by Mike Bara
Admittedly, I thought this whole issue was put quite nicely to rest in August 1997, when my co-author on Dark Mission, Richard C. Hoagland, debated James Collier on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM radio program. The results of that debate can only be described as an unmitigated humiliation for Collier, who turned out to be totally out of his element and misinformed on the general subjects of space travel, physics, engineering, NASA, and Apollo itself. But I have to keep in mind that every ten years or so, a new generation comes along and they have to be reminded of the truth and the facts.
I have been accused, along with Mr. Hoagland, of defending NASA on this count only because I need a legitimate manned lunar program to support my Ancient Alien theory. I hope this chapter will make it clear there simply is no logical basis for the faked Moon landing conspiracy theory.
Let me be clear; I am unabashedly a conspiracy theorist. I am 100% convinced that there has been a cover up by NASA of some extraordinary discoveries made in the course of the agency’s 40-year year history, and I think the data we’ve already covered in this book proves that. That said, one thing they did not do – unquestionably—was fake the Moon landings. In fact, most of the charges made, not just by Collier and Percy, but by others who have picked up the mantle of their assertions, are so absurd, so easily discredited, so lacking in any kind of scientific analysis and just plain common sense that they give legitimate conspiracy theories—like mine—a bad name. Frankly, I suspect that may ultimately be the point of this whole thing after all.
Almost from the moment that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot upon the Moon at Tranquility Base, the rumors began circulating that the whole thing was faked. I have always felt that there was something a little more to this than simple stupidity or naïveté, something a bit insidious about the whole thing. That was more than confirmed in the Forward to Dark Mission, when Richard related his memories of being handed a pamphlet claiming the landings were faked even before Neil and Buzz had splashed down on their return trip from the first lunar landing. What made that moment so extraordinary was not that someone had made up a pamphlet making such a claim, it was that the person who authored it was being escorted around the NASA press room by a NASA press officer to make sure every reporter got one.
So yeah, the rumor that the Moon landings were faked was actually started with the able assistance of NASA itself more than 4 decades ago.
I assumed that as time went by, the notion would weaken and falter, rather than gain momentum as it has recently. I have come to wonder, given my own stance on the whole question of what the Moon program was really about and what the astronauts really found, if there wasn’t perhaps something a bit “conspiratorial” about the promotion of this patently absurd and demonstrably false conspiracy theory. Richard’s story, recounted as I said in more detail in Dark Mission, all but confirms that.
As you will see, some of the specific citations of evidence that the landings were faked can actually be more easily explained not just by a complete rejection of the Moon Hoax theory, but a combination of conventional explanations and the glass ruins model of the Moon. The way light scatters on the Lunar surface; the size of solar reflections in the visors of the astronauts (which are way out of proportion to their counterparts on modern day Space Shuttle missions), the sometimes secretive stance taken by the astronauts and the Agency; the very peculiar qualities of the film in the cameras taken to the Moon by the astronauts, all point to something bigger and more interesting then we have been led to believe by NASA itself. In this chapter, I will try to sort out the most common claims being made, highlight the rebuttal evidence, and show that the Moon landings were something quite extraordinary after all.
Yes Virginia, We Really Went to the Moon
There are three major thrusts used by the fake landing advocates to bolster their claim: First, that the radiation exposure suffered by the astronauts was not survivable; second, that the photographic evidence “proves” that the landings were staged in a Disney movie studio somewhere; and third, that the mechanical aspects of the mission—the pure mechanics and physics of the journey—are not as claimed and therefore must be faked.
Each of these claims is based on misinterpretations, misrepresentations, or just plain ignorance of the realities of space travel. It is not a coincidence that many of the believers in this myth are too young to actually remember the Moon landings. If they had been old enough to watch the missions on live TV, they would have known that most of these claims are nonsense. For this article, we will deal with each of these claims in separate sections, and try to directly address the key sub-claims being made.
Section One – The Photographic Evidence
Percy is one of the primary drivers of this particular set of claims, but Collier and others have added to it. Let’s list a few of the claims one-by-one and address them.
Claim 1 – The shadows don’t fall right in images taken on the lunar surface, proving that there are multiple light sources, like professional stage lighting using high- powered lamps. Since the Moon has only one light source, the Sun, these images (these people claim) “have to have been shot on a sound stage somewhere.”
This one is usually based on images like the one above (taken from an Apollo 17 TV transmission), that seem to show the shadows of the astronauts coming from different lighting sources. However, a logical approach to this problem reveals that there is nothing at all mysterious about either the shadows or the light sources. If, in fact, the shadows were cast by different light sources, each astronaut would have two shadows instead of just the one each we see here. Yet, in the images that the “Moon Hoaxers” cite, there is consistently only one shadow being cast, indicating that the Sun is (as it should be) the single and dominant light source.
So, how to explain the seemingly divergent shadows in this image? If you look closely, you will see that the astronaut on the right is on a slight rise above the astronaut on the left. This has not only the effect of lengthening his shadow, but also if the slope is greater in one direction, say to the left of the astronaut on the right, it will tend to flow and elongate in that direction.
It’s important to keep in mind that the Moon has a very rough and uneven surface, with lots of slopes, rises and potholes. As a result, many of the shadows will appear to be non-parallel.
Shadows cast in divergent directions from Apollo 17 TV broadcast.
The geometry of shadows.
In a sense, the Moon Hoax advocates are correct here; there is no comparison to be made from lunar landscapes and terrestrial ones. But, it is because the surface of the Moon is so uneven, not because there are multiple light sources, i.e. lamps, casting the “wrong” shadows.
Also at issue is the photographic equipment used by the astronauts on the lunar surface. Shortened wide-angle lenses, like the ones on the hand-held Hasseblad 70mm cameras used by the astronauts, will distort otherwise parallel shadows. Simply pull some outdoor photos from your own personal collection and see for yourself.
Claim 2 – The foreground of many images of the astronauts on the Moon are filled in with light, while the shadows remain absolutely black, again proving that there are multiple light sources.
In this one, the argument is that with his back to the sun, the astronaut’s suit should be as dark as his own shadow stretching out in front of him (see Apollo 16 image, above). Since there is no light diffusion in an absolute vacuum, NASA “must” therefore have used reflectors or fill-in lamps to illuminate the astronaut for this photograph. The truth is, there is evidence of a “reflector” in this image—but it’s the lunar surface itself.
Obviously, the lunar surface is a fairly bright gray color. It is known, from the Apollo samples brought back and analyzed in Houston, to contain a LOT of glass beads and metals like aluminum and titanium, with a lot of other reflective and refractive minerals in it. All of these materials tend to kick light directly back toward the source of illumination with very high efficiency. This is one reason why the Full Mo
on is so much brighter (than other phases) in the night sky; the sun is “behind” the Earth. The effect of the sunlight hitting the lunar surface and being reflected back toward the sun itself creates a backscatter that fills in the astronaut’s bright white shadowed suit with an excellent fill-light effect. And the fact that the shadow is so dark on the ground in front of him is proof of exactly the opposite of the claim being made by the “Moon Hoaxer” crowd. It shows that indeed, the astronaut is standing upright in a harsh vacuum, where his suit can “see” the illumination from the surrounding lunar landscape. By stark contrast, almost no light at all has seeped into the shadow, because it’s lying flat on the ground and cannot “see” anything but black space overhead. It is, as it should be, extremely dark and sharp.
Light scattering off the lunar surface.
Interestingly, as to the question of multiple light sources, some of the leading debunkers of the Moon Hoax theory, like Dr. Phil Plait, have also made a very significant mistake. It is flat wrong, as many of them have stated, that the Earth is a “very significant” light source on the Moon. When full, the Earth is on the order of 68.4 times brighter than a full Moon as seen from Earth. It also takes up something like 13.5 times as much sky. But, that’s not the whole story.
The Earth is—maximum—100 times the brightness of a Full Moon (I’m going to overestimate a bit to prove the point). The apparent magnitude (brightness) of a Full Moon is about -13. The equivalent magnitude of the Sun is about -27. Subtracting, that’s a difference of 14 magnitudes. Since each 5 orders of magnitude correspond to a factor of 100 in brightness, a difference of 14 magnitudes corresponds to almost 100 X 100 X 100, or a factor of a million. Allowing for the ~100 times greater reflected brightness of the Earth (at “Full Earth”) the direct lunar sunlight is still at least 100,000 times brighter than the Earth’s illumination.
There is no way that the slide films used by the crews could have detected that feeble amount of “Earthlight” on the lunar surface, even in the shadows, because the exposures were set for the full, sunlit view.
Of course, we have our own thoughts on this. Some of the debunkers must be realizing that backscatter is insufficient to account for some of what we are seeing on the lunar surface photography. To come up with an explanation, they have resorted to the (obviously incorrect) “Earth light” angle. But of course, it’s really more interesting than that…
Claim 3 – There are no stars in the background from pictures taken on the Moon.
This one keeps coming up, but the answer, while obvious, is somewhat complicated by our own lunar conspiracy theory. Usually, Moon Hoax advocates cite any number of pictures of the lunar surface showing an absolute black background, but this one above of John Young saluting the flag in front of the LM Orion is quite prevalent. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of photography can easily put this one to rest.
On an airless body like the Moon, any brightly lit foreground object must be photographed with a very short exposure time. Otherwise, the image will be badly overexposed. Any background pinpoint light sources—like, say, stars that are literally trillions of miles further away—will not show up at all. Likewise, if the photographer wants to capture the background stars, he is going to have to use a very long exposure time, which means that the foreground will be totally washed out in one blob of overexposed light. Obviously, there would be no real benefit to taking such an image, since the point of the lunar surface photography was to document the activities of the astronauts on the lunar surface—not to stargaze.
Apollo 16 astronaut John Young saluting the US flag on the surface of the Moon.
Even so, there are plenty of pictures from missions like the Surveyors which prove my point. In order to get the stars even to show up (for navigation and location purposes), the Surveyor spacecraft cameras had to use (in one example) a three-minute time exposure to record them. By contrast, the average exposure time of the hand-held, film photographs taken on the lunar surface by Apollo astronauts is about 1/250th of a second—or an average of forty-five thousand times shorter than the exposure required to actually record stars in the airless lunar sky. Clearly, if these “disbelievers” believe at least in the reality of the unmanned lunar landings (which at least some say they do), this simple example should satisfy even the densest Moon Hoax advocates as to the nagging question of why stars aren’t visible in the background of any Apollo surface photographs. Because they’re simply too dim.
This whole process is complicated by the fact that in a vacuum, the problem is made even worse, the light far more intense, and the exposure must be even shorter. The Moon Hoax advocates also seem to have forgotten that they are basing most of their “analysis” on press release photos, which are invariably cleaned up before release to the press. So of course, these sanitized press kit images would reflect what we all would expect to see, an absolute black background.
Surveyor 6 photo of the constellation Scorpius taken from the lunar surface.
So contrary to what the Moon Hoax advocates have been saying, the sky above the astronauts should be absolutely black. And in fact, on most of the prints that they have been looking at, web based images, press release photos, and even new prints from the archives, it is. The problem is that while the sky should be absolute black, and does appear that way in images presented by the Moon Hoax advocates, it most demonstrably is not absolute black in the images we examined earlier in this book.
Four NASA images showing glass structures over Oceanus Procellarum.
Apollo 16 astronaut John Young.
What Ken Johnston’s 1st generation prints showed was quite another story—that the sky above the astronauts was far from blank—it was in fact filled with a strange, bluish, geometric set of ruins. So the problem is exactly the opposite of how it is stated by the Moon Hoax advocates. The sky should be black, but it isn’t.
One amusing sidelight of this famous Apollo 16 photograph is that it is used on several web sites as “proof” that many of the pictures taken on the Moon are fake, since John Young “… is casting no shadow at all” on the lunar surface. In fact, all it really shows is how dumb most of the Moon Hoax advocates really are. If you actually look at the picture, you will see that Young is casting a shadow to the right side of the picture a few feet away. How can this be? Why is the shadow not “attached” to young’s feet? Well, because in this famous sequence, John Young is leaping into the air as he is saluting, while fellow astronaut Charley Duke snaps the photo. Many Moon Hoax advocates, too young to have actually watched this all on live television, look at this picture and mistakenly believe that Young is standing on the slight dome shaped rise in the background, when in fact he is in midair (well, OK, mid-vacuum). This famous sequence is also a good way to show that the astronauts are indeed in the one-sixth gravity of the Moon, since in order to get this kind of elevation on Earth (especially with the bulky, several-hundred-pound spacesuit and backpack on), Young would have to have the leaping ability of Lebron James. There are many video sources available today which show this famous live TV sequence.
Claim 4 – In some images, a huge light source can be seen reflected in the astronaut’s visors. This has to be a very bright, nearby source.
This argument is essentially a variation of the first argument. Occasional images, like the ones above (taken from the Apollo 17 EVA TV transmissions and Apollo 14), seem to show a very bright, huge light source taking up almost 25% of the astronauts visor. Moon Hoax advocates argue that this is proof of a large light source (a stage flood or a spot, again) positioned very close to the astronauts. What they are missing here is essentially the same geometric problem they missed with the “bent shadows” argument. The gold-covered helmet visors that the astronauts wore were very convex shapes—similar to automotive wide- angle side mirrors included on many current models. Like the surface shadows in the earlier images above, this curved helmet has the effect of severely distorting the reflections, making them appear much smaller (and thus farther away) t
han they actually are.
The problem is the sun in the visor reflection pictured here appears much larger (and therefore closer) than it possibly could. The explanation for this is firmly grounded in the theory we’ve already covered; the presence of ancient, glass-like ruins on the Moon. It is these ruins, sticking up above the lunar horizon and physically intervening between the low-angle sun and the Apollo astronauts roaming across the surface, which create the magnified halo of scattered light seen in the gold visors. Since this area of forward scattering is much larger than the optical size of the sun itself, it makes the reflection appear disproportionately larger.
Image frame capture from the Apollo17 mission.
Claim 5 – There are no views of the Earth in pictures taken from the surface of the Moon.
This one also is just plain wrong. Collier was among the most enthusiastic promoters of this mistaken notion, based on studying only a few press release photographs from NASA. Below is an Apollo 17 photo of a large boulder, with the Earth in the background, taken by an astronaut with a hand-held Hasselblad 70mm camera There are dozens of other such examples. Since all the non-handheld pictures taken on or in orbit around the Moon were using a media other than 70mm transparency film, these photos had to have been taken by a human being—an Apollo astronaut — physically present either on the lunar surface or in space around the Moon.
