Apollo Moon landing hoax accusers

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Apollo Moon Landing Hoax Accusers claim that some or all elements of the Apollo Moon landings were faked by NASA and possibly members of other involved organizations.

1 Major hoax proponents
2 Other proponents
3 People accused of involvement in the hoax
4 See also
5 References

[edit] Major hoax proponents

Some of the more notable proponents of the hoax are:

[edit] Bill Kaysing

Bill 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,^[1] the company which built the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V rocket. Reportedly described by his daughter as "a self-supporting vagabond", Kaysing left Rocketdyne in 1963 for a new life as a freelance writer, producing books on such subjects as cheap eating and living on houseboats.^[2]

In 1974 Kaysing released his self-published book We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle * ^[3] ^[4] , beginning the true Moon hoax movement.

Kaysing (and others, including Sibrel) claim that, according to that a Rocketdyne company report from the late 1950s,^[5] 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?^[3]

Kaysing also said that if five F-1 engines had actually been used, "it would have been a most spectacular fire bomb." ^[3], instead claiming that seventy-two hours before the launch of a Saturn V, B-1 rocket engines (more reliable but lower thrust) were put within the large F-1 engines. ^[3]

However, while F-1 development was problematic, particularly due to combustion instability,^[6] the problems were solved in the early 1960s,^[7] and by June 1965 it had been test-fired 1,000 times.^[8] No 'B-1' engine was ever built, unless a NASA conspiracy managed to build it in secret after failing to make the F-1 work in the open. The development of the Atlas booster was similarly troubled, but records do not show the thirteen consecutive failures of the Atlas that Kaysing claims.^[9] It was later used to launch Mercury flights into space with a 100 percent success record, and also launched numerous satellites and unmanned space probes: the Atlas-F mentioned had 22 failures, but also 79 successful launches.^[10]

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.^[11] He suggests a "coalition between governments at the highest level" to conceal, amongst other things, the Moon hoax.^[11]

Kaysing claimed that two NASA engineers admitted that the landing was a hoax:

I received a call from a Margaret Hardin of Portland, Oregon. She said that she had met a hooker in Reno in 1970 who admitted to her that two NASA engineers told her the Moon trips were a hoax. ^[3]

Kaysing contacted Hardin directly in February 1976 and he was "shocked" when she denied knowing anything about the engineers or the hoax. Kaysing also claimed to have met an airline captain who saw a command module being dropped from a cargo plane for a faked 'splashdown', but was unable to provide their name or airline.^[12]

Kaysing later sued^[13] Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell for libel, after Lovell reportedly said of Kaysing:^[14]

"The guy is wacky. His position makes me feel angry. We spent a lot of time getting ready to go to the Moon. We spent a lot of money, we took great risks, and it's something everybody in the country ought to be proud of."

In 1997 a judge dismissed the case^[15]^[4].

[edit] Bart Sibrel

Bart Sibrel, filmmaker and self proclaimed investigative journalist, created a documentary film A funny thing happened on the way to the Moon.

Sibrel claims that the Moon landings provided the US Government with a public distraction from the Vietnam War,^[16] with lunar activities stopping abruptly and planned missions canceled, around the same time that the U.S. ceased its involvement in Vietnam. However, that assertion is not chronologically correct, because the cancellations of the later flights occurred during the budgeting process in 1970 and 1971, when the War was still raging; and the last mission flew in December of 1972, when the war was still a major ongoing conflict.

One of Sibrel's most significant claims 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!

However, the website Clavius.org says that analysis of the footage and mission transcripts indicates that the astronauts were practicing for their upcoming live telecast to the world from space, for which they had not been able to rehearse ahead of time.^[17]

A new pro-NASA documentary entitled Lunar Legacy,^[18] also challenges the Sibrel claim by showing conclusive evidence that original Apollo footage showing Earth from several thousand miles beyond the Van Allen radiation belts, was omitted from Sibrel's video. Had the NASA footage been included, it would have contradicted Sibrel's primary argument that Earth was filmed in a deceptive manner by the Apollo 11 astronauts in low Earth orbit.

Sibrel^[19] 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...".^[20] 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; in fact, 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."^[21]

Apollo 14 Lunar Module Pilot Ed 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.^[22]^[23]

[edit] William Brian

William Brian is an engineer and author of the self-published book "Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the U.S. Space Program".

Brian reportedly^[24]^[25] claims that "the Moon's surface gravity is 64 percent of the Earth's surface gravity, not the one-sixth (or 16.7 percent) value predicted by Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation!".^[26]

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."^[26] However, viewing even a moderate amount of video footage of the landings effectively disproves this theory. Only extremely edited clips appear natural when sped up.

[edit] 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.^[27]

[edit] Ralph Rene

Ralph Rene is an inventor and 'self taught' engineering buff. Author of NASA Mooned America (second edition ASIN: B0006QO3E2).

[edit] Other proponents

Charles T. Hawkins, author of How America Faked the Moon Landings,
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.
Jan Lundberg a technician for Hasselblad.
Jack White American photo historian known for his attempt to prove forgery in photos related to the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
Marcus Allen (publisher) - 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." ^[28]
Aron Ranen directed 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). He received a Golden Cine Eagle and two fellowships from the National Endowment for Arts.
Clyde Lewis, radio talk show host.^[29]
Christopher Wunderlee, American novelist who wrote The Loony: a novella of epic proportions a fictionalized account of faking the Apollo Missions in 2005.
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.^[30]^[31]

[edit] People accused of involvement in the hoax

Deke Slayton, NASA Chief Astronaut in 1968: Some hoax proponents (for example, the 'NASA Scam'^[32] website, and Clyde Lewis^[33]) 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".
Michael J Tuttle: Some hoax proponents say that he took the job of producing fake photographs in 1994.^[34] Prior to the widespread availability of the internet, only a small subset of the photos currently in existence were seen. Some hoax proponents believe many of the photos were created in the mid 1990s.
Stanley Kubrick, and his younger brother Raul Kubrick are accused of having produced much of the footage for Apollo 11 and 12.^[29] It has been claimed, without any evidence, 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 accused of leading the special effects team for the faking of the Apollo 11 and 12 missions.^[29]