# The moon landings were faked

**Verdict: Contradicted.** Overwhelming physical and independent evidence confirms all six crewed landings.

Category: Science, Space & Technology · Era: Cold War era · First circulated: 1976 · Believed by: ~6% (US)
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/moon-landing-hoax

## Summary
The claim that NASA never landed astronauts on the Moon and staged the footage to win the Space Race, and the physical, photographic and third-party evidence that shows it did.

## The claim
That NASA never landed astronauts on the Moon between 1969 and 1972, and that the photographs and footage were staged in a studio to beat the Soviet Union in the Space Race.

## Origin and timeline
- 1976: Bill Kaysing self-publishes We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, the origin text of the hoax claim.
- 1978: The film Capricorn One dramatises a faked Mars landing, seeding the idea in popular culture.
- 2001: Fox television airs Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?, pushing the theory into the mainstream.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: There are no stars in the photographs, so they must have been shot in a studio.
  Evidence: Camera exposures were set for the brilliantly lit lunar surface, far too fast to capture faint background stars: the same thing happens photographing anything bright at night on Earth.
- Claim: The flag ripples as if blowing in wind, but there is no air on the Moon.
  Evidence: A horizontal rod held the flag out; it only moved while astronauts twisted the pole to plant it, and in a vacuum that motion persists longer because there is no air to damp it.
- Claim: NASA could have faked everything and nobody could check.
  Evidence: Rivals did check. The Soviet Union tracked the missions in real time, and later independent orbiters from India (Chandrayaan-1), Japan (Kaguya) and NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the landing sites, descent stages and rover tracks.
- Claim: It was all just film; there is no physical proof.
  Evidence: Apollo left laser retro-reflectors on the surface that observatories worldwide still bounce lasers off today, and 382 kg of returned lunar rock has been studied by labs internationally and matches no Earth geology.

## Why people believe it
- Post-Vietnam and post-Watergate distrust of the US government made a state-run cover-up feel plausible.
- To an eye untrained in vacuum physics and 1960s photography, the footage looks 'too clean' to be real.
- Spotting a flaw the rest of the world missed feels like real insight, and it is a very human thing to want to be the one who saw through it first.

## Sources
- LROC Images of the Apollo Landing Sites, NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, Arizona State University (2011): https://lroc.im-ldi.com/featured_sites/59
- We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, Bill Kaysing (self-published) (1976)
- Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?, Fox Broadcasting Company (TV special, narrated by Mitch Pileggi) (2001): https://archive.org/details/conspiracy-theory-did-we-land-on-the-moon-2001
- A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, Bart Sibrel (writer/director), AFTH LLC (2001): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Funny_Thing_Happened_on_the_Way_to_the_Moon
- The Apollo 11 Telemetry Data Recordings: A Final Report, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (2009): https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/398311main_apollo_11_report.pdf
- Laser Ranging Retroreflector (Apollo 11 experiment record), NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive: https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/experiment/display.action?id=1969-059C-04
- Lunar Sample Compendium, NASA Johnson Space Center / Lunar and Planetary Institute: https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/samples/

Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/moon-landing-hoax