The Conspiracy Theory
Humans never landed on the Moon, NASA faked the 1960s Moon landings (perhaps with the help of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick), and the whole thing was staged here on Earth. Since then, there has been a huge Conspiracy to cover up the fakery.
As one Conspiracy fan describes it, “Some of the moon walks are definitely filmed in a movie studio, no question. My theory about the production process is the astronauts were subjected to multiple iterations of mission training simulations where they followed the same script over and over, and much of this occurred in movie studios before cameras. At a minimum some of these training simulation films were used in the official mission footage. How much of any of it was actually on the moon I don’t claim to know, but a lot of it seems highly dubious.”
Another Reddit fan adds, “I don’t think man ever landed on the moon, other space shit is hard to believe. No I don’t believe in Flat earth, but I am not certain the ISS is real.”
The History
Of all the silly Conspiracy Theories that can be found on the Internet, the “Moon landing was a hoax!” is probably the best-known, the most thoroughly-debunked, and the most mocked.
At the time, however, the Moon program was not all that popular. Throughout the 1960s, a majority of the polled public felt that the Apollo project was a waste of money and was not worth the expense. There were political protests demanding that the funding could be better used for schools or highways. Many denounced it as a mere Cold War political stunt with little real scientific purpose. And yet, when Neil Armstrong stepped off the LEM on July 20, 1969, most of the human population of the planet was watching on live TV. It became one of the defining moments of our history.
After Apollo 11, the Moon landings continued until 1972, though a series of planned further missions were cancelled due to budgetary cuts. During this time, there were no significant claims that the landings had been faked or that they had never happened.
Then in the early 1970s, the US entered a period of political turmoil. First there was the Watergate scandal, which pulled the lid off of widespread conspiracy, lying and cover-ups at the very highest levels of the government. This was followed shortly later by US Senate hearings exposing duplicity and conspiracy within the American intelligence agencies including the CIA, FBI and NSA, who had been secretly (and illegally) spying on American citizens, disrupting and “neutralizing” political opponents such as the civil rights, environmentalist and anti-war movements, and carrying out targeted assassinations of unfriendly foreign leaders. Almost overnight, a traumatized United States lost faith in its very system of government, and levels of distrust and suspicion grew to levels never before seen in the US.
It was a fertile ground for planting and fertilizing all sorts of anti-government Conspiracy Theories on a wide series of topics, and one of these was aimed at the Moon landings. The first seed came from Bill Kaysing, a former Navy officer who worked at Rocketdyne (which was building the F-1 engine for NASA’s Saturn rockets) as an editor for the technical publications department. In 1976, Kaysing wrote a book he titled We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. Perhaps not surprisingly, he was not able to find any publisher who was willing to print it, and so he self-published the tome and printed a few hundred copies himself. Kaysing’s primary claim was that he had seen an internal NASA study which concluded that the mathematical odds of successfully landing on the Moon were only 0.0017 percent. (Kaysing, however, never produced any such document, nor has any such study ever subsequently been found by any researcher.) He therefore concluded that the Moon landing had been faked by NASA, which was under desperate pressure to meet the political goal of beating the Soviets to the Moon.
At first, not many people took Kaysing’s book seriously and he had little impact. But as distrust in “government” grew, the “Moon landing was faked” Conspiracy Theory began to grow with it. By 1978, it had become familiar enough that Hollywood was inspired to make a movie about it. Capricorn One told a fictional story about a conspiracy to fake a future Mars landing. Although the movie was panned by critics, it gave some semblance of respectability to the “Moon landing” Conspiracy Theory and also exposed it to a much wider audience who had never heard it before.
And things took off from there. In 1982, another self-published book, by nuclear engineer William L Brian, appeared. Titled Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the U.S. Space Program (the title itself alludes to its primary inspiration), it presented many of the arguments that would continue to be repeated decades later. Brian was followed by a slew of imitators, including a video titled Was It Only a Paper Moon? which appeared in 1997, at the dawn of the Internet Age. The Internet itself was a boon for the Conspiracy Theorists, allowing them to compare notes, cook up new theories and excuses, and also to reach a larger audience than they ever had available before.
In 2001, the Fox Network, beloved by Conspiracy Theorists everywhere, aired a documentary titled Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? which was sympathetic to the Crackpots and sparked renewed interest in the topic amongst the extremist political fringe. Today, a whole slew of YouTube vids can be found featuring the Moon landing deniers, and, naturally, there is a Reddit sub dedicated to the Conspiracy, (which bills itself as “the place to remove ‘truths protective layers’”.
One fringe Russian politician, Yuri Ignatyevich Mukhin, has argued that the US and USSR/Russia have both colluded together to fake the whole thing. (This version has gained some traction in the US as well, with one supporter declaring, “I personally believe Russia is faking their space programme too. Governments of this world aren’t always the enemies you think they are behind closed doors”: another echoes, “The CIA had moles all over the soviet government and space program. The head of the soviet space program is a US citizen.”) There are also prominent Moon landing deniers from Germany, France, and Japan.
The most prominent and well-known Moon Conspiracy Theorist is Bart Sibrel, a self-styled “documentary film-maker” who has produced four videos arguing that the landings were faked. (The most widely-viewed of these is A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, released in 2001.) Sibrel is most famous for an incident that happened in September 2002, when he ambushed astronaut Buzz Aldrin and began peppering him with questions implying that he was lying about being on the Moon. Aldrin punched him in the face. The LA County District Attorney refused to file charges, concluding that Sibrel had provoked the confrontation.
Today, polls show that around one in five Americans reject the idea that humans landed on the Moon, and instead conclude that it was all some sort of hoax. The percentage is slightly higher in the United Kingdom and in Russia.
As with most Crackpots, however, the Moon landing deniers can’t agree among themselves, and have offered theories and hypotheses that are all over the map. While most have concluded that no humans have ever actually visited the Moon, there have been some variations on the theme. Most are willing to concede that unmanned robotic probes have landed on the Moon (and other planetary bodies)—but they rule out any manned landings.
One rather odd variation is that it was actually another crew that went to the Moon but died there in an unsuccessful landing attempt, and so a fake version was then filmed using Aldrin and Armstrong as stand-ins: “So my theory is we filmed the second half of the moon landing on a set but the first half actually happened and was filmed in real life. My reasoning for this theory is based off the actuality of Neil, and Buzz returning to earth. I think we actually sent men to the moon and they actually did land and set foot on the moon and do everything they claim to have done....however I don’t think those men were actually Neil and Buzz, and I don’t think the actual crew ever returned home. I think Buzz and Neil are paid actors to cover up for the men that actually went on the mission and never returned. I think the mission went wrong and the actual crew couldn’t return home. Buzz and Neil just appeared to the public to be the ones going on the mission while the actual crews real identity was kept top secret for reason obvious reason regarding mission integrity and knowledge. Instead of telling the world the actual crew would not return home due to America’s miscalculations, we instead filmed the return of the shuttle to earth on a fake set and claimed buzz and Neil returned safely. I say all of this because everything about the landing seems to hold true, the footage is legit, everything from the shadows to the lack of stars has been scientificly debunked. The thing that throws me off is the clip where the lander takes off and leaves the moon. That clip seems so fake compared to everything else. And the video where buzz or Neil can’t swear on the Bible to say it’s true. And the fact that we haven’t landed anymore men on the moon since, and half of the data and records from the landing are missing. Basically buzz and Neil are the first ever crisis actors but they acted to prevent a world wide crisis and to make American seem successful in the space race.”
Others have concluded that it was only the first few “landings” that were faked (on the belief that NASA was unable to meet President Kennedy’s deadline), but that the technology was then successfully developed a few years later and so the final one or two landings were real. (These theories usually center around some trickery involving the Saturn rockets.) A few people assert that any manned space missions are impossible, and that not only NASA but every space-faring nation including Russia and China has faked their entire “space program”. For some of these “theorists”, that means the International Space Station is a hoax, too.
One very popular hypothesis amongst Moon landing deniers is that Stanley Kubrick, who had just released his blockbuster sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, had so impressed the conspirators with his realistic FX space scenes that he been hired by NASA to produce all the fake footage of the Apollo landings, either in a secret sound stage (perhaps at Area 51) or in some remote desert location. In 1995, a spoof “interview” was posted to the Internet’s alt.humor.best-of-usenet group, titled “Stanley Kubrick and the Moon Hoax”. It declared that Kubrick had been blackmailed by the CIA into cooperating with the hoax after they threatened to expose Kubrick’s brother as an officer in the Communist Party (in reality Kubrick has no brother). Oddly, some of the deniers swallowed this silly story whole and later breathlessly repeated it in their books almost word for word.
The cockamamie idea seems to have then really taken off after it was derided in a 2008 French mockumentary directed by William Karel titled Operation Lune, which used satire and tongue-in-cheek interviews (including fanciful tales of how the CIA tried to kill Kubrick’s assistants) to make fun of the denier theories. Since then, various Crackpots have claimed to have found “hidden messages” inside Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining in which he supposedly “confesses” to participating in the plot. And so the “Kubrick diddit” theory is still alive and well among Crackpots, with one Reddit enthusiast noting in 2019: “In 1968, a film came out called 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was the year before the moon landing and it’s absolutely breathtaking. They could fake the garbage footage back then no problem. I’m not falling the media spin that faking it is impossible.”
According to the Crackpots, then, the Moon landing hoax must be the biggest Conspiracy ever in world history. Not only did it involve a government agency which at its height controlled five percent of the entire US budget and employed, directly or indirectly, over a half-million people in a ten-year period, but according to the Conspiracy Theorists NASA carried out an enormous range of actions, from filming the “landings” on a sound stage, to faking all the radio transmissions from space, to manufacturing phony “Moon rocks”, to “paying off” in excess of several thousand people from technicians to journalists, to conspiring with unfriendly nations like the USSR and China, to even purportedly killing at least a dozen people (including astronauts) who were reportedly about to “expose the hoax”. And as more and more evidence appears that confirms the Apollo landings, the conspiracy tales continue to grow ever-larger (now involving everyone from China to the United Nations) to explain it all away.
The Reality
The 1969 Moon landings have been called the most significant accomplishment ever made by the human species. They were also one of the most well-documented. Unlike the space programs of some other nations, which were carried out under a veil of official secrecy and only revealed in carefully-orchestrated snippets, the NASA Moon mission was entirely open right from the start. The Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs were unclassified and freely available to the press and public. Every step was meticulously filmed, photographed and documented: indeed, literally billions of people around the world watched it live on TV. Today we can trace the history of every part of every spaceship, and copious memos and internal documents illustrate how every decision was carried out. No other event of such historical significance is as open to examination both now and in the future.
Like all Conspiracy Theorists, the Moon landing deniers tend to just repeat the same arguments over and over again: all of them have been debunked in excruciating detail by a wide range of investigators. In August 2008, even the TV show Mythbusters devoted an entire episode to eviscerating most of the common denier arguments.
In 2009, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter began taking a series of high-resolution photos of the Moon’s entire surface as part of NASA’s “Return to the Moon” program. Among the locations it photographed were the landing zones for the Apollo missions. The photos show the Lunar Module Descent Stages still sitting there on the lunar surface, and were clear enough to discern pathways made by the astronaut’s footprints as they walked on the Moon. A year later, the Indian probe Chandrayaan-1 also produced high-resolution photos of the lunar landing sites, and in 2010 a Chinese mission returned new photographs, in which the lunar rovers used by the Apollo astronauts are visible. In 2012, new photos from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showed the flags that had been planted on the Moon, and were clear enough to determine that one of them, from the Apollo 11 site, had fallen over.