On July 20, 1969, after an intense national effort for the better part of a decade, astronaut Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon.
Or maybe he didn’t.
At least that’s what some people believe. They think that the Moon landings were sophisticated hoaxes, designed to swindle the American public out of $30 billion and win the hotly contested space race with the Soviet Union, then our archrival. According to the conspiracy theorists, sometime during the Apollo program to put a man on the Moon, scientists realized that it was either too expensive or technically impossible to get to the Moon. So they built a secret movie studio in Nevada (or Arizona, or New Mexico, depending on the theorist you’re reading), perhaps even in the infamous Area 51, a supersecret military base, and staged the entire thing using Hollywood special effects. And when they were ready, the "history" was beamed to a gullible world, via television.
Has NASA really perpetrated the biggest fraud ever? Or is this theory just so much moondust? You can judge for yourself. Here are some of the claims the hoax believers make and the arguments against them. Weigh the evidence and draw your own conclusions. If you want to read unfiltered arguments by both conspiracy believers and skeptics, just follow the URLs at the bottom .
Argument: In photos taken by the Apollo astronauts while they were on the Moon, there are no stars in the sky (see above). When the sky is black here on Earth, we see stars. Since there is no air on the Moon to scatter light, the lunar sky is black. So where are the stars?
Counterargument: We see no stars in the images because the film was exposed for bright sunlit scenes. When an object is bright, the film needs to be exposed for only a short time to form an image. Stars are faint objects. So when the exposure time is right for a spacesuit or the Earth lit by the Sun, the stars simply do not have time to register on the film. If you went to the darkest site you could find here on Earth and took pictures at night using the same camera settings the astronauts used, you’d find no stars in your images either!
Argument: In photos taken of the lunar lander by the astronauts, there is no blast crater. The 10,000 pounds of thrust from the lander’s rocket should have dug a huge crater in the Moon’s powdery surface.
Counterargument: Just before landing, the astronauts throttled down to about 3000 pounds, just as someone backing into a parking space slows to a few miles an hour. That may still sound like a lot of force, but because the engine bell (the object at the top of the photo to the left) was almost five feet across, the force was spread over a pretty big area. The blast pressure of the rocket exhaust on the surface was probably about the same as the pressure of an astronaut’s footstep: only about one pound per square inch. It was enough to stir the dust on surface, but not to dig a crater.
Argument: In the photos taken by the astronauts, the shadows are not black. Objects in shadow, such as the words "UNITED STATES" in the photo to the left, can be clearly seen. In the photo to the right, the sun is behind Buzz Aldrin, but the front of his spacesuit is well lit. If the Sun was the only source of light and there was no air to scatter that light into shadows, the shadows should be utterly black.
Counterargument: There is no air on the Moon to scatter light, but light is reflected off the Moon’s surface. The full Moon looks bright to us precisely because it reflects sunlight. Some of this light is reflected into the shadows on the Moon. Photographers use umbrellas or white boards in the same way to "bounce" light into shadows.
Argument: The same mountain appears in both of these images, but the lander appears in only one of them. Obviously the mountain background is a fake set that was used for several different shots.
Counterargument: The lander is close to the astronaut in the bottom picture–a few dozen meters away. The mountain is hundreds of times farther away. For the top photo, taken about 40 minutes later, the astronaut moved about a hundred meters to the side. The lander was then out of the picture but, because the mountain was so far away, its position hardly changed at all. It’s not fraud, it’s an optical effect called parallax.
Argument: Several photos taken on the Moon show multiple objects with long shadows. If the Sun was the only light source, all the shadows should be parallel. The shadows are not parallel and therefore the photos are fake.
Counterargument: The shadows are not parallel for the same reason that parallel railroad tracks seem to meet in the distance: perspective. We know the railroad tracks don’t really converge, they just appear to. You can see the same effect in photos taken on Earth. This photo shows a lamppost and a tree, one nearby and the other far away, with what look like nonparallel shadows. In reality, the shadows are parallel, just like the ones on the Moon.
Again you can see a demonstration at www.badastronomy.com/bad /tv/iangoddard/moon01.htm
Argument: In many photos, cross hairs, which were etched in the astronauts’ cameras to help measure objects, seem to disappear behind objects being photographed. This is impossible if the cross hairs were inside the camera. Therefore, the images are faked.
Counterargument: In many of the photos with cross hair knockout, the object is white. Have you ever taken an overexposed photo? White parts bleed into the film around them, making them look white, too. That’s what happened here; the white object overwhelmed the film, filling in the thin, black cross hair.
Argument: The footprints on the Moon look like they were made in wet sand. There is no water on the Moon, so the prints should have vanished, like prints in dry sand.
Counterargument: Moon dust is not like Earth sand. Sand has been rounded and smoothed by wind and water. Moon dust, on the other hand, is made up of jagged shards of rock created when asteroids slammed into the Moon. When astronaut Buzz Aldrin stepped on this dust, the shards locked together, retaining every detail of the bottom of his boot. And because there is no wind or water to disturb it, Aldrin’s bootprint might last hundreds of years.
Argument: When the flag appears in photographs, it often seems to be waving in the breeze. But since the Moon has no atmosphere, there couldn’t be a breeze.
Counterargument: The flag isn’t waving, it just looks like it is. The flag hung from a horizontal rod that telescoped out from the vertical one. The astronauts couldn’t get the rod all the way out, so the flag didn’t get stretched fully. It still had a ripple in it, like a curtain that is not fully closed. In later missions, the astronauts didn’t fully deploy the rod because they liked the way the flag looked with a ripple in it.
Last year, the Fox TV network ran a program about the Moon hoax called "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" According to the program, 20 percent of Americans doubt that we went to the Moon. But a 1999 poll done by the Gallup company showed that the true number was closer to 6 percent. Still, 6 percent translates into millions of people.
According to the poll takers, it is not unusual to find about that many people agreeing with almost any question that is asked of them. Still, it would be interesting to know why so many people believe this theory. The technical arguments are one thing. Since most people are unfamiliar with the details of the Apollo program, the physics of low gravity, and the physics and chemistry of the photographic process, it is easy to fool people into thinking there is something wrong with the photos and videos shot on the Moon.
But there is also a common-sense argument against this conspiracy. Thousands of people would have had to be in on it–and they would all have had to keep silent for 40 years. To understand why people might override their common sense, read the interview with Jonathan Vankin, author of The Seventy Greatest Conspiracies of All Time.
Philip Plait is an astronomer at Sonoma State University. He has just written a book called Bad Astronomy about astronomical misconceptions. You can find out more about him, his book, and the Moon hoax at http://www. badastronomy.com. He says "If everyone had even a basic grasp of scientific principles, this planet would be a better place."
Listening in on the argument between hoax believers and hoax debunkers can be quite amusing. Here are some sources to get you started.
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