Stuff You Should Know - Why do some people believe the moon landings were a hoax?

Episode Date: February 3, 2009

Three decades after the first reported manned lunar landing, some theorists still believe the landing was faked. Check in as Chuck and Josh take a look at the evidence on both sides of the debate in this podcast from HowStuffWorks. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from house.works.com. This episode is sponsored by GoDaddy.com, the world's largest web host and domain name registrar. With domains as low as $1.99 and hosting for less than $5 a month. Enter promo code STUFF10 at checkout and save 10%

off your entire order. Get your piece of the internet at GoDaddy.com. There are people that think that we did not land on the moon in 1969. That is true. Actually, there is a guy who worked for, oh, I don't remember, maybe the Rocketdyne Systems. Rocketdyne Systems, I believe, is a private aerospace contractor. A guy named Bill Casing, he wrote technical publications for that company. In 1959, he calculated, 1959, he calculated that there was a.0014% chance of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely home. He was wrong. Ten years later, we had met on the moon, returned him safely home. Right, so we think. Or did we? I don't think we should take a

conspiratorial tone. I also don't think we should take pot shots at the crackpots who think this. So what are we going to talk about? Well, I think we can discuss the merits of this stuff. In my opinion, skepticism goes both ways. Skepticism is always focused on the people who question reality. And I think that's BS. I think there's plenty of times where you can question what's being fed to you. Absolutely. I'm big on that, actually. And if I was around in 1969, I probably would have, not probably. If you were around in 1969, you would have been in Woodstock, the whole shebang. Maybe so. Yeah. So, all right, let's get down to it. Right? Let's do it. Do you want to tee off? Yeah. Like we said, a lot of people, well, not on how many, but

there was a conspiracy theory going around still yesterday that we never landed on the moon. And there are quite a few points that people make to try and back this up. Yes. From the footage of the moon landing. Yeah. And they basically think it was staged for the purposes of making the Russians so disheveled at the fact that we got to the moon before they did, that they would scrap their program and just say, you know, the Americans are so far ahead of us because they're already on the moon and we can't do that. Well, not just that national pride as well. Like, sure. You know, back in the in the 60s, this is like at the height of the Cold War. And basically, the Soviet Union and the United States spent much in political and actual,

you know, financial capital to make one another look bad. It was pretty much the role of each of these nations. Right. The world was polarized. And what better way to make the other one look like a jackass than by beating them to the moon? Yeah. It was a space race. Yeah. So, I see the theory behind this, this whole thing. Yeah. But, you know, Kennedy said in what 1960, we're going to put a man on the moon. And by 1969, we had that is enormous. Like we had no moon landing program. Right. By then we've been shooting satellites into space and we had men who had orbited by then. Right. But within nine years, we actually landed somebody on the moon. Right. And this is 1960s technology, too. So it's not, I mean, today it would seem like that wouldn't

be the hardest thing in the world to do. But back then it was just unheard of. Right. Okay. So, like you said, most of the bones of contention that people used to pick this idea apart are based on the footage. Correct. Of, you know, there's actual evidence here saying, you know, what's going on? What does this explain this? Right. There's five main points that are generally brought up in this discussion. There's actually a few more. But yeah, in this article, there's, yeah, there's, there's five are our esteemed colleague, John Fuller, waited through the, the muck and picked out the best ones. Right. Polished them off, set them up. There you go. Let's talk about them. Okay. What's the first one? Well, the first one that I'd like to mention is

actually not the first one. The first one I'd like to mention is the quote unquote, sea rock is in the letter C. Yeah. Have you seen the sea rock? Yeah. I looked up a picture today and basically there's a rock in the foreground of a photo and the shot is of one of the astronauts walking away from camera toward the lunar rover. And there's a big moon rock in the foreground that looks like it's got a very clear letter C on it. It is clearly a C. It is clearly. I mean, it doesn't look like some sort of aberration or anything like that. It just, it looks like the letter C carved into it or maybe like stamped with like metal and a chisel. Perhaps. Something like that. But it definitely looks like a C. I would agree with you. And so,

of course, theorists, we're not going to call them conspiracy theorists. We'll just call them theorists. Yeah. Theorists think that this could be a prop, like a stage prop that was marked, you know, moon rock C, put it here, moon rock B, put it there, and that it just kind of got by the camera department who was filming this big hoax. And I like that you put that one first, because this one, in my opinion, has the weakest explanation from the scientific community in NASA for that C on that rock. Spill it. And that is basically that there was a hair on the lens or something like that that had to do with when the photo was taken. It's not really a C. It's like a hair or a scratch. Right. Some sort of flaw. It doesn't look anything like a hair or a

scratch. No, it looks like the letter C. It looks like a C. Right. So there's one. That is definitely one. One that I like is the different shadow lengths. Correct. Have you seen pictures of them with the different shadows? I have not. They're wildly varying in length. And there's, you know, they're guys standing next to one another on the moon. And then one shadow is 10 feet long. The other is just 40. Right. So I guess the basic idea behind this is evidence that the moon landing was faked is that there was some sort of faulty studio. Right. They didn't light it properly. Yeah. Like the basic idea is that this is all done on a soundstage. Right. Now, in my opinion, this one is actually the weakest argument for the moon landing being faked.

Agreed. First of all, the moon is not a flat, smooth surface. It's very rocky and dusty and it has all sorts of features to it. And anybody who has ever stood, you know, on a long desert or something similar to the moon and seen their shadow, they've noticed that the shadows don't always act the same way. Right. And what's more, in my opinion, if NASA was actually going to go to the trouble of faking a moon landing, they would have noticed this. Right. And they wouldn't have released it with the shadows like that badly off or skewed. That's my big point. As a matter of fact, they probably would have gone the other way. Sure. And the shadows would have looked uniform or something like that. Right. Exactly. That's my point. This was 1969. This

wasn't like 1925. You know, they were actually making, I looked up films that released in 1969 and, you know, some really good movies. You got French Connection. Was that 69? No. Like Pooch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, that kind of thing. Oh, gotcha. But anyway, some really good movies and filmmaking in advance to the point where they could have easily, easily gotten someone to make the shadows match and light it properly and that they wouldn't have had some crack team of like, you know, interns out there filming the moon landing. Right. You know, so that didn't hold water with me. Well, what's your next best argument or against? Well, I'm going to go ahead and skip over to the American flag. A lot of people seem to notice that when they're putting the flag up

that it appears to flap in the breeze. Of course, this is on the moon. There's no atmosphere. So there would be no breeze. But what they say, what the government says is, is this was a special flag. And actually, I didn't know this. I felt like a dummy. It's got a wire running across the top of it, which is why it hangs square. Otherwise, it would just hang in zero gravity. And motionless. Right. So when you have a flag with like a taut wire, and you're putting it up, it's going to move around a little bit more and it's not going to look like a regular flag. Yeah. So it's not, in fact, the breeze blowing. It's just, you know, by virtue of the fact that it had a wire running through it. Right. And as Fuller points out, if they had created a sound

stage and filmed it like this and the wire wasn't in there, they would have had to have created a vacuum. Correct. In it, which would have been really difficult. Yeah. Another part of that has to do with that vacuum sound stage that would have been virtually impossible to do, is the dust that's being kicked up right when they walk. When they walk or when the lunar rover is tires, the tires are spinning. This is not so much a piece of evidence, but an explanation or something that people have noticed is that supposedly it's kind of clouding. And apparently, it hasn't. It doesn't cloud at all. The dust is kicked up and it runs its course in that thin atmosphere and then falls back down. Right. And so that kind of actually proves that this thing

either was filmed in a sound stage within a vacuumized sound stage or on the moon. Right. Occam's razor would actually kind of suggest the vacuumized sound stage, I think, at that point, but still. Well, they can create an entire vacuum, a sound stage, but they can't light it properly. Is that? That's a great point, Chuck. Come on. That's a great point. And that kind of reveals what's going on with this. This is never going to be resolved to everyone's satisfaction, I think. I think people enjoy kind of poking at one another on this. Yeah, I think so. Like making NASA scientists respond. Right. Like they don't have anything else to do. Yeah. The fact that they could never have pulled this off, though. They couldn't have duped the

entire scientific community all over the world. Not only that, yes. Russia as well. Like you would think if they try to poke holes in Russia would go public with this faster than you could say lickety-split. There is somebody has actually explained that as well. Supposedly, right after the moon landing, a guy named Ralph Renee points out that the U.S. started sending very secret humanitarian aid massive amounts of grain to the Soviet Union very quietly. And basically, we wouldn't normally do that through our normal policy. We had no reason to send them humanitarian aid. They were our greatest enemy. But we're doing it secretly. And if we were doing it, wouldn't we have said, hey, you know, we're helping out our enemy because we're all humans,

that kind of thing. It wouldn't have been more public. It's kind of a tenuous argument, but it's something to chew over, right? True. That could have kept the Russians quiet. I say no to that, Josh. You know, you're starting to whimmy over a joke. But you said one reason that this whole thing would have been faked, the moon landing would have been faked, was because of the space race, the Cold War. What about money? Well, true. It would have cost a lot of money to put in. In fact, it did cost a lot of money to put someone on the moon. Yeah, from 1958 to 2008, by my calculations, NASA's gotten about $750 billion in change and funding over those over the 50 year period. That's a big slush fund, if you think about it.

It is. It's just like you have no money to account for any longer. It's in space. True. That's our bailout right there. In 1980, cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami. Miami had become the murder capital of the United States. They were making millions of dollars. I would categorize it as the Wild Wild West. Unleashing a wave of violence. My God, took a walk into the devil's den. The car kills. They just killed everybody that was home. They start pulling out pictures of Clay Williams' body taken out in the Everglades. A world orbiting around a mysterious man with a controversial claim. This drug pilot by the name of Lamar Chester. He never ran anything but grass until I turned

over that load of coke to him on the island. Chester would claim he did it all for the CIA. Pulling many into a sprawling federal investigation. So Clay wasn't the only person who was murdered? Oh no, not by a long shot. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Join me for murder in Miami. Listen to Murder in Miami on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1968, five black girls dressed in oversized military fatigues were picked up by the police in Montgomery, Alabama. I was tired and just didn't want to take it anymore. The girls had run away from a reform school called the Alabama Industrial School for Negro

Children, and they were determined to tell someone about the abuse they'd suffered there. Picture the worst environment for children that you possibly can. I believe Mt. Mags was patterned after slavery. I didn't understand why I had to go through what I was going through and for what. I'm writer and reporter Josie Duffy Rice, and in a new podcast, I investigate how this reform school went from being a safe haven for black kids to a nightmare, and how those five black girls changed everything. All that on Unreformed. Listen to Unreformed on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 1972, toward the end of the Vietnam War, and then all of a sudden, if you look at

NASA's funding year by year, it drops in half for about a decade until it started up again in the 80s when you and I were very interested in it as youngsters. So does the tail wag the dog, Josh, or does the dog wag the tail? I can't answer that, but speaking of wag the dog, if it was faked, think about how many people were greased by the CIA right after they played their role as like a production assistant or a director or something like that. You mean greased as in paid offers and killed? Yeah, I mean killed. Waxed. Right. Yeah. But again, why isn't this solved? So we stopped going to the moon,

or we stopped landing on the moon after 1972. We haven't been back, but we have sent some, lunar orbiters around the moon with really great cameras. So why don't we just say, here is the lunar lander, dummy, and here are the footprints, dummy. Why aren't we doing that? You know why? Because it's not worth the money to do that, right? No, they're actually going around the moon, and they're taking photos of the moon's surface, and they're going over it. The problem is the camera resolution, which are these incredible cameras, are still not picking up. They don't have the resolution to pick up these objects on

the moon's surface. Yeah. Sounds shady to me. It does sound a little shady. So we'll see. There's a few out there right now. India has the Chandrayaan, I believe, is the pronunciation orbiter. Japan has the Kaguya orbiter. My Japanese is rusty. That sounds good to me. And then the US is the lunar reconnaissance orbiter. They're all orbiting the moon right now, and they all possibly have good enough cameras to send back photos of the Apollo moon landings.

Well, hopefully that happens one day. Yeah. So... You can just put this to bed once and for all. Put it to rest. Again, I still think people just say, well, they fake those. True. You know? Yeah, that's a good point. We've got India in our pockets. So that's it?

While not quite. Well, you want to... Oh, no, you got to... No, you have reader mail. Yes. So you want to let the moon landing conspiracy one just kind of peter out? Sure. Fade into the counts. How about a moment of silence? Okay. All right. Listener mail time.

Listener mail time. Josh, I'm going to call this one exceptional fan mail, as I like to do. Nice. No, is this... This isn't stuff we should have known? No, no, no. This is an actual really kind of a cool story from Ben in Ontario, Canada. And you're going to remember this one, Josh. This is a good one. This guy listened to our Exorcism podcast and was talking about a positive possession, a beneficial possession, and he has a story about himself.

And I'm going to summarize this. Oh, yeah, Ben. Yeah, Ben says 11 years ago he was in a bad bicycle accident and came between two buses and was hit by a car. He was running into high school. He says... That is a bad bicycle accident. Yeah.

He said he was fully conscious afterwards, even though I went over my handlebars and hit my head on the hood of the car. I was fully aware of the situation and what happened, but he was told he was completely coherent in the ambulance and in the ER with the nurses, even okay with his parents, when he brought him home several hours later. They put him to bed and 30 minutes later he woke back up and didn't remember any of it. And it took him a full hour to even find out what had happened to him. So Ben says, I believe during this short time that I was actually possessed by the Egyptian

God Horus, H-O-R-U-S. I think that's the one with the dog's head, if I'm not mistaken. Oh really? I think so. Okay. So he was possessed by Horus or an ancient priest from the temple of Horus. This took control of him and kept his brain from shutting down and having more damage than it did. I know there are other medical explanations as to what happened.

Heavy impacts can cause a short-term memory to wipe out, etc. However, this is the belief that I have about it and it's backed up to me by the fact this is where it gets good. By about two years later he went to an optometrist and he found marks on the lower outer edge of his eyes. And there are similar marks in paintings of the eyes of Horus. And the doctor could not explain this. He'd never seen it before and could not explain how it happened.

So maybe I'm just crazy, but I know some people will think that, but it's what I believe happened to me. And Ben, I wrote you back already. We don't think you're crazy. Right. We think that anyone that thinks they had this whole big cosmic soup figured out, doesn't know what they're talking about and that who knows, you could have very well been possessed by Horus as far as I know.

Here, here, Chuck. And that's a thanks for sharing your story. Yeah, thanks for opening up for us, Ben. And anybody else who'd like to do the same, whether or not you believe yourself to have been possessed by a benevolent spirit or such, or if you just want to say hi, either one, you can send an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Misha Collins, The Walking Dead's Melissa Ponzio, and Rogue One's Alan Tudyk, written by Lauren Shippen and created by me, Aaron Mankey. Listen to Bridgewater on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.