Was The Moon Landing Fake? Inside The Conspiracy Theories

From the 1976 exposé by a one-time NASA contractor to the conspiracy theories that spread online today, here’s why some believe that the Moon landing was a hoax.

On July 20, 1969, American astronauts landed on the Moon — or did they? Despite the historic fanfare that surrounded the moment when Apollo 11 seemed to touch down on the lunar surface, it didn’t take long for people to doubt that the Moon landing had actually happened.

Just one year after the Moon landing, a group of roughly 1,000 Americans were polled about the event — and 30 percent expressed doubt about it. Around the same time, Newsweek published interviews with Americans who claimed that the Moon landing had been staged in the desert, that it was simply not possible to transmit videos from the Moon back to Earth — after all, they could hardly get some stations on their TVs — and that the Moon landing had been faked to distract Americans from problems at home.

Public DomainAstronaut Buzz Aldrin on the Moon.

Then, in 1976, a man named Bill Kaysing published a pamphlet entitled We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. Kaysing wasn’t just a poll respondent or a random writer with strong opinions — he’d actually worked for a company called Rocketdyne, the NASA contractor that built the engines for the Apollo Moon missions.

Kaysing insisted that the Moon landing must have been faked because NASA didn’t have the technological capabilities to pull it off. And he claimed that he could prove it. In his pamphlet, he pointed out so-called anomalies in the Moon landing including the lack of stars in the sky, the lack of a crater under the lunar module, and the fact that light and shadows seen in videos and stills from the Moon landing didn’t quite line up.

He claimed that NASA faked the rocket’s takeoff and landing, then filmed the entire Moon landing in a studio. And Kaysing was far from alone in his beliefs.

Since 1969, a number of other theories about the Moon landing have been put forward. Some have argued that the radiation in space would have killed the astronauts, while others have pointed to the American flag, suspiciously flapping without any wind. Meanwhile, some have questioned why missions to the Moon suddenly stopped after the 1970s.

Today, an estimated five percent of Americans “strongly believe” that the Moon landing was faked, six percent “somewhat believe” it was faked, and seven percent said that they didn’t know if it was faked or not…

So what does the evidence say?

Learn more about the music used in our podcast.

Learn more about your ad choices by visiting megaphone.fm/adchoices.