The Lunar Landings Hoax

Columbia, he has landed Tranquillity Base. Eagle is at Tranquality. I read you five by. Over." The voice from Houston betrayed no emotion, although this was anything but business as usual. A human being was about to set foot on the moon for the first time in history, armed only with the Stars and Stripes, some scientific instruments and an almost reckless, can-do demeanour that had captivated the world.
The reply from Columbia, the command-and·service module that had released the lunar lander two hours and 33 minutes earlier, betrayed an equally professional cool. "Yes, I heard the whole thing," Michael Collins said matter-of-factly.
Houston: "Well it's a good show."
Columbia: "Fantastic."
That was when Neil Armstrong chimed in. "Yeah, I'll second that," said the 38-year-old astronaut, the moonwalker-to-be, America's own Boy Scout, and the most famous man in the...well, in the universe. And even though the static ate away at the clarity of his consonants, Armstrong's sneering tone came through loud and clear. The mission control man heard it, too. And he knew what was coming. Sort of.
"A fantastic show " Armstrong said. "The greatest show on earth, huh, guys?"
There was a moment's silence. Then a cameraman sniggered. And the director sighed, and did what directors do when actors screw up their lines. "Cut," he groaned. He was a heavy-set man in his fifties and the combination of the long hours and the hot studio lights had started to get to him.
"Shit, Armstrong, if you're gonna be a smart-ass, do it on your own time, all right? We got 25 tired people on this set. We got a billion people who are going to be watching your every move only a week from now. We're on deadline here. Now, do you suppose you could just stick to the script and get it over with? Thank you."
His assistant stepped forward with the slate. "Apollo moon landing, scene 769/A22, take three," she announced.
"Action!"
"Columbia, he has landed Tranquility Base," the mission control man began again.

SuperFraud

The history books lie. So do the encyclopaedias and the commemorative videos and the 9year-old coffee mugs with the Proudly smiling faces of Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, and Michael Collins. When Armstrong climbed down from that ladder proclaiming that it was only a small step for man but a giant leap for mankind, he was merely setting foot on a dust covered sound stage in a top-secret TV studio in thc Nevada desert.
Nasa's cold warriors and spin-doctors faked the whole moon landing. Come to think of it, they faked all six moon landings - spending around US $25 billion to prove to the world that not even the Soviets, especially not the Soviets, Could hold a candle to the United States when it came to space exploration.
This is the view of writer Bill Kaysing. It is also the conviction of millions of Americans who have learned to distrust their Government with -a passion. Most of these sceptics do not even appear to be steamed up about the alleged superfraud. They shrug and raise their palms and go about their business. Not Kaysing. He seems sever to have heard a conspiracy theory he did not like, and this one tops them all. For almost 20 years now, he has been trying to get out "the most electrifying news story of the entire 20th century and possible of all time". He has written a book aptly titled We Never Went to The Moon, and will not give up trying to uncover more evidence.
Kaysing, a gentle, white haired Californian, whose energy level seems mercifully untouched by his 72 years, worked as head of technical publications for the Rocketdyne Research Department at its Southern Californian facility from 1956 to 1963. Rocketdyne was the engine contractor for Apollo.
"NASA couldn't make it to the moon, and they knew it," asserts Kaysing, who, after getting out of the "corporate rat race", became a freelance author of books and newsletters. "In the late Fifties, when I was at Rocketdyne, they did a feasibility study on astronauts landing on the moon. They found that the chances of success was something like 0.0017 percent. In other words, it was hopeless, "As late as 1967, Kaysing reminds me, three astronauts died in a horrendous fire on the launch pad. "It's also well documented that NASA was often badly managed and had poor quality control. But, as of 1969, we could suddenly perform manned flight upon manned flight? With complete success? It's just against all statistical odds."
President John F. Kennedy was not convinced at all that the endeavour was next to impossible, in fact, he had publicly announced in May 1961 that "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth" would be a Number One priority for the United States, an accomplishment that was to instil pride in Americans and awe in the rest of the world. And so, Kaysing believes, "NASA faked it, acting in accordance With the old adage that in a war, the truth is often the first casualty. (Cold wars, he and his fellow conspiracy believers say, are no exception.)
"They - both NASA and Rocketdyne - wanted the money to keep pouring in," adds Kaysing. "I've worked in aerospace long enough to know that's their goal."

ABSENT STARS

There is an almost instinctive rejoinder to all of this: but we saw it. We bought new television sets in droves, and, miraculously, felt ourselves being locked into an intangible but very real oneness with a billion other people. It was our first taste of a virtual community, of cultures docking. It felt good. And now there's this guy telling us that it was all a lie? What proof does he have anyway?
Kaysing points out numerous anomalies in Nasa's publications as well as in the television and still pictures that came from the moon. For example:

* There are no stars in many of the photographs taken on the lunar surface. With no atmosphere to diffuse their light, surely stars would have been clearly visible?
* Why is there no crater beneath the lunar lander, despite the jet of its 10,0001b-thrust hyperbolic engine?
* How do Nasa's experts explain pictures of astronauts on the moon in which the astronauts sides and backs are just as well lit as the fronts of their spacesuits - which is inconsistent with the deep, black shadows the harsh sunlight should be casting?
* Why is there a line between a sharp foreground and a blurry background in some of the pictures, almost as if special effects makers had used a so-called "Matt Painting" to simulate the further reaches of the moonscape?

"It all points to an unprecedented swindle," Kaysing concludes confidently.
But how could NASA possible have pulled it off? How about the television pictures that billions of people saw over the course of 6 successful missions: The rocket lifting off from Cape Kennedy Launchpad under the watchful eye of hundreds of thousands of spectators; The moon rocks; The hundreds, perhaps thousands, of space-programme employees, in the know, who would have to have been relied upon to take the incredible secret to their graves?
Easy, says Kaysing. The rockets took off alright, with the astronauts on-board, but as soon as they were out of sight, the roaring spacecraft set course for the south-polar sea, jettisons its crew, and crashed. Later, the crew and the command module were put in a military plane and dropped in the Pacific for "recovery." (Kaysing claims that he taught with an airline pilot, who, enroute from San Francisco to Tokyo, saw the Apollo 15 command module sliding out of an unidentified cargo plane, but he cannot provide the captain's name or the name of the airline.) The moon rocks were made in a NASA geology lab, he continues. Not very many people on the Apollo project new about the hoax, as they were only informed on a need-to-know basis. Cash bonuses, promotions or veiled threats could have ensured the silence of those who were in on the whole scheme.

Zero Gravity

Kaysing is not alone in his assertion that NASA has been, um, mooning the public. Bill Brian, a 45 year-old Oregonian, who wrote the book Moongate in 1982, agrees that there is "some sort of cover-up". Although Brian thinks that his fellow investigator may very well be right in saying that we never went to the moon, he believes that there is an entirely reason for many of the inconsistencies that the two have found. It is possible, he says, that we reached the moon with a secret zero gravity device that NASA probably reverse-engineered by copying parts of a captured extraterrestrial spaceship.
Brian, who received BS and MS degrees in nuclear engineering at Origan state university, used his "mathematical and visual skills" to reason that the moons gravity is actually similar to the earth's and that it is most likely that the moon has no atmosphere at all. He has crammed the appendices of his book with complex calculations to prove these points, but he trusts his intuition, too: "The NASA transcripts of the communication between the astronauts and mission control, read as if they are carefully scripted. The accounts all have a very strange flavour to them, as if the astronauts weren't really there."
But why in the world would NASA feel compelled to cover up knowledge of a high-gravity moon? "It's a cascading string of events," explains Brian. "You can't let one bit of information out without blowing the whole thing. They'd have to explain the propulsion technique that got them there, so they'd have to divulge their UFO research. And if they could tap this energy that would imply the oil cartels are at risk, and the very structure of our world economy could collapse. They didn't want to run that risk."
A scientist and patented inventor, Ralph René, another lunar landing sceptic has supposedly presented the latest scientific findings regarding the moon landings. René offers data suggesting, among other things, that without an impractical shield about 2 meters thick, the spacemen "would have been cooked by radiation" during the journey
Other conspiracy buffs do not doubt that men walked on the moon, but call the fact irrelevant because extraterrestrial made it there ages ago - and NASA knows it and has preferred to keep it a secret. In his recent book, Extra-terrestrial Archaeology, David Childress points out various unexplained structures on the moon and argues that these might be archaeological remnants of intelligent civilisations. An avid believer in UFOs, Childress also does not rule out the possibility that aliens still use the moon as a base and a convenient stepping-stone for their trips to our planet. This might even mean, enthuses the author, that the moon is really "a spaceship with an inner metallic-rock shell beneath miles of dirt and dust and rock."

Children and Senators

Although very few Americans subscribe to such grandiose theories, millions of people doubt the authenticity of the lunar missions, much to Nasa's exasperation. Over the years, the agency's public services department went through reams of paper answering incredulous schoolchildren, teachers, librarians and even US lawmakers, who had written to NASA relaying the doubts of some of their constituents.
As many as 100 million Americans, says Kaysing, are inclined to disbelieve the whole lunar adventure. Like many of his statements, that one would be taken with a grain of salt; his proof is based on his observation that "almost half the people who phoned in to radio and television shows" he has been on, supported him.
But when Knight Newspapers (one of the 2 groups that later merged to form Knight-Ridder Inc) polled 1,721 US residents 1 year after the first moon-landing, it found that more than 30% of respondents were suspicious of Nasa's trips to the moon. A Newsweek article in July 1970, reported the results of the poll, sited "An elderly Philadelphia woman who thought the moon-landings had been staged in Arizona deserts" and a Macon, Georgia, housewife who questioned how a television set that could not pull in New York stations could possible "receive signals from the moon". The greatest scepticism, according to Newsweek, surfaced in a Ghetto in Washington, DC, where more than half of those interviewed doubted the authenticity of Neil Armstrong's stroll. "It's all a deliberate effort to mask problems at home," explained one inner-city preacher. "The people are unhappy- and this takes their minds of their problems."
Poll or no poll, even James Oberg, a nemesis of Kaysing, conservatively estimates that the disbeliever's number between 10 and 25 million Americans.
Oberg works for NASA contractor, Rockwell International as a spaceflight operations engineer, with the space shuttle programme. He writes as a second profession, covering all aspects of space activity, with a special interest in space folklore. Myths have been a way of blossoming in the fertile soil of scientific discovery, Oberg notes. "Every age of exploration is the same in that respect - from the time of the Phoenicians... to Marco Polo and including mermaids and unipeds, and all these mythological creatures that lurk at the edge of our exploration. To me, it's extremely humanising to have this typically human reaction - this denial, this myth-making - to our lunar adventure."
Hoax believers can be found both at home and abroad. According to Oberg, Cuban children are officially taught that yanky space technology failed miserably and that NASA was reduced to pitifully faking every single moon landing. Some New Agers also contest the possibility of moonlandings, as do Hare Krishna's. Non-mainstream Christians at the Flat Earth Society - the Californian based anti-science group, of about 3,500 members - contests the entire field of astronomy (not to mention moon-landings). They liken the towering launch pads to the Towers of Babel.
The eccentricity of such convictions certainly intrigues Oberg. "I respect these people's dedication to their view of the world. One reason they fascinate me is that they're a constant reminder to me that we can't rest on common knowledge, we can't be complacent with our traditional interpretations of things - even though these interpretations are almost always right." It is no surprise that Bill Kaysing does not much care for James Oberg, whom he dismisses as a "NASA agent."

Good Timing

If NASA had really wanted to fake the moon landings - we are talking purely hypothetically here - the timing was certainly right. The advent of television, having reached world-wide critical mass only a few years before the moon landing, would prove instrumental in the fraud's success; in this case, seeing really was believing. The magic of satellites, with their ability to enable live global (and interplanetary?) communication, fascinated and awed millions of people, much like anything atomic had caught the public's fancy in the previous decade.
Space research and rocket science had also advanced far enough to make a trip to the moon likely - or, at the very least, remotely feasible. "The structural nature of technology had changed to make the moon landing possible, but that also made it possible for people to doubt it," says Gary Fine, a sociology professor specialising in rumour and contemporary legend at the University of Georgia in Athens."
Perhaps more importantly, Watergate had not happened yet, and people still trusted their elected officials. "A distrust of authority clearly plays into this whole thing," argues Fred Fedler, who teaches journalism at the University of Central Florida and has written a book on media hoaxes. "With Vietnam and Watergate, people have become less trusting, and to some people, it doesn't matter what the government says; their immediate reaction is to disbelieve and to sometimes embrace the opposite view."
The distrust continues to be fed by the mass media, especially in the film and television business. It is rare to find a movie in which a Government agency is actually depicted as a collection of fairly efficient, competent people who serve their country to the best of their ability. Dramatically speaking, an elite of sinister, evil bureaucrats is much more appealing.
Linda Degh, a retire folklorist, who taught at Indiana University in Bloomington and who has recently published a book titled American Folklore and Mass Media, is reminded of the film Capricorn One. Released in 1978, Capricorn One tells the story of a staged flight to Mars. The astronauts grapple with the moral implications of the giant charade and fear they might be killed to stop them blowing the whistle. Sure enough, they find themselves hunted down by bloodthirsty government thugs; only one of the astronauts makes it to freedom and reporters' microphones. Degh recalls that it was "quite a slanderous movie, pretending that the government had been killing people," a powerful boost to the moon-landing hoax theory. "The mass media catapult these half-truths into a kind of twilight zone where people can make their guesses sound as truths. Mass media have a terrible impact on people who lack guidance."

007 Uncovers Hoax

Peter Hyams, Capricorn One's director, agrees that mass media can be very powerful - dangerously so, in fact. "I was part of the generation that grew up believing that if I saw it on television, it was true. I learnt how inaccurate newspapers were, and I realised that TV is just an inaccurate, or it can be. So I said, wouldn't it be interesting you took a major event where the source that people have is a TV screen, and you showed how easy it would be to manipulate people."
Hyams insisted that he made Capricorn One "for entertainment, for fun," not because he was making not-so-veiled references to the alleged Apollo hoax. " I was aware that there were people who believed that we never walked on the moon, but I never read their books or consulted them. And frankly, I think they are being totally ludicrous." (Nevertheless, an invitation to a preview screening of Capricorn One's release said: "Would you be shocked to find out that the greatest moment of our history may not have happened at all?")
The concept of the moon swindle hold a certain appeal for other film-makers as well. In Diamonds are Forever (1971), James Bond, accidentally stumbles onto the movie set that consists of rocks, a lunar back-drop and a vehicle that looks like Nasa's Eagle. Men in spacesuits move about slowly and clumsily, as if stimulating low gravity. Bond's pursuers give chase, but 007 climbs into the lunar landing and escapes. The scene was never explained.
In the high-tech thriller Sneakers (1992), Dan Aykroyd's character, a gadgeteer and conspiracy enthusiast, refers to the moon landing by casually remarking: "This LTX71 concealable mike is part of the same system NASA used when they faked the Apollo moon landings."

Simulating One-Sixth Gravity

Technically speaking, could the moon landings have been faked? Was the state of special effects advanced enough in the late sixties to fool even the most discriminating eye? Simulating one-sixth gravity could have been done with the use of hydraulic cranes and thin wires - the Peter Pan approach - or by filming scenes under water, says Dennis Muren. Muren, an eight-time Oscar winner, is the senior visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic, a division of Lucas Digital. He was responsible for making the Jurassic Park monsters come alive, and for key scenes in Terminator 2, Star Wars and The Abyss.
" A moon landing simulation might have looked pretty real to 99.9% of the people. The thing is though, that it wouldn't have looked the way it did. I've always been acutely aware of what's fake and what's real, and the moon landings were definitely real," Muren stipulates. "Look at 2001 or Destination Moon or Capricorn One, or any other space movie: everybody was wrong. That wasn't the way the moon looked at all. There was an unusual sheen to the images from the moon, in the way the light reflected in the camera that was literally out of this world. Nobody could have faked that."
Of course, Bill Kaysing will have none of it: "Perhaps this gut [Muren] was part of the cover-up. Anything is possible," Kaysing likes to paraphrase Alvin Toffler: "He writes that most people are producer/consumers - he calls them prosumers. They go through life not questioning anything, not knowing anything. Ninety percent of the American population has no idea what's going on in the country. I'd like to be the one to tell them - tell them at least part of it. I'm either going to share the truth about the moon with them, or I am going to die trying."

NASA Bites Back

Q. Why are there no stars in many of the photographs taken on the moon?
A. "That's one of Kaysing's sillier arguments," says James Oberg, a space flight operations engineer with the space shuttle programme. "Go outside and take a picture of yourself under a street light. Even if there is a star-studded sky, you'll see no stars in your picture because the camera was set to properly expose that big-lighted object in the foreground - you - and will not register weaker sources of light.

Q. Why is there no discernible crater beneath the lunar landing?
A. "Although the descent engine of the LM is powerful, most of its operation takes place thousands of feet above the moon during the early stages of the landing," says a NASA information sheet. "At the moment of touchdown, a small amount of surface dust is blown away, but the relatively cohesive lunar surface seems to deflect the blast sideways."

Q. How about the various lighting anomalies?
A. "On some pictures, astronauts are lit from more than one side because the sunlight is reflecting off the lunar surface or the lunar vehicle," says Nasa's spokesman James Hartsfield. Paul Lowman, a NASA geophysicist, adds that some conspiracy believers are unknowingly or deliberately using pictures of astronauts that NASA never claimed were taken on the moon.
"There are pictures being passed on and published in their circles that appeared in pre-moon landing issues of Aviation Week - nothing mysterious about them," says Lowman.
"These are photos taken in a moon-like training facility at the Johnson Space Center where, indeed, there were several sources of light."

Q. Why is there an artificial-looking line between a sharp foreground and a blurry background in some of the pictures taken of the lunar surface?
A. "What you see is simply the curvature of the moon," explains Paul Lowman. "Because the moon is such a small body, the curvature of the horizon is only 2 or 3 miles away from eye-level. That sharp line you see is caused by mountains sticking up from beyond the horizon."