Brynäs IF

Numerous piece of "evidence" have been presented to prove the conspiracy. However, none of it stands up to scrutiny.

[edit] Prop C

One image purports to show the letter "C" on a rock. Conspiracy theorists say that this is the label for a prop piece and the letter indicates which position it goes in the shot. There are numerous problems with this, not least of which is the fact that the "letter" is clearly a case of pareidolia. Firstly, this is not seen anywhere else in any of the moon footage or photos. If people were dumb enough to put a prop the wrong way up, you'd expect it to be visible on most rocks, or the moon buggy, or the lander itself. Secondly, and very importantly, no one in film or television labels their set pieces like this precisely because such labels might be seen if the director picks a new angle to shoot from.

[edit] Cameras

Looking carefully in the reflection of Neil Armstrong's visor it is possible to see Buzz Aldrin taking the photo... but wait! He isn't holding up a camera, so how could he be taking the picture. It must be fake! No, really, this has cropped up a few times. One would expect that, if it were fake, the visor would be reflecting a full film crew complete with their cameras. Of course, the simpler explanation is to look at the cameras used on the Apollo missions. Unlike technology we use down on Earth, NASA's equipment has to be specialised for use in space and operated while wearing a space suit. So holding up a compact camera, peering through the viewfinder and snapping away like you're on holiday isn't an option. The cameras used were attached to the chest of the suit. Despite the restricted ability to aim the cameras (shooting from the hip, as it were), it's still possible to take quite good images.

[edit] Take off video

When the lunar lander takes off again, a camera pans up to view it. Conspiracy nuts like to think this proves someone was their operating the camera but in reality it was remote controlled and operated very carefully by timing the delays between transmissions of the signal - so the operator had to pan it up at a set speed several seconds before actual take-off in order to get it right. Does this make it awful "convenient" that the camera operators just happened to get it right? No. The signal delay times and ascent rate of the lunar module are known, making the task actually quite trivial.

[edit] Shadows

Holy crap, this picture must be faked!

In some shots, astronaut shadows can be seen to be cast in different directions. Conspiracy buffs with little-to-zero understanding of how light works claim that this is proof of two light sources - if they were really on the moon there would only be one light source, the sun. However, anyone with even a vague knowledge of reality knows that multiple light sources create two shadows for each object and not one shadow that points in a different direction. The different orientations of the shadows are due to the angles of the background and perspective tricks. Even art students can grasp this sort of thing.

[edit] Image bleed

For various purposes, photographs from the moon feature black crosshairs at regular intervals. In some images, the crosshairs appear behind parts of the image. This suggests, to the mind of the conspiracy hack, that the images have been tampered with, much in the style of Photoshop Disasters. However, carefully examination of this shows that only very bright white areas seem to cover the crosshairs. This is a very well known optical and image processing phenomenon where the bright white areas bleed across the exposure, covering the crosshairs as the image was captured.

[edit] The flag

The US flag planted during the moon landing visible shakes while it is being handled. This is claimed to be evidence of wind - and therefore proof that it was filmed on Earth on a soundstage, rather than in the vacuum of space. In fact, the vacuum of space is exactly why you can see it wave in the first place. When surrounded by air, the flag would be subject to air resistance, and so while it will flap in a strong wind, it will also settle down very quickly as the air buffers against its motion. In space, where there is no air to prevent this, any slight movement of the flag will continue until the friction of the material slows it down. The flag can only be seen to wave and move while the astronauts are handling it directly as their movements while positioning it are giving the material a large amount of kinetic energy and there is no air resistance to slow it down. When on its own and not touched for a significant portion of time it doesn't move, as expected.

Mythbusters demonstrated the effect by waving a flag in a vacuum chamber.^[7]

[edit] Arguments against the conspiracy

[edit] Logical arguments

Tens of thousands of people worked on the Apollo project at NASA and a variety of contractors. There were also many people around the world working peripherally on the project, e.g. relay stations in Australia and Spain. Anyone who came forward to demonstrate it was a hoax would become rich and famous. This has not happened.

The moon landings took place at the height of the cold war, and transmissions came from the surface of the moon. These were picked up all over the world, including by the Soviet Union. It is likely the Soviet Union would have mentioned that the signals were not coming from the moon if they weren't.

In an effort to counter this rather gaping hole in the conspiracy theory, true hoax believers claim that the Soviets were bribed in secret with large grain shipments. But there are a number of reasons why this is obviously fallacious:

1. It is difficult to believe that this bribe would have paid for 40 years of silence.
2. It is especially difficult to believe that the information would have remained secret after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
3. Grain supplies were stopped in 1980, and yet the Soviets still kept silent about the moon landings, even though it would have been a massive propaganda coup.
4. It would seem patently absurd to secretly prop the Soviet Union up with vast amounts of free grain while at the same time spending even more money on a faked moon shot to publicly humiliate the same entity.
5. The Soviets were not the only other nation which picked up the signals.

[edit] Physical arguments

It is frankly difficult to imagine a project for which there is more real evidence than there is for the moon landings.

• We have a large quantity of moon rock that was brought back by the Apollo missions. Many international scientists have spent their entire careers studying the stuff. If they could prove it did not come from the moon they would be rich.
• We have a vast number of photographs and video which were taken on the moon.
• We have the spacecraft which made the journey and returned - including parts of Surveyor 3 that were brought back by Apollo 12.
• Many of the people who made the journey are still alive and able to testify to the fact along with the thousands of people who worked on the project.
• A set of retroflectors, mirrors meant to be targets for ranging lasers, were placed on the Moon. These retroflectors have been used by relatively independent parties.
• We have close up images of dust being kicked up by the astronauts on the Moon showed that it fell parabolically, as expected in a vacuum. If the moon landings were shot on a soundstage on Earth, the dust would float around in the air before falling to the ground.
• The most interested watchdog of the era (i.e., the Soviet Union) had every tracking station peeled on the lunar module as it descended to the lunar surface. Had NASA faked it, the world would have known.
• The recent Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission took photographs of several of the landing sites, this included both the manned Apollo missions and the unmanned Soviet rovers (including the Lunokhod 2 rover, which had been missing for thirty years). The debris left behind by the astronauts is visible and identifiable as manmade, the tracks from the rovers are also visible.^[8]

[edit] Conclusions

Given the overall context of the Moon landings, that of the Space Race with the Soviet Union, there are many, many reasons why people would come forward to conclusively prove that the landings were faked: political gain, monetary gain, pure fame, and so on. Disproving the landings by a first hand account, or evidence such as a sneaky photograph of the studio used or something more concrete would be relatively simple. However, this still flies in the face of what is known. Man-made objects are on the Moon and transmissions came from the Moon, there is no "faking" this.

If we assume a conspiracy exists, we need to know what it involves. Given the number of people that would need to be paid off to stay silent, the effort required to pull the wool over the USSR's eyes, the ground based fakery - rockets, launches, control rooms - the scientific fakery such as Moon rocks as well as the photography and video taken from the Moon... wouldn't it be easier just to go to the moon?