From alien spaceship to bat-winged humanoids: Amid Chandrayaan 3, revisit the top conspiracy theories about the Moon

As India and the world waits with bated breath to see the success of Chandrayaan-3, it’s important to put in perspective what ISRO and India as a nation is trying to achieve.

In the past, only three nations have successfully “soft landed” on the moons: the United States of America, Soviet Union of Russia and the People’s Republic of China. Before the Apollo 11 Mission, and even after in some cases, after it, urban legends, myths, conspiracy theories, etc about the moon refuse to die down with the most popular being that the Apollo 11 Moon Landing was fake.

Now before we delve into any conspiracy theories, let’s be clear that no matter what you read on the internet or hear on TV or maybe read on shady forums, most Moon-related conspiracy theories are fake including the one about the Moon landing which is an industry of its own.

There’s photographic evidence of the Apollo landing sites which anyone can see with a powerful amateur telescope. Photos from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter clearly shows the remnants of the Apollo missions.

Another popular theory was that the flag was fluttering with wind which is commonly held misbelief. What actually happened was that a horizontal road holds the flag unfurled whereas the weak gravity of the moon isn’t strong enough to uncrumpled the flag. That’s why the flag has remained still since. In fact, as every viewer of The Big Bang Theory will know, the final proof of the fact that Messrs Moon, Armstrong and Aldrin went to the moon is a lunar laser ranging retroreflector array on the surface which remains operational to this day as Leonard Hofstadter pointed out to Penny’s (then) boyfriend Zack Johnson.

Now that we’ve got the hard, cold reality out of the way here are some of the bests conspiracy theories and urban myths about the moon:

1) Good luck, Mr Gorsky

Urban legend goes that before re-entering the lander and saying his prophetic “One Small Step for Man, One Giant Leap for Mankind” statement, he also said: “Good luck, Mr Gorsky.”

Many thought it was a remark at a Russian cosmonaut or other rival, but the story goes that as a kid when Neil Armstrong was playing baseball with his brother, he hit a ball that landed on his neighbour’s porch. His neighbours were reportedly named Mr and Mrs Gorsky and he heard the missus say to her husband: “Oral sex? Oral sex you want? You’ll get oral sex when the kid next door walks on the moon!” And thus, was born one of the greatest cultural lies in history, because the Armstrongs never had a neighbour called Gorsky. But that didn’t stop the urban legend, and as far as urban legends go, it was an excellent one.

2) The Hollow Moon or Spaceship Moon Hypothesis

The Hollow Moon Theory and also the Spaceship Moon theory are both pseudoscientific hypotheses that claims that 1) The moon is hollow and 2) It was therefore probably put there by an alien species.

The belief has been fuelled by the fact that when astronauts of Apollo 12 crashed a lunar module to cause a moonquake, the vibrations lasted longer than usual. Also, a statement that the moon “rang like a bell” was taken literally to suggest that the moon was an artificially created object.

This was further pushed by Michael Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov of the Soviet Academy of Sciences when they wrote a piece that the Moon was a spaceship created by unknown beings and was published in Sputnik. In fact, the theory goes that the “atheistic” Soviet Union wanted to promote the concept to undermine the West’s faith in religion.

Another person, inadvertently responsible for it was the sci-fi maestro Isaac Asimov whose observation about “perfect solar eclipses” meant that people thought that the Moon was created.

He had written: “What makes a total eclipse so remarkable is the sheer astronomical accident that the Moon fits so snugly over the Sun. The Moon is just large enough to cover the Sun completely (at times) so that a temporary night falls and the stars spring out. The Sun’s greater distance makes up for its greater size and the result is that the Moon and the Sun appear to be equal in size. There is no astronomical reason why Moon and Sun should fit so well. It is the sheerest of coincidence, and only the Earth among all the planets is blessed in this fashion. Many used Asimov’s assertion to mean that the Moon was artificial and created to shield the Sun.

3) The Moon’s Creation

Before the first Apollo Mission, there were largely three theories about how the Moon was formed. The first was a capture theory which suggested that the Moon was a wandering body which formed somewhere else and was captured by the Earth’s gravity.

Another is the accretion theory which claimed that the Moon was created along with the Earth. The third, which was also championed by Charles Darwin’s son George Darwin claimed that the moon was created by the earth spinning so fast that some material broke away and began to orbit the planet. However, the most accepted today, backed by the Apollo missions, is that the Moon formed during a collision between the Earth and another planet (about the same size as Mars) and the resulting debris collected in an orbit around the earth.

4) The Full Moon Insanity

Over the years, people have often believed that the Moon affects human behaviour even though there has never been any evidence to suggest that. Even the world lunacy derives form the Latin lunaticus which means “moonstruck”, and even great minds like Aristotle and Pliny believed the madness and epilepsy were caused by the Moon.

In modern times, there have been claims that there is a connection between crimes waves and the full moon, but all such claims have been largely unsubstantiated as is the most popular moon lore: the werewolf. Perhaps the oldest story is from Plato about the mythical king, Lycaon. Legend states, that sons of Lycaon sacrificed their young brother and tried to trick the gods into eating it. This infuriated Zeus who slayed the sons and transformed the father into a werewolf. Meanwhile the moon connection seems to stem from a modern myth that wolves only howl at full moons, which is also false.

5) Batwinged Humanoids on Moon

And finally, the most outlandish Moon hoax, which was published by a highly read newspaper was in August 1835 which claimed there several animals living on the Moon including bison, goats, unicorns, bipedal tail-less beavers and bat-like humanoids.

The New York Sun claimed that bat-winged, copper-haired humanoids lived on the moon in pyramids. The newspaper claimed that it was based on the findings of John Herschel, a respected astronomer, who had seen them on his telescope. The author was a reported called Richard Adams Locke. Edgar Allan Poe, the noted writer, later claimed that the story was a plagiarism of The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall. He would later published another series which would come to be known as The Balloon-Hoax.

The Moon Hoax persisted for a month before the New York Sun admitted it was made up but not before their circulation figures had shot up.

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