18 November 2014
The Short Answer (TSA)
On July 21, 1969, Apollo 11 entered lunar orbit. Two astronauts descended to the surface of the moon landing in the Sea of Tranquility. Six hours later, Neil Armstrong stepped out of Lunar Module and took the first steps on the moon.
But in 2001, a poll taken by the Fox network revealed that one out of five respondents, about 20%, didn’t believe this event ever happened.
That’s a bit of credibility gap.
A small but determined group of people assert that no manned mission has ever reached the moon. The U.S., it is claimed, faked the 1969 moon landing something like the events presented in a fictional novel and film, Capricorn One, in which NASA claims to have launched astronauts on a mission to Mars. In fact (or, rather, in fiction), the “astronauts” remain right here on Earth where they work on a sound-stage participating in the filming of a fake landing on the red planet.
The lunar landing skeptics are divided into two groups. One group believes that no manned mission has ever reached the Moon. All the Apollo missions, in which a landing was said to have occurred, were faked by filming the supposed lunar sojourn on a sound-stage and presenting the film to the world as a real series of events.
Another group of skeptics believes that the 1969 landing was faked, but subsequent missions were real. Apparently, NASA needed to spend fantastic amounts of time, energy, and money primarily to spread around false evidence to cover up the fact that there really had never been a Moon landing in 1969.
In fact, the itemized list of anomalies that believers, or rather “disbelievers,” offer as proof is a long one. Almost all of the evidence centers around the photographs taken while the astronauts were on the moon.
Actually, most all of evidence of a “faked moon landing” can be explained and refuted – and has been – most comprehensively in an episode of the television series Myth Busters, in which Matt and Jamie go through most of the supposed “anomalies” and present pretty convincing explanations.
MythBusters – Moon Landing — Wikipedia
But the believers in the “faked moon landing” were “on a roll” for a while. In fact, there was a comedy of errors long and funny enough to bear reviewing.
First, a “moon rock” in a Dutch museum was found to be a piece of petrified wood from right here on earth. The rock was traced to an Ex Dutch Prime Minister who remembered having received the rock as a gift during an official visit by the Apollo 11 astronauts. After the visit, the Dutch official donated the moon rock to the museum.
Moon Rock Turns Out to be Fake
When NASA was contacted for authentication, the agency revealed that no records of moon rocks had ever been kept. At the time, the agency believed that, with more missions, moon rocks would become so common that they would be nearly valueless. So, without any records, we can’t really be sure where the original rocks are. The moon rock evidence seemed . . . questionable.
Apollo Moon rocks lost in space? No, lost on Earth – USATODAY.com
When investigators sought the original films and video tapes of the missions, NASA explained that they had all been accidentally destroyed. All originals and all copies. And not just the tapes of the Apollo 11 mission, but the tapes of all the manned missions to the Moon.
Then, NASA sought to fill the void by obtaining the original news feed videos from CBS News. These would have been more convincing if the agency hadn’t immediately sent the tapes to Hollywood to be enhanced (altered).
Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits | Reuters
Still, in 1969, computer generated special effects were far in the future. The question remained: How could anyone have faked the footage of the moon landing?
Well, it just so happened that a film director had recently consulted with NASA in the making of a film: 2001 – A Space Odyssey. In that film, director Stanley Kubrick’s most amazing special effect technique, front screen projection, was used to simulate numerous scenes of astronauts walking on the surface of the moon.
While all this begins to sound worse and worse, in fact, the theory of Kubrick’s involvement unraveled quickly. Not only did the director himself, co-workers, friends and family convincing deny his involvement, but the lunar surface scenes in 2001 really don’t resemble the photographs and tapes of the astronauts on the Moon.
But, amazingly, though the facts don’t seem to support the theories, the believers in the “faked moon landing” go marching on. The “legend” of Kubrick’s filming of a fake moon landing has not only survived, but developed into a further theory that the director “confessed” his involvement in “the greatest deception in history” by leaving clues in a subsequent film, The Shining. A later film, Room 237, carefully elucidates “the clues inserted” into the earlier film.
So, not withstanding all the evidence to the contrary, the belief that, at least, the 1969 moon landing was faked, goes marching on.
A final suggestion: One way or another, the waxing and waning of the numbers of believers in the moon landing conspiracy may, in the end, have more to say about the perceived credibility gap between a people and their government, than about whether or not men ever walked on the moon.
Wikipedia gives an extremely good accounting the debate:
Moon Landing Conspiracy Theories — Wikipedia
M Grossmann of Hazelwood, Missouri
& Belleville, Illinois
Lots of Moons & Music 