On 20 July 1969, the Eagle lander touched down in the Sea of Tranquillity. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin became the first people in history to leave their footprints on the surface of another celestial body.
It’s been 55 years since this event, which became one of the most remarkable in the difficult history of mankind. But there is one problem: not everyone believes that it really happened. Various polls show that 10% to 25% of Americans (mostly millennials) believe that humans have never landed on the Moon. And the situation in countries whose propaganda is based on anti-Americanism is even worse. In Russia, for example, more than half of the population believes that there was no landing and that everything was filmed in Hollywood (which is especially telling, as about the same number of people consider their country to be a world leader in space exploration).
On the occasion of the 55th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, Universe Space Tech decided to analyse the five most popular myths related to the Moon landing, which are most often mentioned by conspiracy theorists.
The missing films
Claim.
NASA “lost” the original films that depicted Armstrong and Aldrin’s historic moon landing. This was done so that none of the researchers could uncover the hoax.
Reality.
Providing a live television broadcast of the Moon landing was a very difficult task for the late 1960s. In an extremely simplified form, it was solved as follows. A television camera was installed on the Eagle module, transmitting images in monochrome SSTV format at 10 frames per second and 320 lines of progressive scan resolution. Its signals were received by ground stations.
The problem was that the SSTV format was incompatible with the existing NTSC, PAL and SECAM broadcasting standards. It had to be converted for broadcast on television. By today’s standards, the conversion was carried out in a rather crude way: essentially by using a video camera pointed at a high-quality 10-inch TV monitor at a ground station. The signal was then transmitted via satellite to the control centre in Houston, from where it was then broadcast around the world.
Of course, this method of conversion led to a serious loss of quality. The ground station staff watched the Apollo 11 landing in much clearer resolution than viewers around the world. They recorded this output signal from the Moon on magnetic tapes along with other telemetry. Unfortunately, when researchers tried to find them in the archives at the end of the 20th and 21st centuries, it turned out that all the tapes had been overwritten in the late 1970s and early 1980s for the needs of the Landsat programme, which was then severely short of film. This was a common practice at the time. In addition, the archive staff did not realise that the quality of these recordings was higher and they were of greater value than the numerous copies of the television broadcast made around the world.
So, it’s incorrect to talk about the disappearance of any original films, because there never were any original films, only recordings of the broadcast made on Earth. And in any case, it should be understood that these recordings are mainly of symbolic value, as they demonstrate the first steps of people on the surface of another world. The footage taken by astronauts with their cameras is of scientific value. These films were brought back to Earth and digitised long ago. They can be found in the public domain and their quality can still give modern digital images a run for their money.
Deadly radiation
Claim.
American astronauts would never have survived a trip to the Moon because of the Earth’s radiation belts. Therefore, the Apollo missions could not have happened.
Reality
Of all the lunar myths, this one is not only one of the most popular, but also perhaps the most absurd. After all, if you take it on faith, it turns out that the USSR’s lunar programme is exactly the same kind of falsification. As part of the Zond flights, Soviet spacecraft flew around the Moon, carrying radiation measurement instruments and various living creatures, including insects and turtles. This means that Soviet scientists knew about the deadly radiation and hid the truth from the world, apparently to film their version of the Moon landing on the Mosfilm pavilions. Or they were complete idiots, unable to make sense of the data.
Moreover, based on this logic, the lunar conspiracy right now involves China, which sent stations to the Moon and which cannot but know about the deadly radiation, but still not only fails to expose the scam but also declares its intention to land people there.
The reality, as usual, is much more trivial. Yes, our planet is surrounded by radiation belts — internal and external. Of course, they pose a significant danger to both people and equipment. But the fact is that the Apollo expeditions did not stay for an excursion in the radiation belts. The flight path of the spacecraft was specially designed to transverse them as quickly as possible. They passed through the more dangerous inner belt in a few minutes, and through the outer belt in about an hour and a half.
In addition, the astronauts were protected from ionising radiation by the ship’s hull. Measurements have shown that the radiation doses received by the Apollo astronauts during their journey to the Moon were not much higher than those of shuttle flights that never left near-Earth orbit and never approached the radiation belts.
The missing lunar soil
Claims.
NASA claimed to have brought back more than 300 kg of lunar soil from the Moon. But, like the original lunar landing films, it has “disappeared” — and all the samples studied by independent researchers are in fact fakes.
Reality
Proponents of lunar conspiracy theories often claim that no one has ever seen samples of lunar soil, which is a blatant lie. The samples brought back by the astronauts were divided into two parts. Approximately ¾ of the soil was placed for long-term storage in the Lunar Soil Repository located at the Johnson Space Centre. The samples are stored in a nitrogen atmosphere while waiting for new scientific methods to emerge that will provide more information.
The remaining soil is being actively studied by scientists around the world. To do so, they need to send NASA a written request in the prescribed form with a justification of the purpose of the study. Every year, the Aerospace Administration makes approximately 400 samples available to various research teams. The results of their study constantly allow us to learn something new about our planet’s satellite.
In addition, after the end of the Apollo program, some of the samples were donated to some museums and 135 countries represented at the UN at the time. Over the past 55 years, some of them have been stolen or lost (especially in countries with unstable political situations and dictatorships). All this has led to the emergence of a black market for moonstones. And, as in any black market, there are, of course, fake exhibits.
It’s also worth noting that all samples transferred to NASA are registered and have official documents confirming their origin. Therefore, the story so beloved of conspiracy theorists, when the moonstone transferred to the Dutch museum turned out to be a piece of fossilised wood, proves nothing. Its previous owner had no papers confirming its lunar origin.
The flying flag
Claim.
When the American flag was installed, it was clearly flying. But this is impossible, because there is no atmosphere and no wind on the Moon!
Reality
Many proponents of the lunar conspiracy theory like to cite the footage of the American flag being placed on the moon as an example. At that moment, it began to sway as if under the influence of the wind. Since there is no atmosphere on the Moon, the only explanation they can think of is that everything was actually filmed in a pavilion, and the wind was created by fans used to cool the astronauts. Apparently, all the participants in the filming had severe vision problems and did not notice that the flag was flying.
Again, the real explanation is much more trivial. NASA knew that since there is no atmosphere on the Moon, the flag would simply hang down when using a conventional flagpole. Given the importance of the moment, this would not be good. Therefore, a folding L-shaped pole was used to install the flag. This ensured that it would always be in the unfurled position, and the stars and stripes would be in the frame.
When the astronauts installed the pole, the free end of the flag began to swing like a pendulum. Due to the lack of air resistance and lower gravity, this movement lasted longer than if the flag had been installed on Earth. In addition, since the flag had been stored in a folded state beforehand, there were ripples on the flag during its installation, which can be mistaken for movement in the images.
The Mythbusters once verified this story by installing a replica of the flag pole in a vacuum chamber and then testing how the structure would behave if touched in the absence of atmosphere. The results were fully consistent with what can be seen in the Apollo archive footage.
The Moon landing was filmed by Stanley Kubrick
Claim.
The Moon landing was filmed by Stanley Kubrick. There is even an interview with Kubrick’s widow on the Internet, where she admits that her husband was involved in the fake.
Reality.
Proponents of the lunar conspiracy theory often like to mention the same name. We are talking about the director Stanley Kubrick. They say that NASA commissioned him to do this work, having been impressed by how realistically he filmed the scenes on the Moon for Space Odyssey 2001.
To begin with, although Space Odyssey 2001 was indeed a film with advanced special effects for those years, the way the Moon is shown in the film is obviously markedly different from what it actually looks like. This applies to the way the astronauts move, the way the lunar dust is spread, and the way the Earth looks like in the lunar sky. You would have to be completely blind not to notice the more than obvious difference between reality and film.
More importantly, the proponents of the lunar conspiracy for some reason completely ignore the fact that Stanley Kubrick was considered to be “sympathetic” to left-wing views. His film Spartacus was accused of promoting communism, and Dr Strangelove openly ridiculed US policy. No one in their right mind would ever hire such a person to make propaganda films. And finally, if Kubrick filmed the Apollo 11 landing, then who filmed all the subsequent Apollo flights that lasted until 1972? Steven Spielberg?
But what about the “interview” that is circulating online, in which Kubrick’s widow says that her husband filmed the Moon landing? In fact, it is cut from a pseudo-documentary film called The Dark Side of the Moon, which parodies conspiracy theories. During a conversation with Kubrick’s widow, the director told her that he was making a documentary about the Space Odyssey and deliberately asked the most vague questions, the answers to which could then be taken out of context and put together in the right order. Despite the fact that the film deliberately includes many errors and puns that catch the eye, and the credits explicitly state that it is a prank, some conspiracy theorists still take what they see at face value.
In 2015, another interview appeared on Youtube, in which “Stanley Kubrick” admitted that he had filmed the Moon landing. Despite the fact that the person in the frame did not look like the famous director at that age, he was called Tom several times off-screen, and judging by the date stated, the video was recorded only two months after his death, all this did not prevent conspiracy theorists from reporting another exposure of the fake. In reality, it quickly became clear that the video was a hoax by a certain T. Patrick Murray.
These are just the most famous myths associated with the lunar conspiracy. There are, of course, many more. But, like those described in this article, they have long been analysed in detail and refuted by experts. Therefore, in our next article, we will talk about independent evidence of the Moon landing.
