The Moon Landing: Testing the Hoax Claims

Twelve astronauts walked on the Moon between 1969 and 1972. Yet in polls between 1994 and 2009, between 6 and 20 percent of Americans said the crewed landings were faked, along with 25 percent of Britons and 28 percent of Russians.

The hoax claims rest on a small number of arguments, mostly about how photographs look. Each can be checked, and checking them is a good lesson in how to test a claim against evidence.

Where the idea came from

The modern theory began with Bill Kaysing, who in 1976 self-published a book called We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. It claimed that NASA, unable to reach the Moon, staged the landings to win the space race.

The idea reached a mass audience in 2001, when Fox television broadcast Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?, a special that presented the hoax arguments with little challenge. Among historians and scientists, the views it promoted are considered fringe.

The motives offered

Believers suggest several reasons for a fake: the pressure of the Cold War, the wish to protect NASA's funding and prestige, and even a desire to distract the public from the Vietnam War.

The strongest answer to all of them is the Soviet Union. The Soviets tracked the missions themselves, had every reason to expose a fake, and never disputed the landings. The missions ended in 1972 not because the fraud was too hard to keep up, but because of budget cuts.

The waving flag

One favourite claim is that the American flag appears to wave, which should be impossible in a vacuum. In fact the flag was hung from a horizontal rod to hold it out, and its movement in the footage comes from the astronauts twisting the pole into the ground. Without air to damp it, the motion continued longer than it would on Earth; once they let go, the flag stays still.

Images of the landing sites taken from lunar orbit and released in 2012 show five of the six American flags still standing; the one from Apollo 11 was knocked over by the exhaust of the ascent engine when the astronauts left.

No stars in the sky

Another claim is that the black lunar sky in the photographs shows no stars. The explanation is ordinary photography. The astronauts were working in bright sunlight on a brilliantly lit surface, and their cameras were set for those conditions; faint stars simply did not register, any more than they do in a daytime photo on Earth.

The astronauts' own eyes behaved the same way, adapted to the glare of the surface rather than to the dark.

Strange shadows and deadly radiation

Critics point to shadows that are not parallel or seem to fall in odd directions, suggesting studio lights. On the Moon, shadows are shaped by uneven ground, dust and slopes, and by light bouncing off the bright surface and the spacecraft, which produces exactly the variations seen in the photographs.

A more technical claim concerns the Van Allen belts, zones of radiation around the Earth. The Apollo spacecraft crossed them in a matter of minutes to about an hour and a half, following a path that limited exposure, and the aluminium hull provided shielding. The doses the crews received were measured and were small.

What a hoax would have required

It helps to ask what faking the landings would have involved. Apollo employed hundreds of thousands of people across government, industry and universities. A hoax would have needed many of them to keep a secret for more than half a century, along with the scientists around the world who have worked with lunar samples and data since.

It would also have needed the Soviet Union to stay silent. The Soviets had their own lunar programme, tracked the American missions and had every reason to expose a fraud in the middle of the Cold War, yet they never disputed the landings. Every link in the conspiracy has to hold for the theory to work, and this one has many links.

Polls show that doubt is not limited to the United States: a quarter of Britons and more than a quarter of Russians have told pollsters they think the landings were faked. That says more about trust in institutions than about the evidence, which has only grown stronger as new orbiters have photographed the sites.

Evidence anyone can check

The strongest evidence comes from independent sources. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has photographed the landing sites from orbit, showing the descent stages of the lunar modules and the tracks the astronauts left. Experiments the crews placed on the surface are still being used by scientists today.

No single argument settles a conspiracy theory for everyone who holds it, but the pattern is clear: each claim has a known explanation, and the independent evidence points one way. The same tests apply to newer claims about NASA's missions; we look at them in Artemis II and the Moon hoax claims, and our guide to evaluating a claim sets out the method.