The
Moon Landings: A Giant Hoax for Mankind?
An introduction to the mother of all conspiracy theories
Are believers in danger of extinction?
Coming up is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. In 2016, a survey showed that 52 percent of the British public thought that Apollo missions were faked. Skepticism is highest among those who were too young to see it live on TV: 73 percent of aged 25-34 believe we didn’t land on the moon, compared to 38 percent of those aged 55 or more. These numbers seem to be rising every year. British unbelievers were only 25 percent ten years ago. It is not known how may they are today, but a 2018 poll by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center revealed that 57 percent Russians believe that there has never been a manned lunar landing. The percentage rises to 69 percent among people with higher education: in other words, the more educated people are, and the more capable of rational reasoning, the less they believe in the moon landings. In the US, the percentage seems much lower: A 1999 Gallup poll indicated just 6 percent Americans doubting the moon landings, and a 2013 Pew Research showed the number to have risen to a mere 7 percent. Not surprisingly, then, a 2010 Pew Research poll showed that 63 percent of Americans were confident that NASA would land an Astronaut on Mars by 2050.
The moon hoax theory was almost unheard of before the spread of
Internet, and gained momentum with the development of YouTube, which allowed
close inspection of the Apollo footage by anyone interested. Before that,
individuals who had serious doubts had little means to share them and make
their case convincing. One pioneer was Bill Kaysing, who broke the
subject in 1976 with his self-published book We Never Went to the Moon:
America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. He may be called a
whistleblower, since he had been working for Rocketdyne, the company that
designed and built the Apollo rockets. Then came Ralph René with his NASA Mooned America!, also
self published.
Research gained depth and scope, and disbelief became epidemic
around the 30th anniversary of Apollo 11, thanks in great part to British
cinematographer David Percy, who co-authored the book Dark Moon with
Mary Bennett, and directed the 3-hour documentary What
Happened on the Moon? An Investigation into Apollo (2000),
presented by Ronnie Stronge. It remains to this day greatly valuable for anyone
willing to make an informed opinion.
Then there was the much shorter A Funny Thing Happened on
the way to the Moon (2001), directed by Bart Sibrel,
which brings in valuable insight into the historical context. Sibrel also went
around challenging NASA astronauts to swear on the Bible, in front of the
camera, that they did walk on the moon, and he compiled these sequences
in Astronauts Gone Wild,
together with more useful footages of embarrassingly awkward statements made by
NASA astronauts who are supposed to have walked on the moon but sound hardly
competent and consistent; Alan Bean from Apollo 12 learning from Sibrel that he
went through the Van Allen radiation belt is a must-see.
Then, using materials from those films and other sources, came
the groundbreaking TV documentary Did we land on the
moon? (2001), directed by John Moffet for Fox TV. To my knowledge and
judgment, this is still the best introduction to the arguments of the “moon
hoax theorists”: You can watch it here from its 2013 rebroadcast on Channel 5:
There are very few books available on the subject. I am not
aware of a more researched one than One Small Step? The Great Moon Hoax and the Race to
Dominate Earth From Space by
German researcher Gerhard Wisnewski, originally published in 2005, from which I
will quote repeatedly.
I am not going to discuss all the evidence presented in these
sources. I can only recommend them and a few others on the way. I will simply
sort what I see as the most convincing arguments, add a few recent
developments, give my best conclusion, place the issue in the broader
historical perspective, and draw some lessons from it all about the Matrix we
have been living in.
First of all, we need to be clear about the aim of such an
inquiry. We should not expect any conclusive proof that Neil Armstrong, or any
other Apollo moon-walker, didn’t walk on the moon. That cannot be proven,
absent some indisputable evidence that he was somewhere else (orbiting around
the earth, for example) at the precise time he claimed to have spent on the moon.
In most cases, you cannot prove that something didn’t happen, just like you
cannot prove that something doesn’t exist. You cannot prove, for example, that
unicorns don’t exist. That is why the burden of proof rests on anyone who
claims they do exist. If I say to you I walked on the moon, you will ask me to
prove it, and you will not take as an answer: “No, you prove
that I’m didn’t go.” Does it make a difference if I am the NASA? It does,
because calling the NASA a liar will inevitably lead you to question everything
you have been led to believe by your government and mainstream media. It is a
giant leap indeed! Just like children of abusive parents, decent citizens of
abusive governments will tend to repress evidence of their government’s
malevolence. And so, people choose to believe in the moon landings, without
even asking for proofs, simply because: “They wouldn’t
have lied to us for more than 50 years, would they? The media would have
exposed the lie long ago (remember the Watergate)! And what about the 250,000
people involved with the project? Someone would have talked.” I can actually
hear myself speaking like that just 10 years ago. All these objections must
indeed be addressed.
But before that, the scientific thing to do is to start with the
question: can the NASA prove they sent men to the moon? If the answer is no,
the next step is to decide if we take their word for it or not. That requires
pondering what could have been the reasons for such a massive lie. We will get
to that.
But, first of all, can the NASA provide hard evidence of the
moon landings?
Rock-solid evidence from Antarctica
Yes, they can. They brought back pieces of the moon: roughly 380
kilograms of moon rocks and soil samples, all Apollo missions combined. Moon
rocks prove the moon landings, don’t they? Yes they do, but only if it can be
firmly established that they were not dug out from the earth. And that is the
problem. As explained here, “meteorites have been
found in Antarctica which have proved to have the same characteristics as the
moon rocks.” It may be helpful to know that in 1967, two years before Apollo
11, the NASA set up an expedition to Antarctica, joined by Wernher Von Braun,
the leading NASA propagandist for the lunar missions; Antarctica is the region
of the earth with the biggest concentration of meteorites, but it is not known
whether the expedition included geologists, nor if meteorites were brought
back. In fact, it was not until 1972 that lunar meteorites were officially
discovered in Antarctica; their lunar origin, of course, was determined by
comparison with the moon samples brought back by Apollo crews (Wisnewksi 202).
So the moon rocks are a far cry from proving the moon landings.
As a matter of fact, none of the so-called moon rocks can be proven to have
been brought back from the moon rather than from Antarctica or somewhere else
on earth. But it gets much worse: some of the so-called moon rocks have been
conclusively proven to be fake. In the 1990s, British astrobiologist Andrew
Steele was granted the special privilege to get close to some of the precious
samples locked in NASA safes, and imagine his surprise when discovering in them
a bristle, bits of plastic, nylon and Teflon and tiny earthly animals
(Wisnewski 207). Another moon rock made the headlines when, 40 years after
having been handed personally by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the Dutch
prime minister, it was scrutinized and proven to be petrified wood.
Granted, a few fake moon rocks don’t prove that all moon rocks are fake. But it
should be reason enough for starting a systematic scientific examination of the
dozens of other samples that the USA ceremoniously gave away in 1969 and the
1970s.
