole conversation of the astronauts all the way down to the surface.
10:58 They were obviously highly excited, and it must have been wonderful
11:01 as they sort of literally reached the surface.
11:03 God's might. First-hand window right now, I can observe the entire continent of North America.
11:11 OK, engine stop. We copy you down, Eagle.
11:21 Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.
11:28 And then Neil's voice came through, "The Eagle has landed."
11:31 And that, for me, was a moment of intense relief.
11:34 And since I'm on the air live, I had to watch what I said.
11:37 That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
11:44 In 1969, the public had little reason to question mankind's historic first step on the Moon.
11:56 After all, the achievement was a celebration of technological supremacy.
12:01 America had finally won the space race.
12:05 Mankind's first steps on the Moon have become the epicentre of hoax theories.
12:17 Conspiracy theorists claim NASA faced a formidable challenge with its primitive 1960s technology.
12:26 Just 14 months before the Apollo 11 mission,
12:29 Neil Armstrong test-piloted a prototype lunar lander.
12:33 The result was disastrous.
12:35 Unfortunately, it went out of his control,
12:40 and luckily he was able to eject before it crashed in flames.
12:45 If they couldn't get a simulator to work on Earth,
12:52 how in the world could they get the actual lunar module to work on the Moon?
12:59 And of course, I knew both Neil and Buzz.
13:03 There was no professional rescue.
13:05 Had they made a faulty landing, they couldn't have got back.
13:08 That would have been too ghastly to contemplate.
13:10 Conspiracy theorists question not only the technical capabilities of the landing craft,
13:17 but also the computing power that guided it.
13:21 They didn't have the technology to do it.
13:23 The risk is too great. They could not afford to risk failure.
13:28 They wouldn't allow themselves to rely on science and technology to get them there.
13:34 Pat Norris is a former space system and software engineer,
13:41 hired by NASA to analyse the challenges of navigating to the Moon and back.
13:47 In the 1950s, computers didn't really exist.
13:51 But by the mid-1960s, computers were available that were powerful enough
13:57 to do the calculations needed for such a complicated mission.
14:01 Of course, by comparison with today's computers, they were very primitive.
14:05 While these advancements should surely encourage a new line of missions,
14:10 conspiracy theorists argue that this is enough to question
14:14 if we ever could have gone in the first place.
14:17 We're talking about the mid-1960s here, when computers occupied rooms.
14:23 The sort of computing power that you have in a mobile phone today
14:27 would be greater than the computing power that was alleged to have been used to land man on the Moon.
14:33 One of the reasons that we had difficulty in navigating close to the Moon
14:38 was that the computers available weren't able to provide a sufficiently detailed mathematical model of the Moon's gravity.
14:46 Perhaps there wasn't enough information,
14:48 but even if there had been enough information, the computers probably wouldn't have been able to cope with it.
14:53 They were adequate for the mission at the time, but only just.
14:58 Unlike modern-day PCs, the Apollo computers didn't have to store files or process images.
15:06 Most of the number crunching was done at mission control,
15:09 and the information transmitted back to the astronauts.
15:12 In their attempt to disprove the missions,
15:18 conspiracy theorists have analysed the footage of the Moon landings frame by frame.
15:23 One of the most famous pieces of footage in history is Buzz Aldrin's dance across the moonscape.
15:29 Near the end of the two and a half hours, in front of the television camera,
15:34 I did have an opportunity to prance around and hop and demonstrate different methods of moving around.
15:41 The movement, because of the restrictions of the spacesuit, was basically like being in slow motion.
15:49 The famous lunar walk shows Aldrin experimenting with the restrictions of the spacesuit.
15:56 The so-called kangaroo hop does work, but it seems your forward mobility is not quite as good.
16:04 Conspiracy theorists have claimed that the footage was actually filmed in slow motion in a studio,
16:09 and that the astronauts were supported by wires to replicate these movements on the Moon.
16:14 The astronaut is dangling on a wire to take off, if you like, the difference between the Earth's gravity and the Moon's gravity.
16:23 The wire was between the backpack and the body.
16:26 The problem is, the astronauts tended to rely on this wire, so you see lots of jerky movements.
16:34 Astronauts were wearing pretty big and bulky spacesuits,
16:39 and the weight distribution isn't the same as your eye walking around on the surface of the Earth here.
16:45 The astronauts had to really cope with that and work out if they're top heavy,
16:50 how to move around such that they weren't going to fall over all the time and be unbalanced.
16:55 You do have to be rather careful to keep track of where your centre of mass is.
17:01 You can see that astronauts really adapted really well to that and started to kind of develop this new walk.
17:08 While the exact conditions of the Moon couldn't be replicated on Earth, NASA introduced methods to adapt the astronauts.
17:16 One of their favourite methods was parabolic flight, or as the astronauts called it, the vomit comet.
17:23 By climbing and diving in a series of arcs, an aeroplane could simulate 30-second windows of reduced gravity.
17:31 These sessions served as road tests for the spacesuits and gave astronauts their first taste of lunar gravity.
17:43 If, as the conspiracy theorists claim, NASA faked the Apollo missions, then it also had to fake the photographic evidence.
17:50 I was trained as a photographer in London back in the 1960s.
17:55 I was familiar with the camera that was used, the Hasselblad camera,
17:59 and also with the film that was used, Kodak Ektachrome transparency material.
18:04 I was familiar with the technical side of it.
18:07 And the more I looked at the photographs, the more I started to doubt whether what we'd been told had happened
18:14 had actually happened the way we'd been told.
18:17 Also siding with Marcus, American conspiracy theorist Ralph Renne raised a different technical question.
18:24 Could the gloves the astronauts wore on their pressurised spacesuits have actually worked on the Moon?
18:32 What I do is I pull a vacuum in this chamber I created, and I have a glove inserted inside of it.
18:38 And it was to prove that the flexibility they've shown in their suits and gloves are impossible.
18:44 Right now I can put my hand in there and I can move it every which way.
18:48 I can grasp, I can make a fist, I can lift up, down.
18:51 But as soon as I throw this switch here, I evacuate the chamber.
18:55 As air is sucked out of the machine, the vacuum makes it more and more difficult to move the glove.
19:02 And this glove doesn't want to move. I can't bend it backwards. I can hardly force it down.
19:07 I mean, how could you pick up small screws and bolts like they've shown them to do,
19:12 or trigger a little tiny trigger on a camera with a glove doing this?
19:16 If it seems impossible to operate a camera properly in pressurised gloves,
19:21 how could these perfect pictures have been taken?
19:26 Trained aerospace engineer Jay Windley has extensively researched the moon landing conspiracies,
19:32 and was present at the experiment on the moon set to refute these theories.
19:36 This is a Hasselblad EL500 camera, manufactured specially for the lunar missions.
19:42 It attached to the spacesuit via this bayonet.
19:46 The camera would have a framework surrounding the bottom and rear of the camera,
19:51 and it would slide down onto the control unit here,
19:55 so that the astronaut could work with his hands without worrying about the camera.
19:59 Lunar cameras didn't have a viewfinder,
20:02 because the astronauts' helmets prevented them from looking down and framing the shot.
20:06 Basically, you could just sort of point that camera at what you wanted
20:10 without having to really look through a viewfinder.
20:13 But according to conspiracy theorists, this was a problem that couldn't be solved.
20:19 Focus it, set the shutter speed, set the aperture by hand, wearing armoured gauntlets.
20:25 You can't see the shutter button on a Hasselblad, it's on the front of the camera.
20:29 You didn't know if you'd taken a photograph, because you can't hear anything in space.
20:32 You can't see the counter dials on the side of the camera.
20:36 So with all those restrictions, we have some of the most iconic images ever taken in the 20th century.
20:42 I don't believe it.
20:43 I'll step out and take some of my first pictures here.
20:47 Jay Windley investigated how these design features on the Hasselblad
20:51 would have been operated by the astronauts.
20:53 The Zeiss Biagon lens here has been fitted with these little paddles
20:59 to allow the astronaut to manipulate them with clumsy fingers.
21:04 You just push it in either direction.
21:07 The shutter release, normally a very small button,
21:10 has been made especially large so that it can be pressed with an astronaut's glove.
21:15 The focus ring has been fitted with stops that correspond to near, medium, far and infinity.
21:23 So he didn't have to pay attention to whether he was 8 feet or 9 feet away from a subject.
21:28 He wouldn't have to very carefully measure it.
21:31 Richard Underwood was responsible for teaching Apollo astronauts the art of lunar photography.
21:39 Even in the early days, before they went to the moon, I'd say,
21:43 "You know, when you get back from this journey, you will be a national hero.
21:48 But your photographs, if they're good, they'll live forever."
21:52 I'd tell them, "Your only key to immortality is the quality of your photography.
21:56 Nothing else. Forget all the other stuff."
21:58 The astronauts were told to take their lunar cameras everywhere they went and practice.
22:03 They took them home to photograph their friends and family and barbecues and sporting events
22:08 and all other types of things.
22:10 And they did it with the camera very effectively.
22:13 All of the crew members understood pretty well how to operate this.
22:17 And the film turned out to be very, very versatile in coming up with just outstanding results.
22:24 But these outstanding results led to one of the most famous photographic anomalies,
22:31 the strange case of the lunar shadows.
22:35 Shadows are one of the strong proofs that we never went to the moon.
22:40 If you examine pictures offered by NASA as genuine,
22:44 you find that in many cases the shadows are not parallel.
22:49 Well, since the sun was the only source of light,
22:53 all shadows on the moon should be exactly parallel, but they aren't.
22:58 Because the lunar shadows fall in different directions,
23:02 some conspiracy theorists claim that they were created by separate artificial light sources.
23:08 "There's only one sun. There are not two.
23:11 But these shadows are anomalous in that sometimes they are diverging from objects
23:16 and sometimes converging. And it can't be.
23:20 You can go any place on this planet when the sun's up
23:23 and you look at two objects and those sun shadows are parallel."
23:27 But according to physicists, there are reasonable explanations
23:31 for why we find that shadows aren't always parallel.
23:35 "There's lots of different things which can make shadows go in different directions.
23:39 I mean, obviously you have shadows pointing away from the sun,
23:42 but if your camera is a wide-angle camera, you'll get a perspective effect on the shadows."
23:47 The effect of converging shadows is a well-known optical phenomena in photography.
23:52 This effect is created where there is a single light source.
23:56 For both the Moon and the Earth, this source is the sun.
24:00 "If you have bits of topography on the surface, like troughs,
24:03 they can produce shadows which appear to be at right angles to the main direction of the sun."
24:08 But if we look at the photos, Aldrin appears to be brightly lit up.
24:15 Shouldn't the astronaut's body be in darkness?
24:19 "He's standing in a pool of light. It's a spotlight.
24:23 It's not the sun. This is taken here on Earth,
24:27 under controlled studio lighting conditions,
24:30 with a whacking great, probably a 12K ARRI spotlight."
24:33 "On the Moon, you're not just illuminated by the sun shining towards you
24:39 and casting a shadow behind you, but there's also a huge area of the lunar surface around you,
24:44 and that provides backlight to any subject on the Moon's surface.
24:48 You can also get reflections of light off bright objects,
24:51 like spacesuits, if they're fairly close to whatever they're illuminating."
24:56 And specifically, the light bouncing off the highly reflective lunar module.
25:01 In these pictures, you can clearly see where a pool of light appears.
25:05 If you look at pictures where the astronauts are away from the module,
25:09 the surface appears evenly lit.
25:12 Another cause for suspicion among conspiracy theorists
25:17 is Apollo's symbolic highlight, the American flag.
25:21 "Wherever there's an American flag, it's always brilliantly lit up,
25:25 even if it's on the shadow side.
25:27 And on the shadow side, that should be really dark black.
25:32 But they had little spotlights, obviously, because that's the only way you can do it."
25:36 "Oh, geez, that's great. Is the lighting here quite decent?"
25:39 "The flag they took to the Moon was made of nylon,
25:42 which is fairly translucent material. It lets light through.
25:45 You wouldn't expect to see one side bright and one side dark."
25:48 "Here we can see our flag brightly lit from the front,
25:51 but if we move around to the back,
25:54 we can see that even with our single light source, it's still brightly lit.
25:59 The light is shining through and making the flag glow."
26:03 But why does the lunar flag wave around if there's no wind on the Moon?
26:08 "The stage sets were very hot,
26:12 because when you're filming in slow motion, you need more light,
26:16 because each frame is being exposed.
26:19 They had 144 frames per second, so they needed very, very strong lights.
26:24 Therefore, it was probably very hot. Probably, they had some cooling."
26:29 Is this waving flag the ultimate proof the landings were faked in a studio?
26:34 With no atmosphere on the Moon,
26:36 the planting of the Apollo flag has caused some controversy.
26:40 "If you look at how the flag swings,
26:43 the edge of the flag is acting like a pendulum.
26:46 If you know the length of the pendulum, you know the time of the swing,
26:51 you can say where the gravity is, and it was on Earth."
26:55 So how could the flag flapping on the windless Moon be explained?
27:00 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin may not have been thinking about that question
27:04 as they prepared for the historic moment.
27:07 "Putting the flag on the Moon was really a symbolic highlight of the mission.
27:12 It was one that we had not really rehearsed.
27:15 Neil knew where the flag was stowed.
27:17 We brought it out, then we had to put the two pieces together."
27:21 "It won't go up. It's not in the flap."
27:25 The astronauts had to drive the flagstaff into the hard lunar surface with a twisting motion.
27:30 A horizontal aluminium rod kept the flag suspended.
27:34 "And this caused the free end of the flag to flip up and back in response to that.
27:40 Also, this is an aluminium tube, very similar to the ones used on the Apollo mission.
27:45 It's very springy. If I cause it to spring and then let go of it,
27:50 we see that this motion continues long after I've let go of it."
27:55 "Once it's in the surface, then those oscillations gradually dampen away over time.
28:00 The vibration is going down the flagpole and then it's pretty much stable after that."
28:05 "Beautiful, just beautiful."
28:08 Conspiracy theorists point to another strange anomaly.
28:14 One that can't be explained by lack of atmosphere.
28:18 As the 16-tonne landing craft touched down,
28:21 its powerful rockets would be expected to blast away the top layer of dust,
28:26 exposing the rocky lunar surface.
28:29 But footprints were visibly photographed beneath the spacecraft
28:33 and there seems to be no dust on the landing pads.
28:37 "One of the problems that was encountered, of course, is lunar dust,
28:40 the Moon is covered with it. And in fact, prior to landing on the Moon,
28:43 they'd sent unmanned landers.
28:45 One of the concerns was the fact that the lunar surface might actually be so dusty
28:48 that any spacecraft that tried to land on it might actually sink in it.
28:52 And if you wouldn't support an unmanned probe,
28:55 it certainly wasn't going to support a manned one."
28:59 Ralph Rene devised an experiment to illustrate his notion
29:02 that the rocket-powered lander should have left a crater.
29:06 If a garden leaf blower, which is dramatically less powerful,
29:10 can move dust with Earth's gravity,
29:12 why didn't a rocket which produced 10,000 pounds of thrust?
29:16 "They didn't move dry dust, they didn't move little rocks,
29:20 they didn't move anything.
29:22 So the demonstration is to show that this stuff will disappear immediately
29:26 and I'll even be able to gauge some kind of a hole."
29:29 If Rene is correct, the lunar surface, like the gravel pit,
29:37 would show visible signs of disturbance.
29:40 "But when it actually landed, the dust was all still there.
29:45 Now how can that be?
29:47 You know, if you blow dust away, it goes away, like I just did here,
29:50 I swept the ground."
29:52 "Some people think that when you land on the Moon
29:55 you should get a very big crater underneath the rocket nozzle
29:58 on the lunar module.
30:00 Now that's not the case because when they were coming in
30:02 they'd already throttled down to at least about a quarter of the maximum thrust
30:07 and just above the surface they turned off the rocket motors
30:10 so any exhaust was actually pretty feeble when it landed on the Moon's surface."
30:14 "This engine did not leave a crater of any size."
30:18 "If you look at the pictures you can see a very slight depression
30:22 underneath the rocket nozzle where dust and a little bit of soil
30:25 has been radially blown away in different directions around the lunar module."
30:30 And a closer inspection of some of the photographs
30:33 reveals that the landing did in fact disturb a very fine layer of dust,
30:38 but not enough to cover the landing pads.
30:41 "I can see some evidence of rays emanating from the descent engine,
30:47 but very insignificant amounts."
30:51 But the NASA images from the mission
30:53 aren't the only proof of the module landing on the surface.
30:57 Satellite images taken of the lunar surface in more recent years
31:02 could suggest more compelling evidence of the Apollo landings.
31:06 The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is a robotic spacecraft
31:11 launched by NASA in 2009 to orbit the Moon.
31:15 "Using some very high resolution cameras
31:19 and being relatively close to the Moon's surface,
31:21 it has actually been able to pick out each of the six Apollo landing sites.
31:25 And not only the descent stages where they landed,
31:29 but locations of the flags, the experiments,
31:32 the three rovers that were left on the last three missions."
31:35 But some argue that these satellite images
31:38 aren't as detailed as they expected when they were taken in 2011.
31:42 "The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was deliberately flown
31:46 over what is purported to be the Apollo landing sites.
31:50 And from a height of 12 miles, i.e. not very far at all,
31:56 what do you see? A couple of pixels.
31:59 If you looked at these images without NASA putting on a whacking grey arrow,
32:04 you wouldn't know what you're looking at."
32:06 While satellite images of the equipment left behind
32:09 may not be detailed enough to persuade some,
32:12 there are other markers of man-made interference in the images.
32:15 "I have to say, what you see is just one or two pixels,
32:19 but you don't get a sharp picture, a nice clean picture of the lunar module.
32:25 But the LRO pictures do show some discolouration of the area
32:30 where the lunar module took off,
32:32 so that seems fairly consistent with what NASA said."
32:36 Alongside the lunar reconnaissance images,
32:39 evidence from other missions have also been able to confirm the Apollo landing sites.
32:45 "Altitude 4200, you're go for landing, over."
32:48 "Of course, we've also had the Chinese and the Japanese with their own lunar missions.
32:53 They are able to image the areas in which the landings took place
32:58 and there are evidence of soil disturbance.
33:00 So you do have that third-party verification that the landings themselves took place."
33:06 There's one more big question conspiracy theorists ask about the Apollo 11 photographs.
33:13 With no weather on the Moon, you would expect a spectacular view of space.
33:18 Yet, there are no stars in the Apollo photographs.
33:22 "Some of these conspiracy theories, they think that if you go to the Moon,
33:26 you should be able to see stars because there's no atmosphere there,
33:28 so space should be nice and black,
33:30 so you should be able to see a lot more stars than are shown in the Apollo photographs."
33:34 Bill Kaysing is convinced this was a conscious decision on NASA's part.
33:41 "If you were to talk to Aldrin or Armstrong or any of the other Apollo astronauts,
33:47 they would actually not respond in any way to questions regarding stars."
33:55 "When you looked up at the sky, could you actually see the stars and the solar corona in spite of the glare?"
34:01 "We were never able to see stars from the lunar surface or on the daylight side of the Moon by eye
34:08 without looking through the optics."
34:10 "I asked Neil Armstrong whether he saw stars because I knew everybody else was asking.
34:14 I knew the answer, of course.
34:15 The point is that your eyes aren't adapted to that."
34:18 The human eye reacts to light by opening and closing the iris.
34:23 In bright light, the iris becomes smaller.
34:26 In the dark, it widens.
34:28 On the Moon, the eye, like the camera aperture,
34:32 can't adjust to the brightness of the lunar surface and the darkness of space at the same time.
34:39 "If you increase the aperture, you increase the amount of light going in.
34:42 And if you increase the exposure time, you also increase the amount of light going in."
34:46 "Now, if you were to do that on the Moon to get the stars,
34:49 then that would mean that the foreground would just be completely washed out and overexposed,
34:54 when really what the astronauts were trying to take pictures of
34:57 was themselves, the surface features of the Moon."
35:00 "If you imagine going, let's say, to a football stadium and all the lights are turned out,
35:07 and you look up at the sky, you can see lots of stars.
35:09 Now, if you can imagine some person turned on a floodlight,
35:13 he would drown out pretty much all the stars."
35:17 With the powerful light, even our own television camera
35:21 can't adjust to the extreme contrast to see the stars in the sky.
35:26 On our Moon set, Jay Windley puts this theory into practice
35:32 in the hope of disproving one of the conspiracy theorists' recurring arguments.
35:37 "We're going to find out that if we use an identical camera, loaded with identical film,
35:43 and we shoot pictures of the night sky, we won't get stars."
35:47 "OK, I'm going to take a shot here."
35:49 "You'll notice here I'm not using any sort of a viewfinder, I'm just aiming."
35:59 Will this experiment be enough to invalidate the conspiracy theorists' claims?
36:04 The morning after the shoot,
36:07 the negatives are developed at a professional processing laboratory in Los Angeles.
36:11 "In our experiment in the desert, we shot a variety of photographs using different film formats.
36:21 Like the Apollo astronauts, we had to guess at our focusing distances and our exposure settings.
36:28 And because we had no viewfinder, we had to guess at the direction the camera was pointing.
36:33 And you can clearly see that even with those handicaps, we were able to take quite usable photographs.
36:38 You can immediately see that there are no stars in this photograph,
36:42 even though the stars were very bright during our experiment.
36:45 They're simply too dim to be registered on film at the exposure levels that we used to take these photographs."
36:54 Our experiment demonstrates that the stars could not have been seen in the photographs taken on the lunar surface.
37:00 But this explanation doesn't satisfy magazine publisher Marcus Allen.
37:06 He believes it's impossible that any of these photographs could survive a journey to the Moon and back in the first place.
37:14 "Photographic film cannot withstand the vacuum of space.
37:21 So how did they get all these fantastic photographs we've been shown forever about Apollo astronauts on the Moon,
37:28 when the film was not in a pressurised environment, let alone radiation protection?"
37:33 Conspiracy theorists believe this is their trump card.
37:37 Not only would it destroy film, it would kill the astronauts.
37:42 The Earth's magnetic field protects our planet from solar rays.
37:50 But beyond this zone, deep in space, is where conspiracy theorists believe
37:55 astronauts would be vulnerable to radiation's deadly effects.
37:59 "The Moon is irradiated by the Sun constantly with terrible heat.
38:06 And of course there's cosmic radiation.
38:09 And then there are micrometeorites that travel 60,000 miles an hour
38:14 that would go right through the camera, the film, and of course the astronauts themselves."
38:20 After leaving the Earth's atmosphere, the astronauts rocketed through the Van Allen belts.
38:25 "Van Allen, he said it was a sea of deadly radiation.
38:32 You would pick up a death dose just about the time you got through the Van Allen shield,
38:37 you'd be cooked and you'd be dying."
38:39 These radioactive belts form a thick ring encircling the equator, thinning out around the North and South Poles.
38:48 "Until they get an engine that'll lift the life capsule,
38:52 surrounded by six feet of water or equivalent mass of lead,
38:56 they don't even dare go through the Van Allen shield."
38:59 "NASA knew it was dangerous.
39:04 Don't you think that when they went through the Van Allen belts,
39:07 they would have said, 'How are you feeling, guys?
39:10 Any effect? You still feeling okay?'
39:14 Surely you would say this, because if they were in any way incapacitated, it would be a disaster."
39:21 "When NASA designed the trajectory to go through the Van Allen radiation belt,
39:29 it was done so the astronauts would go very, very quickly through there,
39:32 so they wouldn't get a very high dosage,
39:34 and they also picked a part of the Van Allen radiation belt
39:38 which the levels of radiation were quite weak."
39:42 NASA claims the astronauts endured only a brief exposure,
39:46 penetrating the thinnest section of the belts in one hour.
39:49 "The Van Allen radiation belt is a zone of radiation around the Earth
39:55 that shapes a little bit like a donut, with two centres in it.
39:59 It's got a very strong, nasty area around here, so you can see that's a darker area,
40:04 and that's the inner belt and an outer belt over here, which is a little bit more benign.
40:08 Now, the Apollo astronauts were sent on a trajectory which avoided the inner belt,
40:13 so they were at a relatively safe part of there, and they went through fairly quickly,
40:17 so they didn't hang around inside the Van Allen radiation belt for very long."
40:20 But once they passed through, they faced an even greater danger.
40:25 "So here we have these clowns running around in tinfoil craft, stopping solar radiation,
40:34 and I'm not talking about the light, I'm talking about the radiation from the solar storms."
40:39 "There's always risk in space. For example, you can have solar storms
40:44 where you can get massive doses of radiation being flung out from the Sun."
40:48 These eruptions from the Sun can knock out satellites and electricity grids on Earth.
40:54 But they can also be detected by an early warning computer system.
41:01 "If there was some form of solar storm, a big radiation discharge,
41:05 that the astronauts could actually be exposed to an unacceptable hazard,
41:09 which would be a real risk.
41:11 So there were solar scientists actually monitoring the solar activity
41:16 to make sure that they weren't about to launch into a potential problem."
41:19 Just three months after the Apollo 16 mission,
41:23 NASA admitted that a violent solar flare hit the Moon's surface.
41:28 An eruption so powerful it could have killed the astronauts, had they been there.
41:33 "The point is that the American Apollo astronauts did not have protection
41:40 against these levels of radiation.
41:42 And we know that because NASA now admit, as a result of the Orion craft,
41:47 which is Apollo 2.0, that the levels of radiation are such
41:52 that they have to find out means to protect them
41:55 before they can send humans through these levels of radiation.
41:59 But they'd sent the Apollo astronauts, so what's the problem?
42:03 The problem is they didn't send the Apollo astronauts."
42:06 "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal,
42:11 before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon
42:15 and returning him safely to the Earth."
42:18 Those were the words of President Kennedy in 1961.
42:21 There were three parts of that sentence.
42:24 There was "get humans to the Moon before the decade is out" and "safely."
42:30 And "safely" was only one of the three.
42:33 And there were a number of occasions during the course of the Apollo program
42:38 when particularly the phrase "before the decade is out"
42:43 kind of took priority over "safety."
42:48 Sometimes they had to take some risks in order to keep to the schedule.
42:54 The astronauts could only rely on their spacecraft to survive a solar flare.
43:00 "By studying the disk of the Sun, you can make predictions
43:05 about when these are going to likely happen and avoid those times.
43:09 And even if there was a storm, if the astronauts were in the command module,
43:14 you could rotate the command module so you've got a lot of the fuel,
43:17 the oxygen, the water in between the astronauts
43:20 and the direction the radiation is coming in.
43:23 And if you're on the surface, then you could potentially go and hide behind a rock
43:27 or you could even launch off from the surface
43:29 before the nasty bits of the solar storm arrive."
43:32 For conspiracy theorists, radiation is the final nail in the coffin.
43:39 They believe the astronauts could never have survived a trip to the Moon and back.
43:47 But could the objects they returned with also be the key
43:50 to unlocking secrets from the lunar surface itself
43:53 and provide a definitive answer to the question,
43:56 "Did we really land on the Moon?"
44:00 Conspiracy theorists believe that the Moon rock from the missions
44:06 was just another part of NASA's carefully engineered deception.
44:10 "Ferno von Braun and a few guys from NASA went down to Antarctica.
44:15 What's he doing in Antarctica?
44:17 Finding Moon rocks."
44:19 "It's quite possible that these Earth-lying rocks have been doctored
44:27 to give the semblance of Moon rocks."
44:30 "It would be really, really tough to fake these things.
44:37 It would be really hard now, and certainly 50 years ago,
44:40 the idea that you would spend resources on producing some kind of secret lab
44:44 rather than actually sending people to the Moon to bring them back."
44:48 "But how many people have actually examined the Moon rock
44:54 and can confirm where they came from?
44:56 There's a great deal of doubt about it."
44:58 In total, the Apollo missions brought back over 382 kilograms of lunar soil and rock.
45:10 These samples were distributed to laboratories all over the world.
45:14 At the independent Barclay Geochronology Center in California,
45:20 geologist Paul Rene has been studying lunar rock samples throughout his career.
45:25 His main interest is these tiny glass spherules from the Moon's surface,
45:30 created by the intense heat of a meteorite impact.
45:35 "The spherules that we've been analysing are tiny balls of glass,
45:40 so they're like magma that we find on the Earth in that sense.
45:44 But they've cooled very, very quickly, and so they form an essentially uniform glass sphere."
45:50 Using a laser heating system to release gases locked inside these spherules,
45:55 Paul Rene looks for evidence of cosmic radiation
45:58 to uncover clues about their age and place of origin.
46:04 "The lunar materials that we've analysed, and that others have analysed,
46:09 show evidence of having been bombarded by cosmic radiation,
46:13 which we don't see on Earth, because we have an atmosphere that really shields them very effectively."
46:19 Rene has determined these spherules date back 3.9 billion years.
46:25 This finding eliminates the possibility that they originated on Earth.
46:31 "So the Earth, with its very dynamic environment, does not tend to preserve these glassy objects,
46:37 whereas the Moon, being essentially dead from a thermal point of view,
46:42 does tend to preserve these things.
46:44 The results that we obtained are absolutely, definitively proof of a lunar origin.
46:51 I can say with utmost assurance that they were derived from the Moon."
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47:01 But it's evidence the astronauts left behind, and not what they brought back,
47:06 that may offer the clinching proof.
47:08 Each successful Apollo mission set up a range of experiments.
47:13 And 50 years after Apollo 11, the lunar laser range is still in use.
47:19 "There were two major experiments.
47:24 One was a series of corner reflectors to reflect laser beams from the Earth,
47:31 sent to the Moon, that then, because of the geometry of these corner reflectors,
47:37 would send the beam back in exactly the direction that it came from."
47:40 But conspiracy theorists believe that these experiments were taking place before the Apollo missions.
47:47 "You don't need retroreflectors to fire a laser.
47:51 It was being done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963.
47:56 They were firing lasers at the Moon.
47:59 No reflectors there then.
48:01 Nobody had landed then.
48:02 And they were getting a signal back."
48:04 If this had already been achieved, without a reflector,
48:08 what was the advantage of NASA placing these on the lunar surface?
48:12 "There are no lasers there.
48:14 NASA only did the reflector business so they could prove they went to the Moon.
48:19 It was just another part of their ploy."
48:21 "You send a laser pulse from the Earth, with a very powerful laser,
48:29 pointing through a big telescope at a location on the Moon,
48:32 and it reflects a lot of that light back to you.
48:35 So it's fairly directional, it comes straight back to you, it doesn't get scattered.
48:38 And by measuring the time difference between when you send the pulse
48:42 and when you get the received pulse back,
48:44 you can work out the distance to the Moon very precisely, to literally centimetres."
48:49 The reflectors placed by the Apollo 11 crew
48:52 allowed scientists to achieve greater accuracy
48:55 about the Earth's position in the solar system.
48:57 "Pretty much anybody in the world with a big telescope,
49:02 with a powerful laser, can bounce.
49:04 Without getting permission from NASA,
49:06 lasers offer those reflectors and measure the distance to the Moon.
49:09 So that proves to me that the astronauts went there
49:12 and they left these laser reflectors at these different locations."
49:16 If NASA had faked this,
49:18 surely the Russians would have exposed the legitimacy of this half a century ago.
49:22 At the height of the space race,
49:26 the Soviet Union and East Germany also had the technology
49:29 to listen in on the Apollo missions.
49:31 And yet, conspiracy theorists ignore the eavesdropping power
49:36 and silence of America's arch enemies.
49:39 "They weren't at war, but this was a war.
49:43 They weren't at war, but this was as close as they could get.
49:46 Like, any form of fraud on the part of either party
49:51 would have been exposed by the other party very quickly."
49:55 "If the Russians said publicly it was fake,
49:59 they would need evidence.
50:01 Otherwise it would just be sour, it would look like sour grapes.
50:05 But they had no evidence, because NASA had everything."
50:08 But even with no doubt raised by the Russians 50 years on,
50:12 perhaps all great human achievements
50:15 are destined to attract scepticism and controversy.
50:18 "There will be landings, there will be men, there will be women on Mars soon.
50:24 I hope that we don't see the same path of conspiracy theories surfacing,
50:30 simply because it'll be one of the biggest,
50:33 if not the biggest, achievement of mankind."
50:38 "They got to the moon with basically 1960s technology.
50:42 Now with our technology, with our advanced computers, etc.,
50:46 it's still going to take them 25 years just to get back to the moon.
50:50 Now really there's something wrong there."
50:52 "When we see real conspiracy theories that become public,
50:57 whistleblowers give away the secret after a few years,
51:01 even though there are only a small number of people involved.
51:04 Some people seem to feel that conspiracy has kept its secret for 50 years,
51:10 even though tens of thousands of people were in on the secret."
51:13 For all the effort it would take to create and hide a lie of such magnitude,
51:18 it would have been far easier for NASA to build a rocket
51:22 and put man on the moon.
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52:01 you