Disturbing History - DH Ep:59 Did We Fake The Moon Landing?

Episode Date: January 18, 2026

In this special follow-up to our Space Race episode, we dive headfirst into one of the most persistent conspiracy theories in American history. Did NASA really land men on the moon six times between 1969 and 1972, or was the whole thing an elaborate hoax filmed on a soundstage?We start with Bill Kaysing, the former Rocketdyne technical writer who self-published "We Never Went to the Moon" in 1976 and launched a conspiracy movement that refuses to die. From there, we explore the cultural moment that made America ripe for such theories, including the shadow of Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers, and Watergate. This episode presents the conspiracy arguments in their strongest form, examining claims about the waving flag, the missing stars, the suspicious shadows, the absent blast crater, and the supposedly lethal Van Allen radiation belts. We also tackle the Stanley Kubrick theory and the darker claims about suspicious deaths within the Apollo program.Then we flip the script and examine the overwhelming scientific evidence for the moon landings, including 842 pounds of lunar samples verified by scientists worldwide, retroreflectors still being used for laser ranging experiments today, and high-resolution photographs from multiple international spacecraft showing the landing sites exactly where NASA said they'd be. We also explore why the Soviet Union, America's mortal enemy with every reason to expose a fraud, acknowledged the landings as genuine. Along the way, we discuss the infamous moment when Buzz Aldrin punched conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel in the face, and we examine the psychological reasons why conspiracy theories persist even in the face of insurmountable evidence.This one's a little different from our usual fare. We had fun with it, and we hope you do too.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

of our collective memory. Each week, I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth.

If you like your facts with a side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. A few weeks ago, we took a deep dive into one of the most intense rivalries in human history. The space race.

We talked about the catastrophic failures, the exploding rockets, the cosmonauts and astronauts who gave their lives in pursuit of the impossible. We covered Yuri Gagarin becoming the first human in space on April 12, 1961. His single orbit around Earth lasting just 108 minutes. and how that achievement sent shockwaves through the American political establishment. We talked about the tragedy of Apollo 1 on January 27, 1967, where Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffey burned alive in a capsule on the launch pad,

trapped by a hatch that opened inward and couldn't be budged against the pressure of the fire raging inside. We talked about the Soviet disasters too. The death of Vladimir Kamaroff when his Soyuz-1 spacecraft's parachute failed during re-entry, causing him to plummet to Earth and die on impact. We examined the desperate gambles both superpowers made in their quest to plant a flag on the lunar surface. The risks that were taken.

The corners that were cut. The prayers that were whispered by mission controllers who knew, truly knew, that every launch could end in catastrophe. If you miss that episode, I highly recommend going back and giving it a listen. It sets the stage for what we're about to discuss tonight, and honestly, it provides some important context for understanding just how dangerous and difficult this whole endeavor really was. But here's the thing.

Tonight, we're not here to revisit the space race. We're not going to talk about rocket engines and orbital mechanics and the geopolitical maneuvering of superpowers. Tonight, we're going to explore a question that has lingered in the American consciousness for over 50 years. A question that refuses to die no matter how much evidence is presented. No matter how many scientists weigh in. No matter how many astronauts swear on their mother's graves

that they actually walked on that gray, dusty rock 238,900 miles from Earth. Did we actually go to the moon? Or was the whole thing an elaborate hoax? A cosmic conjob perpetrated by the United States government, possibly filmed on a soundstage in Hollywood by none other than Stanning. Coobrook, or maybe somewhere out in the Nevada desert near a certain facility we call Area 51. Now, I want to be clear about something from the jump.

This episode of disturbing history is going to be a little different from our usual fare. We're going to have some fun. We're going to examine the evidence on both sides, and I mean really examine it. We're going to look at the claims made by the conspiracy theorists, all of them, even the ones that make you roll your eyes. and then we're going to look at what science and documented history have to say in response. I'm going to present the facts as we know them, and when something is opinion or speculation, I'll tell you.

My job tonight isn't to tell you what to believe. My job is to lay out the arguments, give you the information, and let you make up your own mind. Because that's what we do here on disturbing history. We don't tell you what to think. We give you the tools to think for yourself. So grab your tinfoil hat or don't. Pour yourself a drink.

And let's take a journey to the moon. Or at least to the studio where they allegedly faked it. Every conspiracy theory has a patient zero. Someone who first looks at the official story, squints their eyes, tilts their head to the side and says, wait a minute. Something doesn't add up here. For the moon landing hoax theory, that man was Bill Kasing.

And to understand the conspiracy theory, we first need to understand the man who created it. William Charles Kasing was born on July 31st, 1922, in Chicago, Illinois. He grew up during the Great Depression, came of age during World War II, and served as an officer in the United States Navy. He attended Navy officers training school and by all accounts was an intelligent, capable man, with a curious mind and a healthy skepticism of authority. After the war, Kaysing bounced around a bit, as many veterans did. He eventually landed a job as a technical writer at Rocket Dine, a division of North American aviation that manufactured rocket engines.

This was in 1956, just a year before the launch of Sputnik would kick the space race into high gear. Kasing worked there until 1963, which just happened to coincide with the major planning phases for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. He held security clearances with both the United States Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission. Now I want to stop here and point out something important, because this detail matters. Kasing was a technical writer. He ran the technical publications unit. He wasn't an engineer. He wasn't a rocket scientist. He wasn't designing propulsion systems or calculating trajectories or solving the complex mathematical equations required to send a spacecraft to the moon and back. He was writing documentation.

He was creating manuals and technical papers and informational materials. That's not to diminish the role of technical writers. They serve an important function, and the aerospace industry couldn't function without them. But it's worth noting that his expertise was in communication, not in the actual science of rocketry. This becomes relevant when we start evaluating his claims. According to Kasing's own account while he was at Rocketdyne, he heard some concerning things from the scientists and engineers he worked with. He claimed they told him that while the technology existed to perhaps send a rocket to the moon, the technology to bring astronauts

safely back to Earth hadn't been developed yet. He also claimed there were serious concerns about radiation from cosmic rays and solar storms that hadn't been solved. The scientists he spoke with, he said, expressed doubt that a successful lunar landing could be achieved within the decade that President Kennedy had promised. Now it's important to note that we only have Kasing's word for these conversations. The scientists he claimed to have spoken with were never identified. No one came forward to corroborate his account. It's possible he heard some engineers express legitimate technical concerns, concerns that were subsequently addressed and solved, and interpreted them as evidence that the entire program was doomed to failure. It's also

possible he misunderstood or misremembered what was said, or it's possible the conversations never happened at all. We simply don't know. What we do know is that 13 years after leaving Rocket Dine, seven years after Neil Armstrong took his famous first step, Bill Kasing self-published a book that would change the conversation forever. The title, We Never Went to the Moon, America's $30 billion swindle. $30 billion. That was the approximate budget of the entire Apollo program in 1960s and 70s, which would be roughly 240 billion in today's money. And Kasing was claiming every penny of it was used to perpetrate history's greatest fraud.

The timing of Kasing's book wasn't accidental, and this is crucial to understanding why it found an audience. 1976 was a very different America than 1969. The country had just emerged from the Vietnam War, A conflict that revealed the government had been systematically lying to the public for years about the progress of the war, about the body counts, about the likelihood of victory. The Pentagon Papers had been published in 1971, a massive leak of classified documents that exposed decades of deception by multiple administrations.

And of course, there was Watergate. President Richard Nixon, the same president who had spoken to the astronauts on the moon and who had signed the commemorative plaque left on the lunar surface, had resigned in disgrace just two years earlier after his administration was caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters and then systematically lying about it. America in 1976 was a nation prime to believe that its government was capable of just about anything.

The trust was gone. The benefit of the doubt had evaporated. The social contract between the governed and the government had been shattered. And into that environment dropped Bill Kasing's book, like a match into a pool of gasoline. In his book, Kasing laid out what would become the foundational arguments of moon landing conspiracy theory. He made a lot of claims, so bear with me as we go through them. He claimed that NASA lacked the technical expertise to actually land a man on the moon by the deadline Kennedy had set. He pointed to the absence of stars in the lunar surface photographs as evidence of fakery.

He noted what he called optical anomalies in the images, including shadows that didn't seem to point in the same direction. He questioned why there was no blast crater beneath the lunar module from the descent engine. He wondered why the rocket engines didn't create a massive dust cloud during landing. And perhaps most darkly, he suggested that the deaths of certain astronauts and NASA personnel were suspicious, possibly the result of eliminating potential whistleblowers who knew the truth. According to Kasing's calculations, and I used the word calculations loosely since he never showed his work, the chance of a successful crude moon landing was 0.0017%. Less than two hundredths of one percent.

With odds like that, he argued, faking the landing would have been far easier and far safer than actually going. The United States could claim victory in the space race, demoralize the Soviets, and avoid the very real possibility of killing astronauts on live television. Now, here's where I need to put on my objectivity hat. Kasing's book was not, by any scholarly measure, a rigorous work of research. His claims were presented in a disjointed manner with very little actual evidence or analysis.

His source notes were, to put it charitably, impossible to trace back to valid sources. He made extraordinary claims without providing extraordinary evidence. He asked questions without really answering them. He implied connections without proving them. But the book struck a nerve. It planted a seed that would grow into a full-blown cultural phenomenon. And once that seed was planted, it couldn't be unplanted. Kasing would spend the rest of his life promoting his theory,

giving interviews, making appearances, and encouraging others to pick up where he left off. He died in 2005, having never wavered. from his beliefs. After Casing opened the floodgates, others rushed through with enthusiasm. The moon landing hoax theory wasn't just one man's obsession anymore. It was becoming a movement. In 1978, just two years after Casing's book came out, Hollywood released a film that would add rocket fuel to the conspiracy fire.

Capricorn 1, directed by Peter Hymes, starred James Brolin, Sam Waterston, and O.J. Simpson. Yes. That O.J. Simpson, before he became famous for entirely different reasons. The film depicted NASA faking a Mars landing when their spacecraft develops critical problems just before launch. The plot is fascinating in its details.

The astronauts are pulled from their capsule moments before launch and secretly transported to a film studio in the desert. The rocket launch is empty while the astronauts, under threat to their families, participate in a staged Mars landing. The broadcast goes out to the world. Everyone celebrates. And then the empty capsule burns up during re-entry, which means the astronauts are now witnesses who can never be allowed to live.

The rest of the film follows their attempts to escape and expose the truth. The movie was fiction, of course, but it was suspiciously well-timed fiction. It gave visual life to the conspiracy theory, showed audiences exactly how such a hoax might be pulled off, and featured a spacecraft that looked remarkably similar to the Apollo vehicles. The film didn't cause the conspiracy theory, but it certainly gave it a mainstream platform. Suddenly, the idea of faking a space mission wasn't just the ravings of a former technical writer. It was a major motion picture playing in theaters across America.

Then came the Flat Earth Society. Yes, the Flat Earth Society, an organization that believes the Earth is not a sphere, but a flat disk. In 1980, they accused NASA of faking the landings, claiming the whole thing was staged by Hollywood with Walt Disney sponsorship, based on a script by Arthur C. Clark, and directed by none other than Stanley Kubrick. Stanley Kubrick Now, there's a name that would become inextricably linked to moon landing conspiracy theories,

a connection that persists to this day, despite having no basis in fact. Kubrick's 1968 masterpiece, 2001, A Space Odyssey was released just one year before the Apollo 11 mission. The film was a revelation. It featured incredibly realistic depictions of space travel, including scenes set in orbit on a space station and on the lunar surface. For its time, the special effects were nothing short of revolutionary. Audiences were amazed at how real it all looked.

Critics praised the film's scientific accuracy. It won the Academy Award for Best and the Academy Award for Best. visual effects. And that's where the conspiracy theorists saw their opening. The theory goes something like this. NASA knew by 1967 or 68 that they couldn't actually land men on the moon by the end of the decade, as Kennedy had promised in his famous 1961 speech. The technology wasn't ready. The risks were too high. The probability of failure was unacceptable. But they couldn't admit this. The national prestige was on the line. The Cold War was at its peak. Losing to the Soviets in the space race would be a catastrophic blow to American morale and global

influence. It would call into question the superiority of the capitalist system. It might even emboldened Soviet expansionism. So NASA allegedly approached Kubrick, fresh off his cinematic triumph, and made him an offer he couldn't refuse. Some versions of the theory suggest they blackmailed him by threatening to expose his brother Raoul's alleged connections to the Communist Party. Other versions suggest he was simply paid an enormous sum of money. Still others suggest he did it out of patriotism, believing he was serving his country. The arrangement, according to the theory, was this. The rocket launches would be real. The splashdowns would be real. The astronauts would really go into space, orbiting the Earth while the world watched. But everything

that supposedly happened between Earth orbit and the lunar surface. The journey to the moon, the landing, the moon walks, the flag planting, all of that would be filmed right here on Earth using Kubrick's pioneering techniques. Some conspiracy theorists even claim that Kubrick, racked with guilt over his participation in the fraud, hid confessions in his later films. They point to The Shining, released in 1980, as being filled with coded references to the moon landing hoax. The Overlook Hotel, they say, represents America. The character Danny wears an Apollo 11 sweater in one scene. Room 237, a significant location in the film,

supposedly references the distance to the moon in thousands of miles, though actual distance is about 239,000 miles, not 237,000. The twins represent the Gemini program, and on and on. Now, I need to tell you something important. There is zero evidence that any of this actually happened. None. The supposed Kubrick confession video that circulated on the internet turned out to be a demonstrable hoax, featuring an actor pretending to be the director. Kubrick's own widow has publicly stated that the entire story is made up, fraudulent, and untrue. The claims about hidden messages in

the shining have been thoroughly debunked as examples of pattern-seeking behavior, the human tendency to find meaningful connections and random information. But the theory persists, and I'll admit, it has a certain seductive logic to it. Kubrick was a genius. 2001 looked incredible, better in many ways than the actual Apollo footage. If anyone in 1969 could have faked a moon landing, it would have been him. There's just one problem, and it's a big one. Kubrick's depiction of the moon in 2001 looks nothing. nothing like the actual lunar surface shown in Apollo footage. In his film, dust billows dramatically when spacecraft land, something that wouldn't happen

in the moon's vacuum where there's no air to suspend particles. The astronauts walk normally without the bouncing gate caused by one sixth gravity. The moon's surface looks wrong. The lighting looks wrong. The details are all wrong. If Kubrick faked the moon landing, he did a worse job than he did in his own movie. which seems unlikely for a notorious perfectionist who would do dozens of takes to get a single shot right. But we'll get to all the rebuttals later.

For now, let's continue exploring the conspiracy theory itself in all its sprawling glory. All right, let's do this. Let's actually examine the arguments made by moon landing conspiracy theorists, and I mean really examine them. Because here's the thing. If we're going to debunk something, we need to understand it first. We need to take it seriously enough to engage with it on its own terms. And some of these arguments on the surface at least seem pretty compelling.

They've convinced millions of people over the decades. They deserve a fair hearing before we evaluate them. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. This is probably the most famous piece of supposed evidence and the one that gets brought up most often in casual conversation. We've all seen the footage. Buzz Aldrin plants the American flag on the lunar surface, and the flag appears to wave,

rippling in what looks like a breeze. The conspiracy argument is simple and logical. The moon has no atmosphere. There's no air on the moon. No air means no wind. No wind means the flag shouldn't wave. Therefore, the footage must have been shot somewhere with air, like a studio on Earth. The waving flag is a smoking gun.

Somebody made a mistake. The special effects team forgot that there's no wind on the moon. It's a clean, logical argument. I'll give them that. The reasoning chain is easy to follow. If A then B, if B then C, therefore C. No wind, no waving. We see waving.

Ergo not the moon. But hold that thought. We'll come back to it. This one is particularly compelling to people who know a little bit about astronomy. me. Look at any photograph taken on the lunar surface during the Apollo missions. The sky is black, completely black. Not a single star is visible. Not serious. The brightest star in our sky. Not the countless stars of the Milky Way. Nothing but endless, featureless black. Now think about this. The moon has no atmosphere to scatter light and create a blue sky like we have on Earth. On Earth,

the atmosphere acts like a filter, scattering blue light and creating the blue dome we see overhead. That same atmosphere makes it hard to see stars during the day. But the moon has no atmosphere. None. There's nothing between the lunar surface and the stars. At night, when we're away from city lights, we can see thousands of stars with the naked eye. In truly dark locations like the middle of the ocean or a remote desert, you can see the Milky Way as bright band across the sky. The moon should be like the ultimate dark sky location, right? No light pollution at all. No atmosphere to get in the way. You should be able to see millions of stars with incredible clarity. So where are they? Why didn't a single star show up in any of the hundreds of

photographs taken during six separate moon landings? Why is every single lunar sky photograph completely devoid of stellar objects? The conspiracy theory have an answer. NASA couldn't accurately recreate the star field that would have been visible from the moon. Think about it. From the moon, you'd see stars in specific positions based on the moon's location in its orbit and the time of the mission. If NASA faked to the star field and got it wrong, astronomers would notice immediately. They could calculate what the sky should have looked like and compare it to the photographs. Any discrepancy would expose the fraud. So what did NASA allegedly do. They simply chose not to include any stars at all. A blank black backdrop is

safer than a potentially incorrect star field. It's the absence of evidence as evidence of absence of authenticity. Again, a logical argument. Let's keep going. This one requires a little more attention to detail, and it's become increasingly popular in the internet age when anyone can download high resolution photographs and zoom in on every pixel. If you examine the photographs from the Apollo missions closely, you'll notice that the shadows don't always seem to be parallel. In some images shadows appear to point in different directions, as if there were multiple light sources illuminating the scene from different angles. On the moon, there's only one light source. The Sun. There's no atmosphere to

scatter light and create diffuse illumination. There are no building or trees to cast secondary shadows. Just the sun. If the sun is the only thing illuminating the scene, all shadows should be parallel, pointing away from the sun in exactly the same direction. So if the shadows aren't parallel, what does that suggest? Multiple light sources, like studio lights. The kind you might use on a film set to illuminate a scene from different angles. The kind that would create shadows pointing in different directions. Some conspiracy theorists have gone further, pointing to photographs where one object is in shadow, but still clearly visible. If the sun is the only light source, they argue, anything in shadow should be completely black, invisible.

The fact that you can see details in shadowed areas proves there must be additional lighting, like the fill lights used in professional photography and film production. When the lunar module descended to the moon's surface, its descent engine, called the descent propulsion system, fired continuously during the landing sequence. This engine was producing roughly 10,000 pounds of thrust at full power. Even throttled down during the final approach, it was still producing thousands of pounds of thrust. That's a lot of force being directed at the ground.

So why isn't there a blast crater beneath the lunar module? When you look at the photographs of the landing sites, the ground beneath the engine looks completely undisturbed. There's no depression. There's no crater. There's no obvious signs that a rocket engine blasted the surface at point-blank range. The landing pads are sitting on flat ground with no visible displacement. The conspiracy theorists argue this is impossible.

All that thrust should have created a significant crater, or at least scattered debris, in a recognizable pattern. We've all seen videos of rockets landing on Earth. We've seen the massive dust clouds they kick up. We've seen the scorched ground. beneath the engines. The moon landing footage shows none of this. The lunar module just sits there on pristine undisturbed ground. The only explanation they argue is that the lunar module was gently lowered onto a studio set by a crane. No

rocket engine means no blast crater. This is perhaps the most scientifically sophisticated argument made by conspiracy theorists and honestly it's the one that gave NASA the most concern before the missions actually launched. It deals with real physics and real radiation hazards, which makes it more credible sounding than some of the other claims. The Van Allen belts are two donut-shaped regions of trapped radiation that encircle the Earth. They were discovered in 1958 by physicist James Van Allen using data from the Explorer, one satellite, America's first successful satellite launch. Van Allen's discovery

was one of the first major scientific findings of the space age, and it immediately raised concerns about the viability of human space travel beyond low Earth orbit. The belts extend from about 400 miles above Earth's surface to about 36,000 miles out. There's an inner belt and an outer belt with a gap between them. The inner belt contains mostly protons. The outer belt contains mostly electrons.

Both are dangerous to humans and electronics. Here's the physics. The sun constantly emits a stream of charged particles called the solar wind. When these particles reach Earth, most of them are deflected by Earth's magnetic field. But some of them get trapped, bouncing back and forth between the north and south magnetic poles. Over time, these trapped particles accumulate, creating the Van Allen belts. To get to the moon, the Apollo astronauts had to pass through these belts. There was no way around them.

and the belts are filled with high energy-charged particles that can damage living tissue. Exposure to this radiation can cause radiation sickness, increased cancer risk, and potentially death. Conspiracy theorists argue that the radiation in the Van Allen belts would have been lethal to the Apollo astronauts. They claimed that the spacecraft didn't have adequate shielding to protect the crew. The aluminum hull of the command module was just a few millimeters thick. That's not enough, they say, to protect against the intense radiation of the Van Allen belts. Since the astronauts obviously didn't die of radiation poisoning, and none of them developed any radiation-related illnesses in the immediate aftermath of their missions,

the argument goes that they must not have actually passed through the belts, which means they never went to the moon. They stayed in low Earth orbit below the Van Allen belts, while fake footage was broadcast to the world. This is more of a general skepticism than a specific piece of evidence, but it's surprisingly common. The argument goes like this. In 1969, we didn't have iPhones. We didn't have the internet.

We didn't have GPS or digital cameras or laptop computers. We didn't have flat screen televisions or streaming video or any of the technology we take for granted today. The Apollo guidance computer, the most sophisticated piece of computing equipment on the space, had about 74 kilobytes of memory and ran at a clock speed of about 2 megahertz. Your smartphone has literally millions of times more computing power. A modern smart watch is more powerful than all the computers that existed in 1969 combined. How could we have possibly landed men on the moon with such primitive technology? How could we have navigated across 239,000 miles of space, landed on the lunar surface, and returned safely to

Earth using computers that would struggle to run a simple spreadsheet today. The conspiracy theorists point out that we haven't been back to the moon since 1972. If we had the technology to go in 1969, why can't we do it now with all our advances? Why are we still struggling to develop the technology for a return mission? The answer, they suggest, is that we never had the technology in the first place. We faked it then, and we can't fake it now, because experts, Expectations are higher and cameras are better. It seems almost absurd that technology from over 50 years ago

could accomplish something that seems challenging even by modern standards. And if it seems too good to be true, maybe it wasn't true at all. Before we move on to the rebuttals, I want to mention several more arguments that conspiracy theorists have raised over the years. Some of these are more fringe than others, but in the interest of completeness, they deserve a mention. And some of them, I have to admit, raise legitimate questions even if the answers turn out to be mundane. Remember Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffey?

The three astronauts who died in the Apollo One Fire in January 1967. Some conspiracy theorists claim their deaths weren't accidental. They suggest that these men knew the moon landing was going to be faked and were preparing to blow the whistle. So NASA, or the government, or some shadowy agency, operating behind the scenes, had them killed. The theory is particularly focused on Gus Grissom. Before his death, Grissom had been increasingly critical of the Apollo program's safety issues. He famously hung a lemon on the spacecraft simulator to express his frustration with the equipment. Some conspiracy theorists claim he was about to go public with concerns about the entire

program being a fraud, and that the fire was deliberately set to silence him. Grissom's family has at various times expressed their own suspicions about the circumstances of the fire. His son Scott has been particularly vocal, suggesting that the fire might not have been accidental. However, it's worth noting that the family's concerns have focused on potential negligence or cover-ups of safety problems, not on any conspiracy to fake the moon landing. There's also Thomas Barron, a quality control and safety inspector for North American aviation, the contractor that built the Apollo Command Module. Barron was critical of NASA's safety procedures

and had compiled a 500-page report documenting problems with the program. He testified before Congress in April 1967, just months after the Apollo won fire, describing what he saw as systematic safety failures. Eight days after his congressional testimony, Baron was killed when his car was struck by a train at a railroad crossing in central Florida. His wife and stepdaughter were also killed.

His 500-page report was never found. It vanished completely. Only a 55-page summary exists today. Coincidence? Conspiracy theorists don't think so. They see Barron's death as evidence that NASA was willing to kill to protect its secrets. And the disappearance of his report suggests there was something in it that powerful people didn't want the public to see. Now, I need to be very clear here.

There is no credible evidence that any of these deaths were anything other than what they appeared to be. The Apollo One fire was a tragedy caused by a pure oxygen atmosphere at 16.7 pounds per square inch, the presence of flammable materials in the capsule, and a hatch design that opened inward and couldn't be opened quickly in an emergency. Multiple investigations confirmed these findings. The lessons learned from the fire, led to significant improvements in spacecraft safety. Thomas Barron's death, while tragic and oddly timed, occurred at a railroad crossing with no evidence of foul play. The police investigated and

found nothing suspicious. Sometimes terrible coincidences are just coincidences. But these incidents feed into the larger narrative that NASA was willing to do anything, literally anything, to make the moon landing happen, or at least appear to happen. They become part of the the mythology of the conspiracy. After Apollo 11 returned to Earth, there was a press conference. This was one of the most anticipated media events in history. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins sat before the world's media to discuss their historic achievement. Hundreds of reporters, live television coverage, the whole world watching. And if you watch the footage of that press conference, something seems off. The astronauts don't look jubilant.

They look tired, serious, even uncomfortable. They give short answers. They seem guarded. At times, they seem almost guilty. They don't look like men who have just accomplished the greatest achievement in human history. They look like men carrying a heavy burden. Conspiracy theorists point to this footage as evidence that the astronauts knew they were lying. They had just perpetrated the greatest hoax in human history,

and the weight of that deception was showing on their face. They couldn't celebrate because they knew the truth. They couldn't be exuberant because their exuberance would be false. So they sat there, stone-faced and quiet, trying not to give away the secret. There's also the matter of Neil Armstrong's behavior after the mission. Armstrong famously became reclusive after Apollo 11. He gave very few interviews. He avoided public appearances.

He retreated to academia and then to rural Ohio. He spent the rest of his life trying to stay out of the spotlight. If you had just walked on the moon, wouldn't you want to talk about it? Wouldn't you want to share your experience with the world? Armstrong's reluctance to discuss the mission strikes some conspiracy theorists as evidence that he was uncomfortable with the lie he was forced to live. Of course, there are other explanations for all of this. The astronauts had just returned from an incredibly dangerous mission. They had spent eight days in a tiny camera.

capsule. They were exhausted. They were adjusting to Earth's gravity after days of weightlessness. They were facing hundreds of aggressive reporters asking them to describe an experience that was probably impossible to put into words. An Armstrong, by all accounts, was simply an intensely private man who had never sought the spotlight and was uncomfortable with fame. But I'll let you watch the footage and draw your own conclusions. This one is more obscure but interesting. Some conspiracy theorists have claimed that photographs taken at supposedly different locations on the lunar surface show identical backgrounds. The hills in the distance, the rock formations, the overall terrain, all look the same in photos that were allegedly taken miles apart. The implication is that NASA only built one studio set, and they used the same backdrop for all the photography.

They move the rocks around, changed the foreground a bit, but the background remains. constant because they couldn't afford to build multiple sets. There's a famous photograph from the Apollo 16 mission that shows what appears to be the letter C on a rock on the lunar surface. It's clearly visible, a perfect letter C, as if someone had stamped it there. Conspiracy theorists claim this is a prop marking. In film and stage production, props are often labeled with letters or numbers to help the crew position them correctly. Somehow, this rock was accidentally photographed before the marking was removed, revealing the truth about the staged nature of the scene.

The cameras used by the astronauts had crosshairs, called fiducial markers, etched into the lens. These crosshairs appear in every photograph, helping with measurements and orientation. But in some photographs, the crosshairs appear to be behind objects rather than in front of them. A crosshair will be visible on one side of an object, but not the other, as if the object was placed on on top of the photograph after it was developed. If the photographs were real, the crosshairs should always appear on top of everything, since they were etched into the lens.

The fact that objects sometimes appear to be in front of the crosshairs suggest the images were composited together in a studio. All right, we've laid out the conspiracy theories. We've presented the arguments in their strongest form. I've tried to be fair to the conspiracy theorists to present their case as persuasively as they present it themselves. Now it's time to look at the other side.

And folks, I have to tell you, the evidence that we actually went to the moon is overwhelming. It's not just strong. It's not just convincing. It's absolutely overwhelming. Let's go through those arguments one by one. Remember the waving flag? The one that supposedly proves there was wind,

which would be impossible on the airless moon? Here's what actually happened, and this is completely documented in the engineering specifications for the lunar flag assembly. NASA knew from the start that a regular flag wouldn't work on the moon. Without air, a fabric flag would just hang limply from the pole like a dead fish. It wouldn't look dramatic. It wouldn't photograph well. It wouldn't be the inspiring image of American achievement that NASA wanted to broadcast to the world. So they engineered a solution.

The flag was designed with a horizontal telescoping rod along the top edge, running perpendicular to the flagpole. This rod held the flag extended so it would appear to be flying even in the absence of wind. The technical term for this was the lunar flag assembly, and it was specifically designed to display the flag in a horizontal position. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. When Buzz Aldrin planted the flag during the Apollo 11 mission,

He had to twist and push the pole to get it into the hard-packed lunar soil. The moon's surface isn't soft like beach sand. It's compacted regolith. Getting the pole deep enough to stand upright required significant effort. That motion, that twisting and pushing and working the pole back and forth, caused the flag to rotate and sway on its support rod. It was inertia, not wind. And here's the crucial detail that conspiracy theorists always ignore.

After Aldrin stopped moving the flag, it stopped moving too. In every piece of footage we have, once the astronauts step away from the flag, it becomes completely still. It doesn't continue flapping. It doesn't oscillate. It doesn't move at all. It just sits there, frozen in whatever position it was left in. If the footage was shot in a studio with air currents or wind machines, the flag would continue to move. There would be subtle vibrations.

There would be small shifts as air moved around the set. There would be some indication of air movement. Instead, there's nothing. The flag is still as death, exactly as you'd expect in an environment with no air. You can actually watch the footage yourself and time how long the flag moves after the astronaut steps away. The answer is zero seconds.

The instant human contact stops, the motion stops. That's what happens in a vacuum. That's what wouldn't happen in a studio. The Missing Stars argument seems convincing until you understand basic photography. And I mean, basic. This is stuff you learn in Photography 101. The lunar surface during the day is bright.

Really bright. The sun is shining directly on it with no atmosphere to filter or diffuse the light. The gray regolith, that's the scientific term for the layer of loose rocks dust covering the moon's surface reflects about 8% of the sunlight that hits it. That's actually pretty reflective, about the same as worn asphalt. The astronauts in their white space suits are even more reflective.

When you're taking a photograph of brightly lit objects, your camera needs to be set for a fast shutter speed and a small aperture. If you use a slow shutter speed, everything will be overexposed and washed out. If you use a wide aperture, same problem. The camera settings that correctly expose the lunar surface and the astronauts are incompatible with capturing the faint light of distant stars. Stars are dim compared to a sunlit landscape. To photograph stars, you need a slow shutter speed, measured in seconds, and a wide aperture

to gather enough light. Even then, you often need to use a tracking mount to compensate for Earth's rotation. Otherwise, the stars become streaks instead of points. You can't do both at the same time. You either expose for the bright lunar surface and the astronauts, in which case the stars are too faint to register on the film. Or you expose for the stars, in which case everything else is a blinding white blur.

This isn't a moon conspiracy thing. This is basic physics. This is how cameras work. Go outside on a sunny day and try to photograph the sky with your phone. I guarantee you won't see any stars. Even at night in a brightly lit parking lot, good luck photographing the stars. Same principle.

If NASA wanted to include stars in the photographs, they could have. They would have just needed to overexpose everything else. But that would have created worse photographs, not better ones. The non-parallel shadows argument falls apart when you understand two things, perspective and terrain.

The moon's surface isn't flat. It has hills and dips and bumps and craters. The astronauts weren't walking on a smooth studio floor. They were walking on a landscape sculpted by billions of years of meteorite impacts. The terrain is uneven at every scale, from tiny pebbles to massive mountains. When a light source, even a single-point light source like the sun, hits an uneven surface, the shadows cast by objects on that surface, the shadows cast by objects on that surface, will appear to go in different directions. This isn't strange. This isn't evidence of fakery. This is basic geometry. Think about it this way.

Two flagpoles on a flat surface will cast parallel shadows. But two flagpoles on a hillside will cast shadows that appear to diverge or converge depending on your angle of view. The shadows are still being cast by the same sun, but they're falling on different slopes. This is something you can test yourself. yourself. Go outside on a sunny day and find an area with uneven ground, maybe a hillside or a boulder field. Place a few sticks in the ground at different spots. Take a photo from a low angle.

The shadows won't appear parallel, even though they're all being cast by the same sun. As for objects being visible in shadow, the explanation is equally straightforward. The lunar surface is reflective. Light from the sun hits the ground and bounces. That reflected light illuminates things that are in shadow from the direct sunlight. Additionally, the astronauts' white space suits were highly reflective. The foil covering on the lunar module was reflective. All of this creates filled light that illuminates shadowed areas. Again, this is normal photography stuff.

Professional photographers call it bounce light or fill light. You can see the same effect in any well-lit environment. The blast crater argument seems reasonable until you understand the actual physics of the landing. Let me walk you through it. First, the descent engine was not operating at full thrust during landing. The lunar module had two speeds. It had the full thrust needed to slow down from orbital velocity. But during the final approach in landing, the astronauts throttled the engine way down.

They were coming in slow and controlled. By the time the landing pads touched the surface, the engine was producing only about 3,000 pounds of thrust, not the 10,000 it was capable of. Second, the lunar regolith behaves differently than soil on Earth. It's densely packed. The Apollo astronauts found it surprisingly difficult to plant the flag and other equipment, because the soil was so compact. It doesn't scatter easily. It's not like spraying a garden hose at a pile of sand. Third, and this is crucial, the moon has no apt to be. On Earth, when a rocket fires, the exhaust is contained and focused by the surrounding air pressure.

The exhaust gases can't just spread out in all directions. They're channeled downward, creating that dramatic plume we're all familiar with from launch videos. On the moon, there's no air pressure. The exhaust gases spread out rapidly in all directions the moment they leave the engine nozzle. They expand into the vacuum. This rapid dispersal significantly reduces the force being applied to any single area of ground. NASA addressed this exact concern in their official documentation. The combination of reduced thrust, the cohesive nature of the lunar surface,

and the rapid dispersal of exhaust and vacuum, all explain why there's no dramatic blast crater. And there was surface disturbance. If you look at the photographs carefully, you can see that the soil immediately beneath the descent, engine has been disturbed. It's lighter in color than the surrounding area because the rocket exhaust blew away the top layer of darker space-weathered regalith. It's just not a crater, because, again, physics. This is where the science gets really interesting. And it's also where the conspiracy

theorists most badly misunderstand the physics involved. Yes, the Van Allen belts are radioactive. Yes, the Apollo astronauts had to pass through them. Yes, radiation exposed, is dangerous. All of that is true. But the radiation exposure the astronauts received was far from lethal. It wasn't even particularly dangerous. Here's why. The Apollo spacecraft followed trajectories specifically designed to minimize time in the most intense regions of the Van Allen belts. They didn't pass through the dense inner core. They passed through the thinner outer portions. They moved quickly. The entire transit through the radiation belts took less than

an hour. The spacecraft itself provided some shielding. The aluminum hull wasn't made of lead, and it didn't need to be. Aluminum is reasonably effective at stopping protons, which are the primary radiation hazard in the inner Van Allen belt. For the electron radiation of the outer belt, aluminum provides adequate protection given the short exposure time. The astronauts' radiation doses were carefully monitored. They wore personal dosemeters throughout the mission. The readings from these devices showed an average total radiation dose of about 1.14 rads for the entire mission, including the transit through the Van Allen belts, the time in deep space, and the time on the lunar surface. To put that in perspective, the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration says a lethal radiation dose is about 300 rads in one hour.

The Apollo astronauts received less than 1% of that for their entire multi-day mission. Their radiation exposure was roughly equivalent to getting a chest CT scan. It slightly increased their lifetime cancer risk, but it was nowhere near lethal. Was there risk? Absolutely. NASA took it seriously. They studied the Van Allen belts extensively before sending astronauts through them. They timed the missions to avoid periods of high solar activity. They were genuinely concerned about solar flares, which could have posed a real danger, if one occurred during a mission.

But the Van Allen belts themselves? They were a manageable hazard, not an insurmountable barrier. Now let's talk about the evidence that is really hard for conspiracy theorists to explain a way. This is the stuff that makes the conspiracy theory essentially impossible.

Physical evidence. Independent verification. Things that can be tested and measured and confirmed by anyone with the right equipment. Between 1969, in 1972, Apollo astronauts brought back 382 kilograms of lunar material. That's 842 pounds of moon rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand, and dust, collected from six different landing sites. These samples have been studied by scientists around the world for over 55 years,

not just American scientists. Scientists in Japan, Australia, Germany, France, Britain, and yes, the Soviet Union and later Russia. Countries that had no political reason to support an American hoax. Countries that would have loved to expose American deception. The rocks have been independently verified as lunar in origin

through multiple analytical techniques. They have unique isotopic signatures that can't be replicated on Earth. They contain minerals that formed in the low oxygen, low water environment of the moon. They show evidence of micrometeerite bombardment.

tiny impacts from cosmic dust that only occurs in space where there's no atmosphere for protection. They're between 3 billion and 4.5 billion years old, significantly older than most rocks on Earth. The lunar samples have a distinctive lack of volatile elements. They have unique glass beads formed by volcanic activity and meteor impacts. They have a specific ratio of oxygen isotopes that differs from Earth rocks. These aren't characteristics you can feel. fake in a lab. They're fundamental properties that result from billions of years of formation in the lunar environment. And here's the really compelling part. The Soviet Union ran their own

lunar sample return missions using unmanned probes. The Luna 16 mission in 1970 returned about 101 grams of lunar soil. Luna 20 returned 55 grams. Luna 24 returned about 170 grams. These missions were completely independent of NASA. They use Soviet rockets, Soviet spacecraft, and Soviet landing sites. When scientists compared the Soviet samples to the American samples, they matched. Same mineralogy, same isotopic ratios, same age ranges, same lunar characteristics. If NASA faked to the moon landing, they somehow managed to create nearly 400 kilograms of rocks that are scientifically indistinguishable from genuine lunar material. Rocks that match the independently collected Soviet samples. Rocks that have fooled scientists around the

world for over five decades. Rocks that continue to yield new scientific discoveries as analytical techniques improve. That seems unlikely. Actually, let me be more direct. That's impossible. You can't fake this. The geology is too complex. The isotopes are too precise. The global scientific community is too skeptical. NASA has distributed lunar samples to over 500 scientists in more than 15 countries for independent study. They've sent out over 50,000 individual samples. Any one of those researchers could have exposed a fraud. None of them have. Because the rocks are real. During the Apollo 11 mission, Armstrong and Aldrin place something on the lunar surface called the lunar laser-ranging retro reflector array.

It's a panel of special mirrors called corner cube reflectors, designed to reflect laser beams directly back to their source, regardless of the angle of incoming light. Here's how it works. You fire a laser at the moon. The laser pulse travels 239,000 miles to the lunar surface. It hits the retro reflector array. The light bounces back in exactly the lunar. the direction it came from. You detect the returned pulse. By measuring the time between sending and receiving, you can calculate the distance to the moon with incredible precision. Scientists around the world have been doing this experiment continuously for over 50 years. Observatories in New Mexico, Texas, France, Germany, Italy, and Australia regularly bounce lasers off the Apollo retro reflectors. They've measured the moon's distance down to the millimeter level.

They've detected that the moon is slowly spiraling away from Earth at about 1.5 inches per year. They've tested Einstein's theory of general relativity, all using the mirrors left behind by the Apollo astronauts. If we never went to the moon, how did those retro reflectors get there? Conspiracy theorists sometimes point out that the Soviet Lunacod rovers also carried retro reflectors. This is true. The Lunacod 1 and Lunacod 2 rovers, which landed in 1970 and 1973, both had small French-built retro reflectors. So it's theoretically possible to place retro reflectors on the moon using unmanned missions. But there are problems with this argument.

First, the American retro reflectors are significantly larger than the Soviet ones. The Apollo 11 array has 100 corner cubes. The Apollo 14 and 15 arrays each have 300. They return much stronger signals than the Lunacod reflectors. They were clearly designed for human deployment. Second, if NASA could soft land a retro reflector package with enough precision to be usable, they could soft land astronauts. The technological challenge is essentially the same.

You're not saving any effort by faking the crude portion. Third, the retro reflectors are in exactly the same. the locations the astronauts said they placed them. The coordinates match the mission reports. The orbital photographs match the described deployment locations. Everything is consistent. This is where the conspiracy theory really falls apart. I mean completely, totally, utterly, falls apart. In 2009, NASA launched the lunar reconnaissance orbiter. This spacecraft has been circling the moon ever since, taking high-resolution photographs of the surface. The camera system can resolve objects as small as half a meter across.

And among the things it has photographed, every single Apollo landing site. These images show the descent stages of the lunar modules sitting exactly where they were left over 50 years ago. They show the American flag still standing, though the fabric has likely faded to white from decades of ultraviolet radiation. They show the lunar rovers parked at their final resting places. They show the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments packages. They even show the astronauts' footprints, visible as dark trails where their boots disturb the lunar soil. The images are publicly available.

Anyone can view them. NASA has released them in full resolution. You can download them yourself and examine them in detail. And here's what's critical. It's not just NASA that has seen this. In 2008, the Japan Aerospace Exploration, agency's Selene Mission photographed the Apollo 15 landing site. The terrain features visible in the Japanese photographs match the terrain visible in the original Apollo photographs taken from

the ground. Same mountains. Same craters. Same landscape. The Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayan missions have photographed the landing sites. China's Changi missions have photographed them. South Korea's lunar orbiter has photographed them. These are independent space programs from independent countries with no particular reason to cover for America. Are we supposed to believe that Japan, India, China, and South Korea, countries with their own independent space agencies and their own verification methods, are all participating in a 50-year-old American hoax? That they're all doctoring their photographs?

That there's some kind of global conspiracy involving every nation capable of building spacecraft? The simpler explanation is that the landing sites are exactly where NASA said they were, because NASA actually went there. This is perhaps the most compelling argument of all, and it's the one that conspiracy theorists have the hardest time addressing. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States were mortal enemies. This wasn't a friendly rivalry. This was an existential conflict between two fundamentally different visions for human society.

Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Nuclear weapons were pointed at each other's cities. Proxy wars were being fought around the globe. The possibility of civilization ending warfare was never far from anyone's mind. The space race was a key battleground in this conflict. Every Soviet achievement was celebrated as proof

that communism was the superior system. Every American achievement was celebrated as proof that capitalism and democracy were the way forward. The stakes couldn't have been higher, and the Soviets were winning. They launched the first satellite. They put the first animal in space. They put the first human in space. They conducted the first spacewalk.

Every major milestone of the early space age belonged to them. The United States was constantly playing catch-up, constantly reacting to Soviet achievements. Losing the race to the moon was a dead. devastating blow to Soviet prestige. It was the first major space milestone that America achieved first. It happened on live television, watched by the entire world. It happened on the 50th anniversary of the revolution that created the Soviet Union. If there had been any way, any way at all, to prove that America faked the moon landing, the Soviets would have done it in a

heartbeat. They had the motivation. They had the technical capability. They had intelligence agencies dedicated to exposing American lies. They would have shouted it from the rooftops. They would have used every propaganda tool at their disposal to humiliate their rivals. But they didn't. Why? Because they knew the landing was real. They were monitoring the Apollo missions with their own tracking equipment.

The Space Transmissions Corps, fully equipped with the latest intelligence gathering and surveillance technology, tracked the spacecraft all the way to the moon and back. They intercepted the radio communications. They received the television broadcasts. They knew exactly where the spacecraft was at every moment of the mission. If the Apollo spacecraft had simply orbited Earth instead of going to the moon, the Soviets would have known instantly. Orbital mechanics don't lie.

Radio transmissions have signatures that can be analyzed. You can't fake the Doppler shift of a signal coming from the moon. The Soviets would have detected the fraud and exposed it immediately. Instead, when Apollo 11 landed, the Moscow newspaper Pravda ran a front-page story, acknowledging the American achievement. The Soviet government sent official congratulations to Washington. Soviet cosmonauts praised their American counterparts. They didn't do this because they were being polite.

They did it because they couldn't deny what their own instruments had told them. In 1975, just six years after Apollo 11, American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts met in orbit during the Apollo Soyuz test project. They docked their spacecraft together. They shook hands. They shared meals. The two superpowers worked together in space. Do you really think that would have happened if the Soviets knew the moon landing was fake?

Do you think they would have celebrated America's achievement if they could have proven it was a lie? The Cold War was a zero-sum game. Any advantage to America was a disadvantage to the Soviet Union. Exposing the moon landing as a hoax would have been the greatest propaganda victory in history. The Soviets had every reason to expose a fraud. They had the technical capability to detect one. They had nothing to gain by covering for America. And yet, they acknowledge the landing as real.

That tells you everything you need to know. Let's step back from the technical arguments and think about this from a purely practical standpoint. Let's think like conspiracy theorists for a moment and ask what it would actually take to fake the moon landing. The Apollo program employed approximately 400,000 people across NASA, contractors, subcontractors, and supporting industries. That includes engineers, scientists, technicians, administrators, secretaries, janitors, and everyone else involved in the effort. 400,000 people. That's roughly the population of Oakland, California.

For the moon landing to be a hoax, all of those people would need to be kept quiet. Not just the astronauts. Not just the mission controllers. Everyone. Because if even one person out of 400,000 decided to talk, the whole thing would unravel. There's a famous saying in intelligence circles. Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead. The idea that 400,000 people could maintain a conspiracy for over 50 years, with not a single credible whistleblower coming forward,

strains credulity beyond the breaking point. Think about it. Government secrets get leaked all the time. The Pentagon Papers exposed decades of Vietnam War deception. Watergate brought down a president. Edward Snowden revealed the NSA's surveillance programs. Chelsea Manning exposed military miscarriage. conduct. These were secrets that governments desperately wanted to protect, and they couldn't

stop individuals from talking. But the moon landing hoax? Over 50 years. Four hundred thousand people. Not one credible confession. Not one deathbed revelation. Not one leaked document. Nothing. The most tightly kept secret in human history, apparently. And it wasn't just Americans who were watching. Independent observers around the world tracked the Apollo missions. Amateur radio operators in multiple countries picked up the communications and confirmed the spacecraft was transmitting from lunar distances. The Jodrell Bank Observatory in England tracked the missions with their radio telescope. Australian tracking stations at Honeysuckle Creek and Parks received the television transmissions and relayed

them to the world. A group of students at Kettering Grammar School in England using nothing but simple radio equipment they built themselves, monitored Apollo missions, and calculated the spacecraft's orbital parameters. They would have noticed if the spacecraft wasn't actually going to the moon. They would have detected the discrepancy. All of these independent observers would have had to be silenced or brought into the conspiracy. Every ham radio operator who picked up Apollo transmissions. Every astronomer who tracked the missions. Every journalist who investigated the program. All of them.

Somehow. There's also the practical matter of faking the footage itself. Remember, this was 1969. Special effects technology was primitive by modern standards. There was no CGI. There were no digital compositing tools.

There was no green screen technology as we know it today. Everything had to be done with practical effects, miniatures, and in camera tricks. A film expert, named Howard Barry has analyzed the Apollo footage extensively and concluded that faking it would have been technologically impossible. The lunar footage was shot at 10 frames per second in a special slow scan television format.

Creating slow motion footage that looks like low gravity requires either shooting at very high frame rates and then slowing it down, or using expensive video manipulation technology that barely existed in 1969. To create the effect of reduced gravity using slow motion filming, you would need to shoot at about 60 frames per second and then play it back at 10 frames per second. But high-speed filming creates obvious visual artifacts. The footage would look different. Hair and fabric would move differently. The effect wouldn't be convincing.

The alternative would be some kind of video manipulation to slow down footage shot at normal speed. But the technology to do this in 1969 would have a very good. required expensive broadcast equipment that left electronic artifacts. These artifacts aren't present in the Apollo footage. And then there's the continuous footage problem. Some of the Apollo missions include unbroken sequences of footage lasting over an hour. To fake this in slow motion would require shooting for six hours continuously. On film. Film reels in 1969 held about 10 minutes of footage each. You'd need to change reels constantly, creating visible splice points. There are no splice points in the continuous Apollo sequences. One film expert put it with delicious irony. If Stanley

Kubrick had been asked to fake the moon landings, he was such a perfectionist that he would have insisted on shooting on location. I can't talk about moon landing conspiracy theories without mentioning one of my favorite moments in the entire history of this debate. It's a moment that encapsulates the frustration, the absurdity, and yes, the comedy of the whole situation. On September 9, 2002, Edwin Buzz Aldrin was walking into the Lux Hotel in Beverly Hills. He was 72 years old. His hair was gray. His reflexes, presumably, weren't what they once were. He was there, he thought, to be interviewed for a Japanese educational program about space. But it was a trap.

waiting for him was Bart Sebrill, a documentary filmmaker and conspiracy theorist who had made it his life's work to harass Apollo astronauts. Sebrill and his camera crew ambushed Aldrin outside the hotel. They had lured him there under false pretenses. This wasn't going to be an educational interview. This was going to be a confrontation. Sebrill shoved a Bible in Aldrin's face. He demanded that Aldrin swear on it that he had walked on the moon. This was Sebrel's signature move.

He had done it to other astronauts, showing up unannounced and demanding they swear on the Bible or be exposed as liars. Aldrin understandably wanted nothing to do with this. He tried to walk away. Sebrill followed. He got in Aldrin's face. He blocked his path. He wouldn't let the 72-year-old man leave in peace. And then Sebrill made a mistake.

A serious mistake. He called Buzz Aldrin, a man who had risked his life in combat as a fighter pilot in the Korean War. A man who had docked spacecraft in orbit. A man who had walked on the moon 239,000 miles from home. A man who had seen things that most of us can only dream of. Sabrell called that man, a coward, a liar, and a thief. Buzz Aldrin punched him in the face. The punch was clean.

It was quick. It connected squarely with Sebrel's jaw, and it was captured on camera by Sebrill's own crew. The video went viral. It was shown on news programs around the world. It became one of the most viewed pieces of footage on the early internet. When Sebrel tried to press assault charges, the case was thrown out. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office declined to prosecute. Witnesses testified that Sebrill had provoked the confrontation.

They described how the six-foot-two, 250-pound Cybrel had forced the elderly Aldrin against a wall and refused to let him leave. The court ruled that Aldrin had acted in reasonable self-defense. The video garnered praise for Aldrin from around the world. People cheered for him. They celebrated his punch as a victory for sanity over delusion. T-shirts were printed.

Memes were created. The moment became iconic. I bring this up not to say, celebrate violence. Violence is rarely the answer. But I bring it up to illustrate the emotional reality of what these astronauts have dealt with for over 50 years. These men risked everything. They left their families knowing they might not come back. They flew to the moon on rockets that were essentially controlled explosions, traveling faster than any humans had ever traveled before. They walked on another world. They collected samples and planted flags and looked up at Earth hanging

in the black lunar sky. And then they came home to find that a not-insignificant portion of the population thinks they're liars. They've spent the rest of their lives being harassed by people who demand they prove they did what they obviously did. They've been called frauds and criminals and cowards by people who have never risked anything, never achieved anything, never done anything worth remembering. Imagine dedicating your life to one of humanity's greatest achievements.

Imagine putting yourself through years of brutal training, facing death multiple times, pushing the boundaries of what was thought possible. And then imagine spending your remaining decades having people shove cameras in your face and call you a fraud. Is it any wonder that Buzz Aldrin, at 72 years old, finally snapped? When asked about the like-minded conspiracy theorist years later, Aldrin was philosophical. I don't pay any attention to them, really, he said. They're out for themselves to make a name. Coming from a man who literally walked on the moon, that's about as dismissive as it gets.

So if the evidence for the moon landing is so overwhelming, why do conspiracy theories persist? Why do somewhere between 6% and 20% of Americans, depending on which poll you believe, harbor doubts about whether we actually went to the moon? Why has belief in the conspiracy theory actually increased over time, rather than fading away as more evidence has accumulated.

The answer is complicated, and it has more to do with psychology than it does with physics or engineering or photography. There's a powerful appeal to feeling special. Conspiracy theories make believers feel like they're in possession of secret knowledge. They've seen through the lies that fool the masses. They're not sheep. They're not gullible like everyone else. They know the truth.

That feeling of special knowledge, of being smarter than the crowd, is psychological. rewarding. It doesn't matter if the knowledge is actually true. What matters is how it makes you feel. Conspiracy theories often arise from a deeper distrust of institutions. If you already believe that the government lies about everything, that corporations are evil, that the media is corrupt, that experts are compromised, then believing the moon landing was faked is just one more item on the list. It fits the pattern you've already established. It confirms what you already believe. And confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out and believe information that confirms our existing views, is one of the most powerful forces in human cognition. I think it's important to be honest here. The moon landing

is genuinely hard to believe. Let's be honest about this. We sent human beings 239,000 miles through the hostile vacuum of space. We landed them on another celestial body, a ball of rock that has no air, no water, temperatures that swing from 250 degrees to negative 250 degrees. We let them walk around for a few hours. And then we brought them safely back to Earth. We did this six times.

We did it with technology that would be laughable by today's standards. We did it in an era when computers filled entire rooms and had less processing power than a digital wristwatch. That is insane. That is absolutely, completely, utterly insane. It's the kind of thing that sounds like it should be impossible. It sounds like science fiction. It sounds like a story we tell ourselves to feel good about humanity.

So when someone suggests it might not have happened, there's a part of our brain, a skeptical part, a pattern-seeking part, it says, yeah, actually, that, that would make more sense. That would be more consistent with how the world usually works. Conspiracy theories are self-reinforcing in a way that makes them almost impossible to disprove. Once someone believes, any evidence against the conspiracy can be dismissed as part of the cover-up. The moon rocks are fake.

The photographs are doctored. The retro reflectors were placed by robots. The Soviets were in on it. The scientists who studied the samples are lying. The orbital photographs have been tampered with. There's always another layer of conspiracy to explain away the inconvenient facts. Every piece of evidence that should disprove the theory becomes evidence of how deep the conspiracy goes. The very strength of the evidence becomes proof of how much effort was put into the cover-up.

It's circular reasoning that can't be broken by facts, because the facts themselves are part of the alleged fraud. The Internet has fundamentally changed how conspirators. theories spread and persist. In the past, belief in fringe theories was limited by physical access to information. You had to find someone who believed and convinced them to share their materials. Now, anyone with a smartphone can find hundreds of videos, websites, and forums promoting any conspiracy theory you can imagine. The barriers to entry have vanished.

More insidiously, social media algorithms are designed to maximize engagement. And what engages people? Controversy Outrage The feeling that you're learning something shocking that the mainstream won't tell you. A video claiming the moon landing was faked generates more engagement than a video

explaining the physics of lunar soil. The algorithm doesn't care about truth. It cares about clicks. And conspiracy theories get clicks. As I record this episode, it has been over 55 years since Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder of the eagle and into the history books.

In that time, 12 human beings have walked on the lunar surface. All six Apollo landing missions were successful. Thousands of photographs have been taken. 842 pounds of lunar material have been brought back and studied by scientists around the world. Scientific instruments placed on the moon continue to function and provide data to this day. And yet the conspiracy theories persist. In some ways, they're stronger than ever. 2001, the Fox Television Network aired a documentary called Conspiracy Theory.

Did We Land on the Moon? The show presented many of the arguments we've discussed tonight. It introduced them to a whole new generation of viewers who weren't alive when the landings happened. The show was hosted and produced by Bart Seibrell, the same man who would later receive that famous punch from Buzz Aldrin. The documentary was criticized by scientists and space historians as misleading and factually incorpict. But criticism doesn't make something unpopular. The show was a raiding success. It sparked renewed interest in moon landing conspiracy theories.

It became part of the cultural conversation. In 2003, Dimitri Rogozen, the former director of the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos, publicly expressed doubt about the American moon landings. He complained that he hadn't received a satisfactory answer when he asked his own agency to provide evidence that the landings occurred. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. His colleagues at Roscosmos, he said,

were annoyed by his questions and didn't want to undermine cooperation with NASA. This from a representative of the country whose scientists had independently verified the Apollo landings decades earlier, whose tracking stations had followed the missions in real time, whose cosmonauts had acknowledged their American counterparts achieved,

Rojasin's statement was widely seen as political posturing, an attempt to appeal to anti-Western sentiment in Russia. But it showed how conspiracy theories can be weaponized for political purposes. Polling consistently shows that belief in the moon-landing hoax theory has actually increased over time. Among young people, the numbers are particularly concerning. A 2019 poll found that 18% of 18 to 34-year-olds said they weren't sure if Americans landed on the moon. Among those who had been alive to witness the landings, the percentage was much lower. Social media has created an environment where conspiracy theories can spread rapidly and where the voice of a random YouTuber can carry as much weight as the voice of a professional

scientist with decades of experience. The old gatekeepers of information, newspapers, television networks, scientific journals, have lost their monopoly. Anyone can publish anything and find an audience. We live in an age of increasing distrust. Trust in government is at historic lows. Trust in media is at historic lows. Trust in scientific institutions,

once among the most respected in society, has declined significantly. And in that environment, conspiracy theories thrive. They offer simple explanations for a complex world. They identify villains we can blame. They make us feel smart for seeing what others miss. So where does all this leave us? I've tried to present both sides of this debate as fairly as I can.

I've laid out the arguments made by conspiracy theorists. I've tried to present their case in its strongest form, the way they themselves would present it. And I've shown you the scientific responses to those arguments. I've given you facts, and I've told you when something was opinion or speculation. Here's my take, and I want to be clear that this is my opinion, not objective fact. The evidence that we went to the moon is overwhelming.

It's not just one piece of evidence. It's not just a few convincing photographs. It's hundreds of pieces of evidence from dozens of independent sources. It's physical artifacts that can be tested and verified by scientists around the world. It's images taken by spacecraft from multiple countries, including countries, that have no reason to cover for America. It's the tacit acknowledgement of our Cold War enemies who had every reason in the world to expose a hoax if one existed.

The conspiracy theory, by contrast, is built on a foundation of misunderstood photography, misapplied physics, and generalized mistrust. The arguments seem convincing until you look at them closely, at which point they fall apart under scrutiny. They require believing that hundreds of thousands of people have kept a secret for over half a century. They require believing that the Soviet Union,

our mortal enemy, helped us perpetrate a fraud. They require believing that scientists around the world are either in on the conspiracy or too stupid to detect an obvious fake. I don't find any of that credible. And I'm someone who spends a lot of time thinking about government deception and cover-ups. I know the government lies.

I know powerful institutions protect themselves. I know that conspiracies are real, but this particular conspiracy theory doesn't hold up. But here's the thing. I'm not going to tell you what to believe. That's not my job. My job is to give you information and let you make up your own mind. I've given you the information. Now it's your turn. What I will say is this. We live in a time when truth itself seems to be under attack. When facts are treated as opinions and opinions are treated as facts.

acts. When expertise is dismissed as elitism, and ignorance is celebrated as authenticity, when everyone has their own reality and no one can agree on what actually happened. The moon landing represents one of humanity's greatest achievements. It's a moment when we looked at the impossible and said, let's do it anyway. It's a testament to what we can accomplish when we commit ourselves to a goal, when we invest our resources and our intellect and our courage into reaching beyond our limit. It's proof that when we work together, when we dream big, when we refuse to accept that something can't be done, we can accomplish miracles.

To deny that we went to the moon is to deny the best of what humanity can be. It's to say that we're not capable of greatness. It's to say that our achievements are illusions. It's to say that the men who risked their lives for a dream were liars and frauds. It's a profoundly pessimistic view of human potential. I choose to believe in human achievement. I choose to believe that Neil Armstrong really did take one small step for man on July 20th, 1969.

I choose to believe that we are capable of doing incredible things when we set our minds to it. I choose to believe that the evidence of my senses and the consensus of scientists and the laws of physics and the absence of any credible counter evidence all point to the same conclusion. We went to the moon. we really did. But you, you get to choose for yourself. That's the beauty of living in a free society. You can look at the evidence.

You can weigh the arguments. You can reach your own conclusions. And whatever you decide, I hope this episode has given you the tools to make an informed choice. This has been disturbing history. And whether you believe we went to the moon or not, I'm glad you spent this time with me.

This has been a fun one. to research and write, and I hope you've had as much fun listening as I had putting it together. Until next time, keep questioning, keep learning, and keep looking up. Because there's a lot out there waiting to be discovered. And whether we've already been there or not, the universe isn't done revealing its secrets. Take care of yourselves and each other.