The verdict is out on this for me but here are some evidences both ways for the initial moon landing. One interesting possibility is that it was legitimate, but there were parts of it they lied about.
Here are my notes on some discussions I’ve had with friends on both sides of this issue.
Most of the rebuttals (in favor of the original landing being legitimate) are from my friend who is a physics teacher with particular interest in space travel.
Landing Technology?
Hoax Claim: I remember when the ability of robots to balance a pogo stick was first developed. This technology is very similar to that needed to land the Lunar Module on the moon, and we didn’t have it until much later. Also, the Lunar Module only had 74KB ROM and 4KB RAM available, and this isn’t enough to run a program to do this. Balancing a rocket on a gimbal motor has only been done by SpaceX, and it’s a very difficult trick.
Rebuttal: CPU was limited, Armstrong had to manually land last 100ft since CPU malfunctioned. He was commander not because he was the smartest, but he was the coolest under pressure.
Crater of Landing Craft?
Hoax Claim: Also, the landing craft would’ve created a sizeable crater upon landing, and none was visible. Neil Armstrong’s shoeprint created a bigger impression. Watching SpaceX landings gives you an approximate view of how much of a crater would’ve been created.
Rebuttal: SpaceX has more power. And less moon gravity means less resistance when landing, so less crater due to 1/6 as strong gravity on moon compared to Earth. Less acceleration so less slowing, no powerful engine required. And the engine wasn’t gimballed. Even if it was gimballed, rocket engines go far back. The Lunar excursion module was lightweight, they didn’t need a powerful rocket engine, unlike landing SpaceX which is heavy and coming down at supersonic speed and fighting 6x the gravity.
Command Module Material & Thickness?
Hoax Claim: Next is the Command Module’s material and thickness. From Perplexity AI:
“The Apollo Command Module’s inner pressure shell was made of aluminum honeycomb sandwiched between aluminum alloy sheets. The thickness of this structure varied from 0.25 inches (0.64 cm) at the forward access tunnel to 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) at the base.” It was too thin.
Rebuttal: thinness not a problem as internal air pressure was reduced. They had almost pure oxygen so atmospheric pressure inside would be 1/3 of on the earth like 5 psi rather than 15 psi so not as strong of a shell was needed. And the honeycomb structure is very strong.
Radiation Danger?
Hoax Claim: One of my friends reported, “I’ve been to NASA’s Houston Command Center, and have seen the capsule for myself. We were told that it’s walls were 3-inch hollow-core aluminum. Even if this were true, the radiation could’ve killed the astronauts when passing through the Van Allen Radiation Belts. And the charged particle exposure could’ve fried their electronics. When I worked at Mostek, we discovered that our radiation shielding in an 1/8th inch thick aluminum housing for an X-ray tube let 98% of the radiation pass straight through it.”
Aka: Affected by Van Allen radiation belt?
Response: International Space Station, they are up there 6mo at a time. They are beneath the Van Allen belts around 250 mi high, shielded from much of the radiation by earth’s magnetic field. But the astronauts weren’t gone long, about 8 days in space, that’s not long enough to be hurt by the radiation.
Too Hot?
Hoax Claim: The astronauts would have been cooked both ways while coming and going through the thermosphere. Their charcoal remains would also have to pass through the VanAllen radiation belt on the way up and again on the way back.
Response: No, the thermosphere is very hot but hot means the atoms of the atmosphere way out there are moving very fast. But there are so few of them that if you were there (the average velocity of the moving particles is the temperature) it’s almost a vacuum, since there are so few particles. With so few atoms hitting you, the heat would be negligible.
The VanAllen radiation belts, due to low density of particles, meant you wouldn’t get cooked going through them. We have satellites taken 23,000 miles above the earth, through the VanAllen belts to get there, and their electronics don’t get fried. There’s radiation but the density of the ionizing particles is low.
Dog Cooked?
Hoax Claim: Concerning Laika (the Russian Dog), the first living creature to orbit Earth. The Soviets pretended it orbited the planet alive several days. However, it was cooked in the thermosphere a few minutes after launch.
Response:
It was in low earth orbit. I don’t know the altitude, maybe 100 miles up, so in the thermosphere. But the thermosphere isn’t as hot as it is so rarified (not dense). Thermosphere is just below exosphere, which is basically a vacuum. Better than any vacuum we can produce on earth.
They let the dog run out of air and die. Later the US orbited Ham the Chimpanzee and we brought him back. Neither were cooked.
Pictures Phony?
Hoax Claim: Finally, the pictures and lighting produced are way too good. The astronauts had these strapped to their chest and could adjust them or even look through the viewfinders. Their amazing studio-quality images are a dead giveaway.
Rebuttal: Yes, they only had film camera then, they used Nikons, great film cameras. Those watching it on TV it was grainy, not photo quality resolution.
Some of the pictures were good quality being done by Nikon cameras. Whether they were strapped to the chest wouldn’t make a difference. Nikon would give good resolution.
Landing Automation, Sinking Upon Landing?
This video (https://www.facebook.com/share/v/19ySF1t4wD/) shows both the complexity of the automation necessary to land with a bottom rocket, and it shows the thrust needed to land safely. Before the moon landing, engineers worried that the Lunar Module might sink 30 feet deep into the soft dust on the moon. However, the greater danger was that a landing crater might be so big that it could cause one or more landing legs to sink into it, causing the craft to fall over. This would’ve damaged it and prevented it from taking off.
Good thing the Starhopper had a cement pad, or the crater it might have made in the dirt could’ve created a crater that might have made it fall over, too.
Rebuttal: Yes they were concerned until they got more data about the depth of lunar regolith, but they did a lot of surveying, pictures up until the point of impact before the mission, gathering data on where best to land, soil depth, etc. They knew they wouldn’t sink. It wasn’t that deep. They had unmanned rockets go there before and fall onto the moon and take images until impact.
And less gravity on the moon means lesser impact.
Rebuttal: The complexity of automation to land with a bottom rocket? Not a big problem. Apollo 13, when it came back, they lost their navigation. They used a sextant to aim their way back to earth. Apollo 11 (the first manned moon landing) had radar, giving them their distance and speed as they approached the moon. Simple radar can do that. Radar navigation was great at the time. Radar was being perfected since WWII era in the early 40’s.
Zipper Suit Pressurized?
Hoax Claims:
Neil Armstrong‘s space suit had a zipper. It could not have been a pressurized suit.
If that suit had been pressurized, he could not have gotten through the door of the spacecraft.
Rebuttals:
Zipper suits can be pressurized. One example of how it could work is that on the inside you could have two flaps going over it, the suit pressure would keep those tight against the zipper.
And the suits weren’t at 15 psi (atmospheric pressure). Theirs were probably more like 5 psi. They were low pressure to allow joint mobility, but still they were awkward.
Skylab was a 3-month period in the 70’s which used 5 psi, which is standard.
They are oxygen enriched (more than 21% oxygen).
They would have made it the right size and would have practiced.
Boot Tracks?
Hoax claims:
His boots that have been on display probably ever since that time have a different pattern than the first lunar footprint photograph.
Having grown up around Southern California beaches, I understand that there are three kinds of footprints in the sand.
Where the sand is dry, you just get dents. Where the sand is too wet, the prints are too soggy to hold their form. You must have just the right combination of sand and moisture to get the kind of footprint that they got for that picture. That’s problematic if there’s no water on the moon.
Rebuttals:
Was it Buzz Aldrin’s footprint instead that was the first photographed? Both Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon, maybe they had different boot prints. Who’s were the first photographed? (But you would think the boots would have the same design).
Also, the soil of the moon was electrostatically charged. Gray lunar dust would stick to the outside of their space suits, which is gritty and abrasive like glass. The presence of this stuff is credence that they landed on the moon. The ions and the solar wind were charging the dust particles.
It’s not beach sand, its finer and electrostatically charged. It’s true there’s no water. No wind to erase or change them overtime. Gravity is 1/6th on the moon compared to Earth, so gravity won’t pull down the sides of the prints.
No Stars in Background?
Hoax Claim: If you go outside on a clear night, far from city lights and smog, the stars are everywhere. The moon, with no atmosphere, no clouds, no city lights, and nothing else to prevent us from seeing everything out there, has a blacked-out sky. Probably, if it had not been blacked out, some people could have triangulated to know where the movie was filmed.
Response:
When on moon looking up at sky there’s no blue as there’s no oxygen, no atmosphere to give the air the color; you just see black. The light of the sun washes out the light of the stars. No color to the sky due to no atmosphere. In a spaceship it would look black outside without being able to see many stars; the sun washes out all starlight.
On earth we don’t see stars during the daytime, they are washed out by sunlight. They were on the sunlit day-side of the moon which is 2 weeks long – it was daytime. If they were on the far side of the moon, they would see a black firmament with stars.
They were going toward the near side of the moon, the sun lit side, so they wouldn’t get photos with stars in the back on the way there either. All they would see, unless they were in the shadow of the moon, would be washed out so far as the stars were concerned.
Movie Issues?
The moon scenes are very similar to Stanley Kubrick‘s moon scenes in 2001, A Space Odyssey. Everything points to him being the director of both. However, by current standards, the moon landing now looks hokey.
Response: Kubrick’s Space Odyssey movie came out in 1968 before the lunar landing, but we had photos and surveys of the lunar surface before landing people on it. We knew what the surface looked like.
Shadows?
Hoax Claim: The moon scenes depict shadows coming from more than one light source at the same time.
Response: don’t know, haven’t observed that. Does the footage actually show that? That would be questionable.
The moon goes around the earth in 30 days and turns as it goes, that rotation on its axis and revolution around the earth might give a changing angle from the sun. The moons angle of looking at the sun is changing, it could give some different angles.
Movie-Prop Craft?
Hoax Claim: The spacecraft that was on the moon looks like it’s held together with duct-tape. It looks like they used cardboard and other elements that have more of a movie prop vibe than being an actual multimillion dollar piece of equipment. It’s like the old version of Lost in Space.
Rebuttal: The photos of the craft look spiffy. It didn’t have to be streamlined, there’s no atmosphere. It didn’t have to be really strong; it could be boxy. It was in a different atmosphere; it was made to meet environmental conditions it was in. When it left the earth, it was shielded in the fuselage of the Saturn 5 rocket. The LEM (landing excursion module) was in the rocket above the 3rd stage behind the command module, protected. It landed on the moon and didn’t return to earth; it took them back off the moon and rendezvoused with a command module and the LEM went back and crashed on the moon, activating the seismometer they put there, which gave some data on the moon’s interior.
Extra Stuff in Pictures?
Hoax Claim: There have been many reports of things that don’t belong in those pictures, such as a sleeping dog, a prop rock with the letter showing, I think a Coke bottle, things like that.
Rebuttal: perhaps the astronauts took souvenirs. On subsequent landings they took golf clubs, which by the way would be hard to do special effects on the golf ball flying further and higher in less gravity.
Why Haven’t We Returned to the Moon Recently?
Hoax Claim: NASA abandoned all future moon trips as soon as the Soviets figured out how to track our ships all the way there.
Response: No, it costs money. And so what if they could track us. They can’t shoot us down, even from earth. Seven attempts and six successes at landing on the moon, why go back further? We aren’t colonizing it.
Five more moon landings occurred after Apollo 11, six total. Twelve people have walked on the moon. 1972 is the last time we went. We proved our point. Congress didn’t want to spend more money for landings. We got all the samples we needed; what’s the point of more landings?
Note: Another claim is that aliens there told us not to come back over the radio. Details of that report are elsewhere in this book.
Note: Interestingly, the recent plan to land on the moon again has been changed to just fly around the moon, not to land.
Gravitational Inconsistencies & Wires?
Hoax Claim: They show gravitational inconsistencies where an astronaut might be lifted by a wire, but something else not on a wire has gravity.
Response:
Yes it could be a wire, but the movies on wire looked fake, this looked natural, in 1/6th gravity.
Good special effects for Sci-Fi floating around they aren’t on wires, they are weightless. For example, they have planes they drop down and you get weightless for a while (called parabolic flights). You can pay to do this. You float around in the cabin about 30 seconds, like going down on a roller coaster in freefall. This training for astronauts was going on in 1959. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced-gravity_aircraft). And the landing of Apollo 11 was 1969. They trained with wires on a mock lunar surface. The wires supported 5/6 of their weight, as the suits are heavy. It wouldn’t look natural to film with the wires.
Using film from a parabolic flight, how would they do it? Today we have special effects with electronics, back then they only had film, no CGI.
Recording Speeds & Reduced Weight?
Hoax Claim: There were two common recording speeds back in those days. It turns out, perhaps coincidentally, or perhaps not, if you record it at one speed and play it at the other, it looks like our moon footage.
Response:
You can record at a higher speed and slow it down for slow motion. Record at higher speed and play it back a fewer frames per second and motion is slowed.
But they did an experiment of hammer and feather falling at same rate, which must be done in a vacuum, so no air was slowing the feather. If it was on earth in a vacuum, they would need to also slow the fall to 1/6. They could have staged it, but it could have the same effect actually on the moon.
Less Gravity They Could Jump Around More than they Did?
Hoax Claim: If we go by the story that the moon has 1/5 the gravity of the earth, then Armstrong should’ve been able to jump five times as high. In one-fifth gravity, they would have a way better show letting Armstrong bounce from hill to hill.
Response: It’s 1/6. It’s not 6x as high as the suits are very heavy, and you don’t have much mobility to crouch and jump up. And it’s too dangerous to do that on the moon. If you fall too hard you could break a seal or something on the suit.
On the heavy weight of the space suit: “The Apollo suit, including the life support backpack, weighed about 180 pounds. The Shuttle suit, including the life support system, weighs about 310 pounds. The suit itself weighs about 110 pounds. If an astronaut weighing 175 pounds wears the complete suit, the total weight is then about 485 pounds (310 + 175 =495).” (https://sma.nasa.gov/SignificantIncidentsEVA2018/assets/space_suit_evolution.pdf)
Why Does the Flag Wave?
Hoax Claim: The flag waves. Yet there’s no wind on moon.
Response: It’s a foil flag not a cloth flag, it had deliberate wrinkles in it to simulate being in the wind. It didn’t actually wave; it just had the shape of a wave.
Enough Fuel to Send Craft to Moon?
Hoax Claim: Imagine how much fuel it would take to send a moon buggy up there.
Response: The craft is light and fragile. The craft was left behind. The craft had no air-filled rubber tires. It was battery powered since there’s no air on the moon to use an internal combustion engine. It was light and likely folded to fit in the rocket. They didn’t have carbon fiber then, but they probably had aluminum lithium, etc. for a lightweight metal construction.
Nixon Called the Astronauts?
Hoax Claim: Imagine what cell phone technology on earth would’ve been like if in the 60’s. Richard Nixon could have really picked up his phone in the White House and talked to the astronauts from earth. Nixon wouldn’t have been able to phone and call the astronauts.
Response: Did Nixon talk to them while they were in quarantine after returning? They were talking on earth, on corded phones. They were in a ship quarantined for about a week with a regular phone talking to Nixon, also on a regular phone.
Motive to Lie?
Hoax Claim: They lied because we were in a space race with them. JFK did not publicly call them out for the lie. Instead, he played along and said we would send a MAN to the moon and bring him back ALIVE!
Rebuttal: There were 7 attempts to land on the moon, all but Apolo 13 were successful. They had to turn back. If it was fake, how would they keep that secret? So many people were involved, especially now with whistleblower protections. We have 12 astronauts that walked on the moon.
Conspiracy expert Joel Skousen has studied the topic and concludes that it was legitimate.
Why Astronauts Not Excited in Interview?
Hoax Claim: Some people question the reality of the Apollo 11 landing based on the interview with the astronauts after the fact, how they don’t look excited like they just got back from the moon.
Rebuttal:
Most likely, some people just have a flat affect, perhaps particularly those who have been through years of intensive training.
Perhaps the setting of the interview was more somber, and other occasions were different.
One theory is that they were in shock about the ET life forms and crafts and structures they saw there and disheartened by the government’s insistence on them not talking (lying) about it?
Hybrid: Real Landing, & Filmed Flag Scene?
Some say the landing was real, but the flag planting was staged beforehand and inserted into the delayed streaming footage the public saw. The reason for this has been suggested to be that since they didn’t know how the astronauts would be received by possible ET’s and their bases which had been seen, they wanted to get this footage regardless.
Clinton Gives Credance to Moon Landing Denier
In Bill Clinton’s autobiography he talks about meeting a carpenter who denied the moon landing. The carpenter said, ‘I don’t believe anything the television people say.’ After serving as President, Clinton said that carpenter may have been ahead of his time.
Note: It isn’t clear to me whether Clinton was referring to the man’s hoax claim, or the man’s general claim that you can’t trust TV. Either way, the statement got attention of the moon landing deniers.
Moonlanding Hoax Documentary
The 2001 Fox television documentary, “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?” is still available for streaming on Netflix, where it is classified with “controversial” and “provocative” tags. The documentary can also be found on YouTube and other video streaming sites.
Rodney Cluff on the Moon Landings and Alien Base on Moon
Yes, the Apollo missions did happen.
Ingo Swann in his book, Penetration, said he remote viewed the Alien Base on the far side of the Moon that Apollo 11 Command Module astronaut Collins saw as he was orbiting overhead.
Swann also quoted from Maurice Chatelain’s book, Our Ancestors Came From Outer Space, who was the engineer that created all of NASA’s electronics, that UFOs followed all our Apollo Missions to the Moon and watched the astronauts land on the moon.
And Ken Johnson, head of NASA’s photo lab testified on Coast to Coast AM that he saw the film taken by Collins of the Alien Base on the far side of the moon, and that Apollo 17, on it’s last orbit around the moon, reported that the Alien Base lit up with bright lights. And by radio told Apollo 17 astronauts, “You people of earth are NOT welcome here on the Moon. So go home and NEVER come back!”
Right after Apollo 17 returned to Earth, NASA let about 36,000 employees go, and we have not set astronauts back to the Moon. Why? Because it is already taken and it is inhabited.
Moon Landing & Moon Mysteries as Discussed in Dr. Steven Greer’s ‘Unacknowledged’ Book & Documentary
Edgar Mitchel, the 6th man to walk on the moon, speaks of a craft with bodies recovered.
One sergeant said he got a report of an alien base on the dark side of the moon. They showed him the base, geometric shaped towers, and tall large structures like radar dishes.
Footage from the moon landing which showed various paranormal things going on including huge box-like structures taking off from the moon.
A moon nuke from America to show off to the Soviets was stopped by ET.
The moon landing did take place, but the flag planting scene was taken on earth. Fly over missions of the moon had taken pictures of structures on the moon, so footage was taken of the flag planting beforehand since they didn’t know how the ETs would react to our astronauts there.
The film was on a delay so they were able to cut back and forth to the pre-recorded footage.
The astronauts were told if they were to disclose any of this it would be the death of them and their families.
Armstrong said they were actually warned off the moon. They were warned off the moon because we were going there as part of an arms race with the Soviets.
Note: As mentioned in my moon landing debate notes, some people question the reality of the Apollo 11 landing based on the interview with the astronauts after the fact and how they don’t look excited like they just got back from the Moon, but what if they are in shock about the ET life forms and crafts and structures they saw there and disheartened by the government’s insistence on them not talking (lying) about it.
They have pictures of the base on the dark side of the Moon. There are many large buildings, some of which were spherical and dome shaped.
People developing the images of the moon, they see these alien bases and said they always have to airbrush these out before releasing the images to the public.
One man involved in burning photographs of UFOs on the moon was commanded not to look at them; he did look and saw the UFOs and was hit in the head with a gun. He still has the scar.
