Forbidden History - Conspiracy on the Moon: Apollo 11

Episode Date: May 20, 2025

In this episode, we journey into one of the most enduring conspiracy theories of the 20th century: Did NASA really land astronauts on the Moon in 1969, or was it an elaborate hoax filmed on a Hollywood soundstage? We explore the origins of the Apollo moon landing conspiracy theory, discuss the most common claims made by skeptics, and examine how science, photography, and cold war politics fuelled both belief and doubt. Cast List: Tony McMahon: Former BBC news producer, author, print journalist and historian  Guy Walters: Author, historian and journalist  Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. The year is 1945. The Second World War has ended. But a new invisible war is just beginning. The Cold War.

Two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, now battle. Not with guns and tanks. but with ideology, technology and ambition. Capitalism against communism. Freedom against control. And in this new war, victory wouldn't just be measured on Earth, but far, far beyond it. The space race has begun.

This was the race to space between the US and its astronauts and the Soviet Union and its cosmonauts. In the 1950s, 1960s, the public was transfixed as both countries tried to get first into space. And the Americans, right in the middle of the Cold War, they want to win the space race. They need a kind of victory over the Soviet Union to prove American muscle and might. The moon landings was such an epic event that it didn't take very long for people to begin to suspect that they were, fate. There are a lot of people out there who think that it was just impossible to have achieved. In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we take a deep dive into the infamous Apollo

Moon Landing conspiracy. Was the landing too good to be true? And why do some people think the moon landing was faked? Is it all down to the fact that NASA hasn't gone back to the moon since 1972, historian and author Tony McMahon tells us more. After the Second World War, you had what was called the Cold War, and this was the United States and the Soviet Union, capitalism and communism in this deadly war of ideologies that span the globe. And part of this cold war was the so-called space race. This was the race to race to space between the US and its astronauts and the Soviet Union and its cosmonauts. In 1957, the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching Sputnik I, the first artificial

satellite to orbit Earth. A beeping metal ball, no bigger than a beach ball, hurtled around Earth for three months. Orbiting the planet every 96 minutes, the idea of it passing over the USA seven times a day started to worry many Americans. Now actually, it was the Soviet Union, the Russians, who made the running, really, who were the most successful initially with the Sputnik program. So in 1957 you had the launch of Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite, which came as a massive shock to United States. This monumental space launch by the Soviet Union,

left the American public anxious about the scientific gap between the USA and the USSR. In trying to keep up with their opponents, the first American satellite attempt, Vanguard TV3 was launched, but subsequently exploded on the launch pad. By the end of January 1958, the U.S. successfully launched its own satellite Explorer 1, But the impact of the achievement was somewhat overshadowed. In response, President Dwight Eisenhower created NASA in 1958, an agency whose sole mission was to win the race to the stars. And the United States was willing to pour billions of dollars into making sure they caught up and overtook their Soviet rivals.

As if that wasn't bad enough, in 1961, Yuri Gagarin, became the first human in space, a Soviet cosmonaut, a Russian was the first human in space. And so the United States really panics at this stage. Uri completed a full orbit of the Earth in just 108 minutes. And when he landed, he instantly became an international celebrity and was even bestowed the Hero of the Soviet Union Award. The United States, the supposed leader of the free world, had been humbled.

The fear was not just scientific, it was existential. If the Soviets controlled space, they could control the skies above America. Missiles, satellites, surveillance, domination from above. NASA begins to launch its own space programs, Project Mercury, Project Gemini, Project Apollo. And we have to see the moon landing really in this context. This is the United States really playing catch-up against the Russians, against the Soviet Union, who had really powered ahead. I mean, they were looking like they were owning space and the Americans were the laggards.

So getting onto the moon first, that was really an important statement by the US that we are going to lead the space race, not the Soviet Union. On July 20, 1969, humanity achieved what once seen. impossible. Abord the Apollo 11 spacecraft, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins had traveled more than 230,000 miles through the vacuum of space to reach the moon. As over 600 million people watched live on television, Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar module and uttered those immortal words, that's one small step for man, one giant leap for man

kind. For many, it was the defining moment of the 20th century. Proof that human ingenuity and American determination could conquer even the harshest frontiers. And yet, within just a few years, some began to ask a troubling question. Was it simply too good to be true? Could 1960s technology, at a time when the most powerful computers were less advanced than a modern pocket-counting really have propelled human beings across space and back again? Even today, a simple smartphone holds more processing power than all the computers used during the Apollo program combined. So how did they do it? Or did they? Here's historian Guy Walters, who explains why some people found and still find the moon landings just two on the moon landings.

too unbelievable. There are a lot of people out there who think that it was just impossible to have achieved. And what they say is how with 1960s technology, you know, with computing power about a one millionth of a smartphone, how do you get two guys walking around on the moon in the late 1960s? So what the people think is that the Americans, right in the middle of the Cold War, they want to win the space race. They need a kind of victory over the Soviet. Union to prove, you know, American muscle and might. And you know what? We can't get to the

moon. What we'll do is that we'll fake going to the moon. And, you know, this hoax will, you know, no one will find out and America will be shown to have been brilliant technologically. Doubtors say, look, there's a hell of a lot of evidence around, you know, there's photographic evidence that shows there are tons of anomalies. There are lots of inconsistencies in NASA's account. The moon landings was such an epic event that it didn't take. take very long for people to begin to suspect that they were faked. And we have to put that in some context because the 1970s was the era of Watergate, a huge political scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. You had the disaster of the Vietnam War, which also

undermine the standing of the US government in the eyes of many of its citizens. We know they say that Hollywood filmmakers are involved. And so, you know, you've got this idea of the moon landings being faked, really going mainstream when you've got a former contractor from NASA, at no less, a man called Bill Kasing, who publishes his book in 1976 called We Never Went to the Moon. And it's from that point, you know, just a few years after the actual moon landings, that, you know, you now get foundations of speculation saying, you know what, the whole thing, now Apollo mission, it was rubbish. It wasn't just wild speculation.

There were real questions that for some refused to go away. If there's no air on the moon, how could a flag ripple? You know, that American flag in all those photographs of men supposedly on the moon, why is it waving? The moon's got no atmosphere, so what's making it wave? Now, some people have explained that by saying, well, you know, there is a pole extended along the top of that flag, and where it seems to be waving, which it shouldn't do because there's no atmosphere on the moon,

that's simply the astronauts, you know, fixing the flag there and moving around it. There is no waving flag. Or the other one about the lack of stars in the photos of the moon. Why are there no stars in the sky? Shouldn't we be seeing a sky full of stars? But this image was taken in the daytime, and lunar landscape, brightly lit by the sun, means that you don't see the stars on the moon at that time of day. NASA insisted that the camera settings were to blame

and that the exposure was too short to capture the faint starlight. Still, the questions kept coming. Look at those astronauts walking around supposedly on the moon, but probably a studio somewhere in Nevada or somewhere. Look at the shadows. They're going everywhere. They're not coming from the sun. they're coming from lots of weird light sources. So that must be fake.

Could it be that the moon landing wasn't illuminated by a distant sun, but by studio lights on Earth? Some people have pointed to the footprint on the moon saying it doesn't match the boot of the astronauts. So you have all these conspiracy theories running and this idea as well that the moon landings may have been filmed in a TV thing. studio. I mean, there was even one theory that Stanley Kubrick, who directed the 1960s movie 2001 Space Odyssey, that he directed the moon landings. Again, of course, he denied it. I've no doubt

he might have been amused by that. Some people saying as well that the infamous Area 51 was used as the backdrop for the moon landings. And then you have a movie lap Capricorn 1, which was very popular, a very popular 1970s movie, which posited this idea of fate landing and then the need by the government to bump off to literally murder the astronauts involved. Despite the photographic evidence suggesting that man never went up there, the technology at the time simply does not exist. So, you know, how could you get men to the moon and back again with 1960s rubbish technology? photocopiers back then were rubbish.

The fax machine hadn't been invented. How on earth do you get a man off this earth and to the moon? It's impossible. It's true. The computers that guided Apollo 11 had less processing power than a modern smart toaster. And one of the most enduring questions of all, why has no other country even today repeated a man moon landing? As doubts festered, new and even stranger theories continued to take root.

And then, in the 2000s, something even more troubling emerged. Evidence, or perhaps an accident, that gave new fuel to the doubters. Coming up after the break. In 2009, something surfaced that changed everything we thought we knew about the Apollo mission. Whether it was a breakthrough or a blunder, it reignited the fire for skeptics everywhere. Investigative historian, author and journalist, Tony McMahon explains more. NASA hasn't really helped its own case in terms of the defense against all those who it calls conspiracy theorists, because the original what they call telemetry tapes that contain the raw,

footage, the original raw footage of the Apollo 11 moon landings were apparently accidentally erased and reused for later NASA missions. You couldn't really believe that NASA would do that. The tapes in question, they were recorded in kind of a low-scan, television, telecast in its rawest format, but they would have, you know, if those tapes still existed, they would undoubtedly have, well, hopefully proved NASA's case. NASA claimed the unfiltered recordings were accidentally erased and reused. But could they really have simply been lost, or perhaps even stolen? NASA did conduct a huge search for the tapes in 2006, but they couldn't be found.

But to conspiracy theorists, it was proof, proof that the moon landing had been a lie from the start. As trust in government collapsed during Watergate and the Vietnam War, questioning NASA became part of questioning America itself. The moon landing became more than history. It became a battleground for lies and conspiracy. For many Americans, the moon landing was a triumph. But others saw something darker lurking beneath the surface. It wasn't the confusing photos, or the lost.

tapes, it was the men behind the mission. NASA has long been a mistrusted arm of the American government. I mean, not least because of the sheer volume of money that's been invested in the space programs. Back in the 1970s, many people complained, you know, why aren't the inner cities in America which need investment being prioritized over sending rockets into space? So that was one reason that NASA wasn't liked. Also, the people that NASA employed raised a lot of eyebrows and questions, and I'm talking

about former Nazi scientists. After World War II, the United States launched Operation Paperclip, a secret project to bring over more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians. Among them were some who had worked directly for Adolf Hitler. who had used forced labor, some who had built weapons that reigned terror on civilians. Particularly, of course, Verna von Braun, who was a key figure in the development of rocket technology for Nazi Germany. At the end of the war, far from being put in prison or worse, he then went to the United States to pioneer the space technology program.

Werner von Braun, once a card-carrying member of the Nazi party and the SS, would become one of the architects of Apollo 11. The man who built the deadly V-2 rocket for Hitler was now hailed as a hero of American spaceflight. So this was somebody who'd been a member of the Nazi party, the SS, who then ends up working for NASA. That doesn't exactly leave a good taste in people's mouths. I mean, as a German Nazi scientist, he was involved in the development of the V2 rocket.

The V2 rockets von Braun had built had killed thousands in London, Antwerp and Paris. Each one stamped with the ideology of a genocidal regime. Could these same men now be trusted to tell the truth about reaching the moon? The Nazis were masters also of lying and propaganda, which of course has then become. associated with NASA in some people's minds and the idea that NASA, if you want, is behaving like a dictatorship and is not telling the truth. If the engineers of Apollo 11 had once served a dictatorship built on deception, could they have carried that instinct for lies with them into America's new Cold War propaganda machine?

Was the moon landing a shining beacon of progress, or just the most convincing story ever told? Even in the 1970s, questions about the moon landing were easy to dismiss as fringe beliefs. A few conspiracy theorists in basements, waving grainy photographs, claiming hidden truths. But decades later, fueled by the rise of the internet, the conspiracy theories didn't fade away. They exploded. The fake moon landing theory really has revived in recent years. I mean, not only has it not gone away, I think it's actually becoming more popular. People with social media, with digital channels and so on,

are really challenging the idea that America got to the moon. Today, social media breathes fresh oxygen into old doubts. Commenters casually declare the moon landing a hoax, sometimes without even offering evidence. If you go on TikTok, if you go on Reddit, Quora, YouTube, whatever, you'll find plenty of people saying the moon landings are fake. It is a very popular theory and much as NASA's frustration, it refuses to go away. 50 years after Armstrong's first step on the moon, more people than ever are asking if he ever stepped there at all. Because once you doubt something so sacred, like the moon landing itself, What else becomes possible to doubt?

NASA, of course, didn't sit back while the conspiracy theories spread. They pointed to the evidence, tangible proof that humans had really been there. NASA also say, well, we've got £800 of lunar rock kicking around, and that's been sent to scientists worldwide, and they all say, yeah, that's lunar dust. Lunar samples like rocks, dust and fragments have all been shared with geologists from dozens of countries. They've been analysed, verified and declared authentic. But there's something else. Then there are also these reflectors that were planted on the moon by the astronauts who've been there,

and which lasers are aimed at on a regular basis to just calculate the distance of the moon. To this day, scientists bounce lasers off the reflectors left by Apollo astronauts, which enables them to measure the exact distance between Earth and the moon to within a few centimeters. It's hard evidence, with many saying it's impossible to fake. But skeptics aren't so easily swayed. They argue that evidence can be misinterpreted or even fabricated, and that even mountains of proof can't erase one simple fact. No other country, not China, not Russia, not even America itself,

has sent humans back to the moon since the 1970s. Why? United States hasn't been back for a long time, and the fact that the U.S. hasn't been back for a long time, especially since the end of the Cold War, convinces many that the moon landings were really part of, of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. They were propaganda.

Once the Cold War ended, there was no need to do any more faked or real moon landings. That's basically the logic. If beating the Soviets was the real mission, was there ever a reason to return once the Cold War was won? Or were the risks and the costs simply too great to justify another journey? After all, if the moon landings were faked, how could a secret that massive stay buried for over 50 years? There's also one overriding argument that NASA point to and they'll say, hang on a minute, 400,000 people in total were involved in the Apollo mission. They would all have to be in on the cover-up. And are you telling me that not one of those 400,000 people could have leaked it?

And there's another argument which actually some people point to and say to fake a moon landing would have cost more to buy everyone's complicity and quietness would have cost more than to do the actual moon landing. In the end, NASA's defense of the moon landing is strong. But it is not perfect. And for some, the missing tapes, the Nazi engineers, the Cold War desperation, leave just enough cracks for doubts to seep through. Now, NASA, unsurprisingly, doesn't really hold much store with people who say that man never went to the moon. And if you ask one man, a certain Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, if you say to him, you never went to the moon, he has got one response.

He'll hit you. I mean, I think he almost ended up getting some sort of police caution because he got so angry at some point. I hope I haven't besmirched poor Buzz there. But the point is, is that, you know, it attracts a lot of heat. this argument. And NASA have plenty of, you know, kind of, you know, rebuttals to all these claims. For NASA, the moon landings aren't just history. Their legacy. Billions of dollars, decades of research, and the reputations of thousands of scientists and engineers hang in the balance. So when the conspiracy theories start flying, they don't stay silent. Instead, NASA points to hard

evidence, detailed logs, and one crucial fact, the sheer scale of the mission. After all, how do you fake something that involved nearly half a million people? Even now, half a century later, the Apollo Moon Landing stand as one of the most significant events of the 20th century. For many, they represent the pinnacle of human achievement, a triumph of science, engineering, ambition. For others, they remain a point of suspicion, and their doubts have never fully disappeared. In the decade since 1969, public trust in governments and institutions has declined. Events like Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the rise of misinformation in the digital

age, have kept conspiracy theories alive, including the belief that the moon landings were staged. Today, whether one accepts the landings as fact or questions them as fiction, often says more about our relationship with authority, trust, and truth than it does about the moon itself. The Apollo story is no longer just about space. It's about what we choose to believe. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. And for more from the Like a Shot Network, check out where did everyone go,

Histories of the Abandoned, a deep dive into the incredible stories behind forgotten places, available now on your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for listening.