The Moon Landing: A Hoax?

We weren’t there, but we heard that…

The first manned moon landing took place on 20 July 1969. Or maybe it didn’t.

According to conspiracy theorists, all that occurred was the filming of another Stanley Kubrick movie, albeit one designed to fool the world into thinking that the USA had won the Space Race. Think of it as the first reality show, if you will.

So what’s the truth? Are we celebrating the 40th anniversary of this historic occasion? Or not?

I love conspiracy theories. Some of them are exceptionally well crafted and plant little seeds of doubt in my mind. Others, perhaps not so convincing, but I marvel at the theorists’ creativity and dedication nonetheless, and applaud their courage in standing up for what they believe in the face of much critical opposition.

In my heart of hearts, I want to believe that Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon. I want to feel for their fellow crew member, Michael Collins, who somehow drew the short straw of having to stay behind in the command shuttle. I mean, that’s surely got to suck big time right? To go all that way and then not even to get a little moon dust on your boots?

But maybe I shouldn’t feel too sorry for him… after all, say conspiracy theorists, there’s something just a tad suspicious about that moon dust and those boot prints left up there. How on earth (er, moon?) did those prints stay so perfect when there’s no water up there to bond the sand together? And why wasn’t there more moon dust flying about all over the place when the Eagle landed? Valid points perhaps, though to give them some credit, the scientists have also been able to dazzle my mind with their technical explanations about the special properties of moon dust and vacuums that creates effects like that.

But then, you know, alarm bells start ringing at the mention of effects… special effects to be precise. The lunar module looks like it’s made from cardboard and tin foil, stuck together with scotch tape – your classic 1960s film prop. Some of the footage appears to show the astronauts jumping around matrix like with the help of wires, the mountains in the background are the same in photos supposedly taken miles apart, and the lighting is clearly from spotlights.

And then there’s the American flag that proudly waves in the breeze. Wait, hang on, what? No breeze on the moon? Ah, right. Vacuum. Yes.

Add in the original high quality footage that has conveniently gone “missing”, the stars that have all “disappeared” from the sky, and the continuity errors in the footage, and what you end up with is a lot of question marks. Not very scientific, all that uncertainty, is it?

To be sure, there are explanations for some of the conspiracy theorists’ accusations. Some very good explanations. Quite convincing, most of them.

And they’ve nearly swayed me. Now all I need is an explanation of how NASA got Apollo 11 all the way to the moon using the equivalent of a pocket calculator in computing power. Yup, you heard me. It takes 1GB of RAM to play a computer game these days. Heck, it even takes 210MB to run MS Office so that you can type a letter to someone. But it took a mere 152kb to send men all the way to the moon. Kilobytes. Kilo. Bytes. That’s not even a full floppy disk. Remember those?