Moon Hoax

The Moon hoax (or Apollo Hoax) is a generalised name for the notion that the Project Apollo Moon landings were falsified by NASA and the U.S. government. Various groups and individuals (hereinafter: Moon sceptics) claim that the Apollo astronauts did not walk on the Moon, and to make the world believe in the opposite, NASA manufactured, destroyed, and tampered with evidence, including photos, telemetry tapes, transmissions, and rock samples. Some Moon sceptics question also the authenticity of the Skylab orbital station.

The struggle between the NASA defenders and the Moon sceptics has continued for more than 40 years (see below). Disregarding the truth, an official recognition of a hoax would likely have extremely grave consequences for NASA, the USA and all people and organisations involved with space exploration worldwide, and also question the feasibility of the new missions for the Moon and Mars.

Rationale

Six weeks after Gagarin's flight in 1961, President Kennedy promised a manned Moon landing by 1969 to win the battle of systems and impress the world with technical superiority:

Finally, if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.

Moon sceptics say that the reason NASA had to fake the Moon landings were the serious technical obstacles that could not be overcome for these 8 years, which deadline however had to be met by all means. The U.S. could not afford to lose the Moon race. Bill Kaysing (see below) suggested that during the 1960s, they (NASA) said "if you can't make it, fake it". And in 2004, President G. W. Bush gave not 8 but 16 years for a manned return to the Moon, given that the technologies for this should have already been developed 40 years ago.

Origins and history

The term "Moon Hoax" originated in 1835 in 6 consecutive New York Sun newspaper articles about alleged discoveries of life on the Moon made by astronomer Sir John Herschel "by means of a telescope of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle". The author of the articles is not certain, but the most mentioned name is Sun reporter Richard Locke, who never publicly admitted that.

Since the twentieth century, the term "Moon Hoax" has been used only in regard to the Apollo Moon landings. Doubts about their authenticity appeared first in December 1968 when Apollo 8 was launched. And the almost perfectly executed odyssey of Apollo 11 seemed unreal to some who believed it to be a hoax, contrived for mere publicity.

The first book on the subject was written by Bill Kaysing in the 1970s. The film Capricorn One by Peter Hyams (1978) depicted a hoaxed flight to Mars in a spacecraft that looks the same as the Apollo craft. Coinciding with the increased distrust in official U.S. reports after the Watergate scandal, it has given a powerful boost to the popularity of the hoax theory.

Public opinion

There are entire subcultures within the U.S. and substantial cultures around the world that strongly believe that the Moon landings were faked. This notion is taught in Cuban schools and wherever else Cuban teachers are sent (Nicaragua, Angola, etc.). The following table shows some public opinion survey results in various countries since 2000.

Source	Year	Country	Moon sceptics
Public Opinion Fund	2000	Russia	28%
Fox TV	2001	USA	20%
Engineering & Technology magazine	2009	Great Britain	25%
Aftonbladet daily	2009	Sweden	40%

NASA's response

When Fox TV aired a film named "Conspiracy theory: Did we land on the Moon?" in 2001, NASA added a page dedicated to hoax theory rebuttal on their web site.

In 2002, NASA had hired the former rocket scientist, NASA veteran, NBC News space consultant and journalist James Edward Oberg (born 1944) for the job of writing a book intended to challenge those who claim the Apollo Moon landings were a hoax, on a fee of $15,000. But NASA then cancelled the project, declining to give the reasons for this. It is understood that the decision resulted from the bad publicity that followed the announcement of the project. NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs said criticism that NASA was displaying poor judgement and a lack of confidence in commissioning the book caused the agency to abort it. Others commented that making the Oberg's book an official NASA publication would actually give a certain credibility to the hoax theory. After NASA's decision to cancel the book, Oberg stated that he still intends to write it as an unofficial publication, depending on successfully arranging new funding sources. As of August 2009, no such book is known to have been published by him yet.

Major Moon sceptics

The following individuals are some of the most notable Moon sceptics.

Bill Kaysing

William Charles Kaysing (1922–2005) graduated from the University of Southern California with a B.A. in English and, from 1957, worked with technical publications at Rocketdyne, the company which built the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V rocket. He left Rocketdyne in 1963 for a new life as a freelance writer, producing books on healthy eating and living on houseboats.

In 1974 Kaysing released his self-published book We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, beginning the true Moon hoax movement.

Kaysing (and others, including Sibrel – see below) claim that, according to a Rocketdyne company report from the late 1950s, the chance of a successful landing on the Moon was calculated to be 0.0017 (1 in 600). Kaysing claimed in particular that the F-1 rocket engine used in the first stage of the Saturn V was too unreliable:

The Air Force had 13 consecutive failures with the Atlas D, E, and F in the summer and fall of 1963. This was at the time when the F-1, a much larger engine, was under intensive development. My point is this: if the Atlas couldn't achieve reliability after almost a decade of development, how could a far larger and more powerful rocket engine be successful?

Kaysing claimed that the supposedly Moon-bound Apollo astronauts did not even go into orbit: the Saturn V changed course during the launch, dropped the crew in the South polar sea, and then crashed. Communications traffic would be faked at NASA Greenbelt in Washington DC, and the lunar television broadcasts would be filmed at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, California, or perhaps Area 51 in Nevada. He suggests a "coalition between governments at the highest level" to conceal, amongst other things, the Moon hoax.

Bart Sibrel

Bartholomew Winfield Sibrel (born 1965), filmmaker and investigative journalist, created the documentary films A funny thing happened on the way to the Moon (2001) and Astronauts Gone Wild (2004)

Sibrel states that the Moon landings provided the US Government with a public distraction from the Vietnam War, with lunar activities stopping abruptly and planned missions canceled, around the same time that the U.S. ceased its involvement in Vietnam.

One of Sibrel's most significant claims (in his film "A funny thing happened on the way to the Moon") is that:

In my research at NASA I uncovered, deep in the archives, one mislabeled reel from the Apollo 11, first mission, to the Moon. What is on the reel and on the label are completely different. I suspect an editor put the wrong label on the tape 33 years ago and no reporter ever had the motive to be as thorough as I. It contains an hour of rare, unedited, color television footage that is dated by NASA's own atomic clock three days into the flight. Identified on camera are Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, and Michael Collins. They are doing multiple takes of a single shot of the mission, from which only about ten seconds was ever broadcast. Because I have uncovered the original unedited version, mistakenly not destroyed, the photography proves to be a clever forgery. Really! It means they did not walk on the Moon!

Sibrel and Aron Ranen claim that Wernher Von Braun was complicit in the hoax, collecting samples to be used as the basis for 'Moon rocks' during his trip to Antarctica in 1967.

Sibrel made repeated demands over several years that Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin swear an oath on the Bible that he had walked on the Moon, or admit that it was all a hoax. Aldrin ignored Sibrel, and in September 2002, Sibrel approached Aldrin and a young female relative as they were leaving a building, and called Aldrin "...a coward and a liar and a thief...". Aldrin punched Sibrel in the face, knocking him backwards. Aldrin later said that he had felt forced to defend himself and his companion (Sibrel was about half Aldrin's age and rather taller and larger). Sibrel suffered no permanent injury; immediately after being hit, he turned to the cameraman and asked, "Did you get that on camera?" The Beverly Hills police investigated the incident, but no charges were filed. CBS News reports that "witnesses have come forward stating that they saw Sibrel aggressively poke Aldrin with a Bible and that Sibrel had lured Aldrin to the hotel under false pretenses so that he could interview him."

Apollo 14 Lunar Module Pilot Edgar Mitchell says that when Sibrel came to his home with false History Channel credentials, he did swear to the veracity of the Moon landings on Sibrel's Bible.

Stanislav Pokrovsky

Stanislav Georgievich Pokrovsky (born 1959) is a Russian candidate of technical sciences and General Director of a scientific-manufacturing enterprise Project-D-MSK.

In 2007, he studied the filmed staging of the first stage (S-IC) of the Saturn V rocket after the launch of Apollo 11. Analysing it frame by frame, he calculated the actual speed of the Saturn V rocket at S-IC staging time using four different, independent and mutually verifying methods. With all of them, the calculated speed turned out to be at maximum half (1.2 km/s) of the declared one at that point (2.4 km/s). He concluded that due to this, no more than 28 tonnes could be brought on the way to the Moon, including the spacecraft, instead of the 46 tonnes declared by NASA, and so a loop around the Moon was possible but not a manned landing on the Moon with return to the Earth.

In 2008, Pokrovsky also claimed to have determined the reason why a higher speed was impossible – problems with the Inconel X-750 superalloy used for the tubes of the wall of the thrust chamber of the F-1 engine, whose physics of high-temperature strength was not yet studied at that time. The strength of the material changes when affected by high temperature and plastic deformations. As a result, the F-1 engine thrust had to be lowered by at least 20%. With these assumptions, he calculated that the real speed would be the same as he had already estimated (see above). Pokrovsky proved that six or more F-1 engines (instead of five) could not be used due to the increased fuel mass required by each new engine, which in turn would require more engines, and so on.

Pokrovsky claims that his Saturn V speed estimation is the first direct proof of the impossibility of the Apollo Moon landing. He says that 15 specialists with scientific degrees (e.g. Alexander Budnik) who reviewed his paper, of which at least five aerodynamics experts and three narrow specialists in ultrasonic movement and aerosols, raised no objections in principle, and the specific wishes and notes they (e.g. Vladimir Surdin) did have could not change his results significantly even if followed. Pokrovsky compares his own frame-by-frame analysis of the filmed Saturn V flight to the frame-by-frame analysis of the filmed Trinity nuclear test (1945) done by the Soviet academician Leonid Sedov who created his own blast wave theory to estimate the then top secret power of the explosion.

See also author's note below.

Alexander Popov

Alexander Ivanovich Popov (born 1943) is a Russian senior research associate, doctor of physical-mathematical sciences and the author of more than 100 scientific works and inventions in the fields of laser optics and spectroscopy.

Helped by more than 40 volunteers, most of which with scientific degrees, he wrote the book Americans on the Moon – a great breakthrough or a space afair? (Moscow, 2009). In it, Popov placed the burden of proof on NASA, and denied all Moon landing evidence, dividing it to five groups:

1. Visual (photo, film and video) material that can successfully be made on Earth, in cinema studios.
2. Obvious counterfeits and fakes, when visual material from ordinary space flights on Earth orbit is presented as Moon material.
3. Space photos, attributed to the astronauts but which by that time could already be made and were made by space robots, including American ones.
4. Devices on Moon (e.g. light reflectors) – by that time both American and Soviet automatic "messengers" had sent on Moon several tens of similar devices.
5. Unfounded, unprovable claims, e.g. for about 400 kg of soil, overwhelming part of which NASA keeps safe and gives only grams for checking.

Thus he concluded that the NASA claims on Moon landings are left unproven, and pursuant to science rules, in the absence of trustworthy evidence, the event, in this case the American Moon landings and their loops around the Moon, cannot be considered real, that is, having taken place. He also confirmed Pokrovsky's results for the speed of the Saturn V at S-IC staging time (see above), giving a still lower value of 0.9 km/s.^{, pp. 230–233}

Yuri Mukhin

Yuri Ignatievich Mukhin (born 1949), Russian opposition politician, publicist and writer, engineer, former metallurgist, manager and inventor. He is the author of the book The Moon affair of the USA (2006) in which he denies all Moon landing evidence and accuses the U.S. establishment for plundering the money paid by the American tax payers for the Moon program and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and some Soviet scientists for helping NASA commit a hoax without being denounced.

William Brian

William L. Brian II is an engineer and author of the self-published book "Moongate: suppressed findings of the U.S. space program". He does not dispute that astronauts visited the Moon, but claims that "the film speed was adjusted to slow down the action to give the impression that the astronauts were lighter than they actually were. With the slow-motion effects, objects would appear to fall more slowly and the public would be convinced of the Moon's weak gravity."

David Percy

David S. Percy, TV producer and expert in audiovisual technologies and member of the Royal Photographic Society, is co-author, along with Mary Bennett of Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers (ISBN 1-898541-10-8) and co-producer of What happened on the Moon?. He is the main proponent of the "whistle-blowing", arguing that the errors in the NASA photos in particular are so obvious that they are evidence that insiders are trying to "blow the whistle" on the hoax by deliberately inserting errors that they know will be seen.

Other Moon sceptics

• Ralph René (1933–2008) was an inventor and "self taught" engineering enthusiast. Author of NASA Mooned America (1994).
• Charles T. Hawkins (born 1962), author of How America Faked the Moon Landings (2004, ISBN 978-0974940540) in which he presents the ideas of Sam Colby (see below).
• Sam Colby, webmaster of the NASA Scam website which, among the other things, provides information and photos of the site and the equipment said to be used for the hoax.
• Gernot L. Geise, German writer, author of Der größte Betrug des Jahrhunderts? Die Apollo-Mondflüge ("The greatest scam of the century? The Apollo Moon flights")and 5 other books on the subject.
• Gerhard Wisnewski, German publicist, author of the film Die Akte Apollo ("The case Apollo") and the book "One small step?"
• Henrik Melvang, Danish publicist, author of the video documentary film "Afsløring Apollo" ("Uncovering Apollo")
• Philippe Lheureux, French author of Moon Landings: Did NASA Lie?, and Lumières sur la Lune ("Lights on the Moon"): La NASA a t-elle menti!.
• James M. Collier (d. 1998), American journalist and author, producer of the video Was It Only a Paper Moon? in 1997.
• Jack White, American photo historian and photo analyst known for his attempt to prove forgery in photos related to the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
• Anne Tonelson (d. 2006), a British stage actress who narrated the documentary film A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon by Bart Sibrel (see above).
• Marcus Allen, British publisher of Nexus magazine said that photographs of the lander would not prove that the US put men on the Moon. "Getting to the Moon really isn't much of a problem – the Russians did that in 1959 – the big problem is getting people there."
• Krassimir Ivandjiiski (born 1947), Bulgarian doctor of economics and professor in geopolitics and international relations. In 2008, his monthly analytical newspaper Strogo Sektetno published a series of articles on the Moon Hoax, based on the ideas of Alexander Popov (see above).
• Aron Ranen, director of "Did we go?" (co-produced with Benjamin Britton and selected for the 2000 "New Documentary Series" Museum of Modern Art, NYC, the 2000 Dallas Video Festival Awards and the 2001 Digital Video Underground Festival in San Francisco) who received a Golden Cine Eagle and two fellowships from the National Endowment for Arts.
• Clyde Lewis, radio talk show host.
• Dr. Shrikant N. Devdikar, Indian doctor and webmaster of the Shriworld website.
• Dr. David Groves, who works for Quantech Image Processing and worked on some of the NASA photos. He said he can pinpoint the exact point at which the artificial light was used. Using the focal length of the camera's lens and an actual boot, he has calculated (using ray-tracing) that the artificial light source is between 24 and 36 cm to the right of the camera.
• Joe Rogan, American comedian, actor and long time colour commentator.
• Peter Bown, a senior school physics teacher and part time photographer in England.

People claimed to be involved in hoaxing

• Dr. Robert Rowe Gilruth (1913–2000), former director of the NASA Manned Spacecraft Centre, Lunar Module chief designer in Houston (see Wernher von Braun's "right hand" Ernst Stuhlinger in at 38:09), and Apollo Program lead. Willy Brunner and Gerhard Wisnewski claim that Gilruth "was the real film director of the Moon landing" ("war die engentliche Regisseur der Mondlandung", 38:44 in ).
• Colonel Frank Frederick Borman, II (born 1928), Gemini 7 and Apollo 8 flight commander who visited the USSR just before the Apollo 11 flight (as some sceptics say, to reconnoitre whether the Russians believed in the Apollo 8 orbiting the Moon and help decide if they can "swallow" a much larger Apollo 11 Moon landing hoax) and one of the Skylab programme managers.
• Donald Kent Slayton (1924–1993), NASA Chief Astronaut in 1968. Sam Colby and Clyde Lewis say that Slayton was one of the primary leaders of the hoax. He visited the film set of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the UK, which he referred to as "NASA East".
• William M. Thompson (1920–2002) who had written the following: "I was actually part of the team that created the faked moon landings and I am ready to talk about them. I have physical evidence to prove that they were faked", to Sam Colby and the APFN.
• Michael J. Tuttle, claimed to have taken the job of producing fake photographs in 1994. Prior to the widespread availability of the internet, only a small subset of the photos currently in existence were seen. Sam Colby claims that many of the photos were created in the mid 1990s, and that Tuttle had admitted that to him.
• Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) and his younger brother Raul are said to have produced much of the footage for Apollo 11 and 12. It has been claimed that in early 1968 while 2001: A Space Odyssey (which includes scenes taking place on the Moon) was in post-production, NASA secretly approached Kubrick to direct the first three Moon landings. In this scenario, the launch and splashdown would be real but the spacecraft would have remained in Earth orbit while the fake footage was broadcast as "live" from the lunar journey. Kubrick did hire Frederick Ordway and Harry Lange, both of whom had worked for NASA and major aerospace contractors, to work with him on 2001. Kubrick also used some 50mm f/0.7 lenses that were left over from a batch made by Zeiss for NASA.
• Douglas Trumbull, a visual effects designer on 2001: A Space Odyssey, is said to have lead the special effects team for the faking of the Apollo 11 and 12 missions.

Specific statements

More general

Statement of NASA and / or its defenders	Statement of Moon sceptics
"Precisely because of human fallibility, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." (Carl Sagan) The burden of proof is on those who make such claims without any credible evidence to support them (i.e. those who deny the Apollo Moon landings).	"When scientists fail to require independent duplication of such an outlandish claim after over 30 years have passed, science is degraded to the status of being just another religion." (Bart Sibrel) The authenticity of a scientific discovery (manned flights to the Moon) should be proven by its author (the USA) and those who share its point of view (the defenders).
Too many people were involved with the project to keep a secret like this. More than 400,000 people worked on the Apollo project for nearly ten years, and a dozen men who walked on the Moon returned to Earth to recount their experiences. It would have been significantly easier to actually land on the Moon than to generate such a massive conspiracy to fake such a landing.	Much fewer people were in the know, and there are examples in history for secrets known by a lot of people but kept for many years (N-1 rocket, cruiser Belfast crashes, Enigma machine message decryption, cargo vessel Rona sinking, operations of British submarines in Swedish waters accusing the Soviets, etc).
A primary reason for the race to the Moon was the Cold War. The Soviets, with their own competing Moon program and a formidable scientific community able to analyse NASA data, could be expected to have cried foul if the United States tried to fake a Moon landing.	Russia could have blabbed to the world that the Moon landings were fake, and probably would have done were Khrushchev in power, but the West would say they were jealous because the USA had beaten them to it. Since 1970, the USSR and the USA secretly agreed to hide from the public some circumstances of the U.S. lunar programme.
On the death in 1967 of Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee (in the Apollo 1 fire), Edward Givens (on a car crash), Clifton Williams (on a T-38 jet trainer), Michael Adams (on an X-15 high-altitude experimental aircraft), Robert Lawrence (on an F-104B combat trainer), Russel Rogers (on an F-105 fighter), and Thomas Baron with all his family (at a railroad crossing) in 1967, the NASA defenders asked: Why remove the disagreeable along with the unique experimental aircraft or the first spacecraft prototype?	3 of the X-15 were built, and its last flight was an year later (in 1968), out of 9 service years in total. Apollo 1 was not the first prototype but had a serial number of 012.. For many years before and after 1967 both the U.S. and Soviet space industry had from 0 to 3 death cases per year. Only in 1967, an year before the first manned Apollo flight, there were 11 death cases., pp. 41–49 The Apollo 1 crew was still alive for at least 15 minutes after the craft caught fire, because their autopsy found that they have managed to develop pulmatory oedema, which cannot happen if they had died earlier., p. 95 Senior NASA astronaut and Apollo 1 commander Virgil Grissom was a sharp critic of the programme, and had received death threats earlier, which his family saw as coming from the space programme. "If there is ever a serious accident in the space programme, it will be me", he said to his wife. NASA quality engineer Thomas Baron died with his family a week after his 500-page report analysing the Apollo 1 incident was deposed before the Congressational committee, and the report vanished., p. 94
Lunar explorers should be able to jump vertical distances up to 12 or 14 feet (4 ± 0.3 m) on the Moon, unencumbered with a spacesuit or other equipment, but will experience difficulty in maintaining their balance. However, falls from these heights under similar conditions are not likely to result in personal injury. The EMU (Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or the Apollo spacesuit) tested on Apollo 9 and used on Apollo 11–14 weighs about 85 kg fully charged.	Assuming astronaut's body weight of 85 kg, his total weight including the space suit would be 170 kg, so he could achieve jump heights of 2 m. But the maximum jump height shown by an Apollo astronaut was 0.42 m, which is 5 times less.
Between 1969 and 1972, six Apollo missions brought back 382 kg of lunar rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand and dust from the lunar surface. Lunar samples are prepared for shipment to scientists and educators at NASA's Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility. Nearly 400 samples are distributed each year for research and teaching projects. All samples (split or intact) must be returned to the NASA Johnson Space Center after being studied.	Unlike the Apollo lunar samples, their Soviet counterparts exhibit triboluminescence and non-oxidation, contain 6 to 9 times more Mercury, which should be uniformly distributed on the lunar surface, and have other unique properties.
On 21 July 1969 Armstrong and Aldrin left lunar laser ranging reflectors on the Moon surface. They reflect pulses of laser light fired from the Earth, helping measure its distance to the Moon with high accuracy. Apollo 14 and 15 also left each one such reflector.	The Apollo 11, 14 and 15 reflectors were left on the Moon by secret Surveyor 8, 9 and 10 unmanned probes that were not really cancelled as declared.
20% of mankind at the time watched Neil Armstrong's first steps on the Moon. Three tracking stations were receiving these signals from the Moon simultaneously. They were CSIRO's Parkes Radio Telescope, the Honeysuckle Creek tracking station outside Canberra, and NASA's Goldstone station in California. They received the voice communication with and between the astronauts, and spacecraft and biomedical telemetry radio signals from the Moon too.	The TV and radio signals were emitted from Earth to the Moon and re-translated to Earth by the radio equipment of special secret Surveyor or Orbiter unmanned crafts., pp. 196, 197 (27 of 61 U.S. space rocket launches in 1968 were secret, and 20 of 47 in 1969).
Unable to track Apollo flights due to incompatibility issues, in 1968 the USSR built in Simferopol (Crimea) a dedicated tracking facility with a S-band (13 cm) antenna with a diameter of 32 metres. To track the spacecraft on their lunar orbits, their data was needed. As it was not published, it was calculated based on the start and Moon arrival times of the Apollo crafts reported on U.S. radio. Apollo 8, 10, 11 and 12 from December 1968 to November 1969 were tracked, including voice communications of the astronauts with Earth, TV images, and telemetry data.	This was the only Soviet tracking facility. The fact that orbit data was calculated based on the start and Moon arrival times of the Apollo crafts reported on U.S. radio means that the USSR did not fix the fact of Apollos leaving Earth orbit for the Moon nor did it track their movement on the spaceway Eath – Moon. Because if they fixed and tracked, then no orbit calculation or using U.S. radio reports about the start and Moon arrival times would be needed. Thus the fact of Apollos leaving Earth orbit and the entire flight from the Earth to the Moon were left totally unconfirmed by Soviet means. Nor did the USSR track this in a telescope, as reported from the only Soviet facility capable of that – the Sternberg Astronomical Institute in Moscow.
A set of recent still images was published by NASA on July 17, 2009. Taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission, these images show lunar landers, including that of Apollo 11, standing on the surface, science experiments and, in one case, astronaut footprints in a line between the Apollo 14 lander and a nearby science experiment.	Photos showing those objects can be made on a printed lunar surface photos with rough models of the objects added, or using a computer.

Flight-specific

Statement or ducument of NASA and / or its defenders	Statement of Moon sceptics
On 16 July 1969, from 8:00 to 9:00 EST (Apollo 11 was launched at 8:32), near the Cape Canaveral Space Centre, 7 Soviet trawlers with reconnaissance equipment on board were met by 15 U.S. surface ships, 7 submarines and an unspecified number of P-3 Orion-type maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft with electronic warfare equipment on board, of U.S. Second Fleet. 12 minutes before the Apollo 11 launch, all U.S. coastal, ship and aircraft radio jamming equipment was switched on full power and then switched off 4 minutes after Apollo 11 reached Earth orbit. The operation was justified by an alleged danger that the Soviet ships can try to radio-jam the Saturn V electronic equipment and thus destroy the flight. The danger was later recognised as non-existent, and the $320 million spent on the operation as wasted.	To destroy the rocket would be suicidal for the Soviets as it would equal to declaring a nuclear war. The real reason why the Soviet reconnaissance was suppressed was to not let it receive the Saturn V telemetry data, which would reveal the non-conformance of its real speed and altitude to the declared values and that the flight goes not proceed as declared.
Astronomer Richard West of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) who commented the Apollo 11 Moon landing at the Danish TV says that they had a manual of 1000 pages or so where it was exactly described what the astronauts had to do at what time (in at 9:21).	How can it be relied that everything would go in accordance with the 1000-page instruction manual, when every detail was done for the first time? But if it was a play, then an instruction (or scenario) is absolutely necessary. If the actors don't strictly follow the instructions of the director, the show will inevitably fail., p. 179
At 13:35 P.M., as the [Apollo 11] command module with its human passengers and its cargo of moon rocks sped on a north-easterly course 80 [nautical] miles above the Gilbert Islands, it slammed into the atmosphere and streaked like a flaming meteor toward a soft landing in the water below. Fifteen minutes later the command ship's three parachutes lowered it gently, at 21 [nautical] miles an hour, into the Pacific 950 [nautical] miles south-west of Hawaii, 2.7 [nautical] miles (5 km) from its aiming point and 13.8 [nautical] miles (25.6 km) from the [aircraft] carrier Hornet, the recovery ship. Man's first expedition to another world was over. President Nixon watched the recovery from one of the Hornet's two bridges. He caught a glimpse of the spaceship's fiery re-entry into the atmosphere, but shared in the disappointment of the crew and millions of television viewers when the craft splashed down out of sight of the ship. [Apollo 11] capsule was first righted by flotation bags.	If Nixon could see the spacecraft's entry into the atmosphere down its sloping trajectory, the sky must have been exceptionally clear, assuring direct visibleness of hundreds of kilometres. Then the craft descending on three huge parachutes at only 25 km should have been noticeable too: aircraft carrier's bridges are 40–50 metres above sea level, corresponding to a horizon of 20–25 km, so the high flying parachutes would be visible. But only a helicopter and the capsule were filmed, without even its parachutes. And if the landing accuracy was only 5 km, why was not the ship at the aiming point but stayed 25 km away? Finally, even today Soyuz spacecraft's landing accuracy is an order of magnitude worse than the average of 4 km Apollo could achieve back then, which makes such high accuracy unreal. All issues vanish if we assume that the crew did not fly but the capsule with it was dropped in advance far enough (25 km) from the ship. Craft entry into the atmosphere can be imitated by a ballistic missile with a suitable head surface material to produce enough fire., pp. 254–257
As astronauts in special isolation suits watched, frogman scrubbed the capsule down with disinfectant. Apollo crew waved as they entered quarantine trainer aboard Hornet. The astronauts then settled down for an 18-day quarantine to make certain their contact with the moon had not contaminated or infected them in any way.	What bacteria can there be on the Moon, tilled already for several milliards of years every 27 days now by space cold of –150°C, now by Sun heat of +150°C, and irradiated by streams of radiation from the Sun flares? Do Earth medics have such sterilisers? And why scrub the craft down with disinfectant if it had flown through the atmosphere in a cloud with a temperature of several thousands of degrees on its return? And, if lunar bacteria do exist and are so hardy, then what quatantine, and what disinfectant can help against them? But if there was a hoax, the quarantine was important for its success. The black masks on the astronauts' faces helped them avoid unwanted sights by the welcoming people while getting used to their most important role (Moon flight stories), having ensured 3 weeks later that the world public opinion had already believed the Moon landings. It did, so next Apollo crews had no quarantine.
This view of the damaged Apollo 13 Service Module (SM) was photographed from the Lunar Module/Command Module following SM jettisoning.	The rear side of a spotlight is clearly seen on the top right edge of the photo. When brightness and contrast are increased, a halo due to reflection of its light by dust is seen. So the photo was made in a studio.
In early 1970, the Soviet Union had recovered an empty Apollo capsule and returned it to the Americans a several months later. The capsule was identified at NASA as the BP-1227 training capsule lost a while back.	It was on the night of 11–12 April 1970, the night after Apollo 13 was launched, and it was its capsule and not BP-1227.
The Galileo's experiment was made by Apollo 15 astronauts to prove that they're on the Moon. (Apollo 15 TV camera frame rate was 20 fps.)	More than a half of the frames in the NASA (.mpg) film are repeated, and after removing them, the acceleration it was taken under was calculated as 9.5 ± 2 m/s2. The experiment may have been filmed at NASA's Space Power Facility (SPF) vacuum chamber.
In each of the following Apollo 17 archive photos, the Earth (with an angle diameter 1.9°) is at a different angle over the horizon: AS17-137-20910 – 16°, AS17-134-20473 – 32°, AS17-134-20384 – 34°, AS17-137-20957 – 16°, AS17-137-20960 – 16°	Calculating from the coordinates of the Apollo 17 lunar landing site (20.16° North and 30.77° East), the Earth should be at constant 53.4° above the lunar horizon.
Astronaut Charles Conrad, Jr., Skylab-2 commander, smiles happily for the camera after a hot bath in the shower in the crew quarters of the Orbital Workshop of the Skylab space station.	The towel at the upper right corner hangs as on Earth, so there was no weightlessness and the photo was taken on Earth, not Earth orbit.

Contradictions in NASA documents

First NASA document	NASA document sceptics found to contradict the first one
The first photo of Earthrise by a human as he watched the event unfold (AS08-13-2329) was taken on 24 December 1968.	There is yet another photo (AS08-14-2392) of the same Earthrise at the same time and place but with a window frame and said to be taken two days earlier. A sceptic says that both photos are taken by a secret Lunar Orbiter unmanned craft and not from Apollo 8., p. 190
Conrad, from the 1969 Technical Debrief – "As soon as I got the vehicle stopped in horizontal velocity at 300 feet (figure 4–12 from the Apollo 12 Mission Report indicates that he stopped almost all of his forward motion at about 220 feet), we picked up a tremendous amount of dust – much more than I had expected. It looked a lot worse than it did in the movies I saw of Neil's landing. It seemed to me that we got the dust much higher than Neil indicated. It could be because we were in a hover, higher up, coming down...".	According to the Apollo 12 land path, at 300 feet (90 m) the module was almost half a kilometre far from the landing place and was descending not vertically but down a very gently sloping trajectory, and dust was first seen at a 3 times less height of 30 m (100 feet).
After the landing of the Apollo 14 lunar module, the engine works 7 more seconds and the jets of dust flying from under the module are clearly seen.	There are no signs of blowing the dust on the photo of the surface under the Apollo 14 lunar module.