Apollo Moon landing hoax claims

The Apollo Moon landing hoax or simply Moon hoax is a generalised name for the notion that the Project Apollo Moon landings were falsified by NASA and the U.S. government. Since the Apollo program, a number of Moon hoax accounts have been advanced by various groups and individuals. Claims that the Apollo astronauts did not set foot on the Moon; that NASA and others intentionally deceived the public into believing the landings did occur by manufacturing, destroying, or tampering with evidence, including photos, telemetry tapes, transmissions, and rock samples; and that the deception continues to this day are common to the proponents of these claims.

Hoax proponents claim that the reason why NASA had to fake the Moon landings were the serious technical obstacles that couldn't be overcome for the 7 years that President Kennedy gave for manned landing on the Moon in 1962. Bill Kaysing suggested that during the 1960s, they (NASA) said "if you can't make it, fake it". And in 2004, President George W. Bush gave not 7 but 16 years for a manned return to the Moon, given that the technologies for this should have already been developed 40 years ago.

The struggle between the hoax proponents and opponents has continued for more than 40 years.

Origins and history
The first book dedicated to the subject, by technical publications editor Bill Kaysing, the self-published We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, was released in 1974, two years after the Apollo Moon flights had ceased. Folklorist Linda Degh suggests that writer-director Peter Hyams's 1978 film Capricorn One, which depicts a hoaxed journey to Mars in a spacecraft that looks identical to the Apollo craft, may have given a boost to the hoax theory's popularity in the post-Vietnam War. She notes that this occurred during the post-Watergate era, when segments of the American public were disinclined to trust official accounts. In A man on the Moon, published in 1994, Andrew Chaikin mentions that at the time of Apollo 8's lunar-orbit mission in December 1968 similar conspiracy ideas were already in circulation.

Public opinion
There are entire subcultures worldwide which advocate the belief that the Moon landings were faked. James Oberg of ABC News stated that notion that the Moon landings were faked is actively taught in Cuban schools and wherever Cuban teachers are sent. Officials for Fox television stated that "Moon skeptics" were about 20% after the airing on 15 February 2001 of their TV show entitled Conspiracy theory: Did we land on the Moon?. Seen by approximately 15 million viewers, the 2001 Fox special is viewed as having promoting the hoax claims.

Americans are not the only believers in the hoax theories. A 2000 poll conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Fund found that 28% of the Russians do not believe that American astronauts have been on the Moon, and this percentage is roughly equal in all social-demographic groups. A poll by the Swedish daily Aftonbladet indicated about 40% of readers thought the first Moon landing was faked. In 2009, a poll conducted by the British Engineering & Technology magazine found that 25% of Britons do not believe that man has walked on the Moon.

Major hoax proponents
Some of the more notable proponents of the hoax are the following:

Bill Kaysing
William Charles Kaysing (1922–2005) graduated from the University of Southern California with a B.A. in English and, from 1957, worked in technical publications at Rocketdyne, the company which subsequently built the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V rocket after Kaysing had left. 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. There were specific criticisms of his work.

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 Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, 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
Bart Winfield Sibrel (born in 1965 or late 1964), filmmaker and self proclaimed investigative journalist, created a documentary film A funny thing happened on the way to the Moon (2001).

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 "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.

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, ISBN 978-5-9533-3315-3). 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. 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.

Yuri Mukhin
Yuri 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 the 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 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-blower" accusation, 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.

Suppression?
Wikipedia had an article devoted to the hoax "accusers". Two days after adding the above information about Pokrovsky's findings there on 23 July 2009, the entire article was proposed for deletion and was deleted in a week. At the same time, Pokrovsky's business site was hacked and as of 18 August 2009, is still empty with a "403 forbidden" error.