Dark Side of the Moon

Are you sure we went to the moon 25 years ago? Positive? Millions of Americans believe the moonlandings may have been a 20-billion-dollar swindle, perpetrated by NASA with the latest in communications technology and the best in special effects. A mad dash through the combat zone between heated conspiracy believers and exasperated NASA officials.

"Columbia, he has landed Tranquility Base. Eagle is at Tranquility. I read you five by. Over." The voice from Houston betrayed no emotion, although this was anything but business as usual. A human being was about to set foot on the moon for the first time in history, armed only with the Stars and Stripes, some scientific instruments, and an almost reckless can-do demeanour that had captivated the world.

The reply from Columbia, the command and service module that had released the lunar lander two hours and thirty-three minutes earlier, was equally professional. "Yes, I heard the whole thing," Michael Collins said matter-of-factly.

Houston: "Well, it’s a good show."

Columbia: "Fantastic."

That’s when Neil Armstrong chimed in. "Yeah, I’ll second that", the 38-year-old astronaut - the moonwalker-to-be, America’s own Boy Scout, the most famous man in the, well, universe - said slowly. And even though the static ate away at the clarity of his consonants, his sneering tone came through loud and clear. The mission control man heard it, too. And he knew what was coming.

Sort of.

"A fantastic show," Armstrong said. "The greatest show on earth, huh, guys?"

There was a moment’s silence. Then a cameraman sniggered. And the director sighed, and did what directors do when actors screw up their lines. Cut, he groaned. He was a heavyset man in his fifties, and the combination of the long hours and the hot studio lights started to get to him.

"Shit, Armstrong, if you’re gonna be a smart-ass, do it on your own time, alright? We got twenty-five tired people on this set. We got a billion people who are going to be watching your every move only a week from now. We’re on a deadline here. Now, do you suppose you could just stick to the script and get it over with? Thank you."

His assistant stepped forward with the slate. "Apollo moonlanding, scene 769/A22, take three," she announced.

"Action!"

"Columbia, he has landed Tranquility Base," the mission control man began again.

 

Giant Leap or Giant Lie?

The history books lie. So do the encyclopaedias and the commemorative videos and the 26-year-old coffee mugs with the proudly smiling faces of Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins. When Armstrong got down from that ladder, proclaiming that it was only a small step for him, but a giant leap for mankind, he was merely setting foot on a dust-covered sound stage in a top-secret TV studio in the Nevada desert. NASA’s cold warriors and spin doctors faked the whole moon landing. Come to think of it, they faked all six moon landings - spending around twenty-five billion dollars to prove to the world that not even the Soviets, especially not the Soviets, could hold a candle to the United States when it came to space exploration.

Well, at least, that’s writer Bill Kaysing’s view. It’s also the persuasion of millions of Americans who have learned to distrust their government with a passion. Most of these people don’t even appear to be steamed about the alleged superfraud. They shrug and throw up their hands and go about their business. Not Kaysing. He has never heard a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, and this one tops ‘em all. For almost twenty years now, he has been trying to get out "the most electrifying news story of the entire 20th century and possibly of all time." He has written a book aptly titled "We Never Went To the Moon," of which he claims to have sold 30,000 copies. Kaysing, of course, is not saying that only Apollo 13 never made it - that’s an undisputed fact, and the Apollo 13 movie, he concedes, is largely truthful. He’s saying every single mission was a scam.

A white-haired, gentle Californian whose energy level seems mercifully untouched by his 73 years, Kaysing worked as head of technical publications for the Rocketdyne Research Department at their Santa Susana facility from 1956 to 1963. Rocketdyne was the engine contractor for Apollo.

"NASA couldn’t make it to the moon, and they knew it," asserts Kaysing, who, after begging out of the "corporate rat race," became a freelance author of books and newsletters. "In the late fifties, when I was at Rocketdyne, they did a feasibility study on astronauts landing on the moon. They found that the chance of success was something like .0017 percent. In other words, it was hopeless." As late as 1967, Kaysing reminds me, three astronauts died in a horrendous fire on the launch pad. "It’s also well-documented that NASA was often badly managed and had poor quality control. But as of ‘69, we could suddenly perform manned flight upon manned flight? With complete success? It’s just against all odds." John F. Kennedy wasn’t convinced the endeavour was next to impossible at all. In fact, he had publicly announced in May 1961 that "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth" would be a number one priority for the U.S., an accomplishment that was to instill pride in Americans and awe in the rest of the world. And so, Kaysing believes, NASA faked it, acting in accordance with the old adage that in a war, the truth is often the first casualty. (Cold wars, he and his fellow conspiracy believers say, are no exception).

To hear him tell it, NASA had good reason to stage moonlanding after moonlanding, instead of simply admitting that lunar strolls would have to remain the stuff of science fiction novels for a while. "They wanted the money to keep pouring in. I’ve worked in aerospace long enough to know that’s their goal."

 

First Virtual Community

There is an almost instinctive rejoinder to all of this: but we saw it. If television ever had a killer app, the moonlanding was it. We bought new sets in droves, and flicked them on as zero hour approached, and, miraculously, felt ourselves being locked into an intangible but very real oneness with a billion other people. It was our first taste of a virtual community. Cultures docking. It felt good. And now there’s this guy telling us that it was all a lie? C’mon. His rockets are a little loose. What proof does he have anyway?

Kaysing points out numerous anomalies in NASA publications, and in the TV and still pictures that came from the moon. For example, there are no stars in many of the photographs taken on the lunar surface. With no atmosphere to diffuse their light, wouldn’t stars have to be clearly visible? And why is there no discernible crater beneath the lunar lander, despite the jet of its 10,000 lb thrust hypergolic engine? How do NASA’s experts explain pictures of astronauts on the moon in which their sides and backs are just as well lit as the front of their spacesuits - which is inconsistent with the deep, black shadows the harsh sunlight should be casting? And why is there a line between a sharp foreground and a blurry background in some of the pictures, almost as if special effects makers had used a so-called matte painting’ to simulate the farther reaches of the moonscape? "It all points to an unprecedented swindle," Kaysing concludes confidently.

But just how could NASA possibly have pulled it off? How about the TV pictures that billions of people saw over the course of six successful missions; the rocket lifting off from the Cape Kennedy launch pad under the watchful eye of hundreds of thousands of spectators; the capsule with the crew returning to earth; the moonrocks; the hundreds, perhaps thousands of space program employees in the know who would have to be relied upon to take the incredible secret to their graves?

Easy, says Kaysing. The rockets took off all right, with the astronauts on board, but as soon as they were out of sight, the roaring spacecraft set course for the south polar sea, jettisoned its crew, and crashed. Later, the crew and the command module were put in a military plane and dropped in the Pacific for recovery’ by an aircraft carrier. (Kaysing claims that he talked with an airline pilot who, en route from San Francisco to Tokyo, saw the Apollo 15 command module sliding out of an unidentified cargo plane, but he can’t provide the captain’s name or the name of the airline.) The moonrocks were made in a NASA geology lab, right here on earth, he goes on. Not very many people on the Apollo project knew about the hoax, as they were only informed on a need-to-know basis. Cash bonuses, promotions, or veiled threats could have ensured the silence of those who were in on the whole scheme.

 

Zero Gravity

Kaysing is not alone in his assertion that NASA has been, um, mooning the public. Bill Brian, a 45-year-old Oregonian who fathered a 1982 book called "Moongate," agrees that there is "some sort of cover-up." Although Brian thinks that his fellow investigator may very well be right in saying that we never went to the moon, he believes there is an entirely different reason for many of the inconsistencies they have found. Maybe we did go, he says, but it’s possible we reached the moon with the aid of a secret zero gravity device that NASA probably back-engineered by copying parts of a captured extraterrestrial spaceship. Brian, who has B.S. and M.S. degrees in Nuclear Engineering from Oregon State University (although he now holds a job as a policy and procedures writer at a utility company), uses his "mathematical and conceptual skills" to reason that the moon’s gravity is actually similar to earth’s, and that most likely, the moon has an atmosphere after all. He has crammed the appendices of his book with complex calculations to prove these points, but he trusts his intuition too: "The NASA transcripts [of the communication between the astronauts and Mission Control] read as if they’re carefully scripted. The accounts all have a very strange flavour to them, as if the astronauts weren’t really there."

But why in the world would NASA feel compelled to cover up knowledge of a high-gravity moon? "It’s a cascading string of events," explains Brian. "You can’t let one bit of information out without blowing the whole thing. They’d have to explain the propulsion technique that got them there, so they’d have to divulge their UFO research. And if they could tap this energy, that would imply the oil cartels are at risk, and the very structure of our world economy could collapse. They didn’t want to run that risk."

And there’s yet another book whose author seeks to cast doubt on NASA’s lunar quest: "Was It Only A Paper Moon," by Ralph René, ‘a scientist and patented inventor.’ Published by tiny Victoria House Press in New York, ‘Paper Moon’ supposedly presents the latest scientific findings. René offers data that suggest, among other things, that without an impractical shield of about two meters thick, the spacemen "would have been cooked by radiation" during the journey. Ergo, the lunar endeavours were impossible and, therefore, cynically faked at the expense of gullible people everywhere.

Other conspiracy buffs don’t doubt that men walked on the moon, but call the fact irrelevant because extraterrestrials made it there ages ago - and NASA knows it and has preferred to keep it a secret. In his brand new book "Extraterrestrial Archaeology," David Hatcher Childress points out various unexplained structures on the moon, and argues that these might be archaeological remnants of intelligent civilisations. Childress also doesn’t rule out the possibility that aliens still use the moon as a base, as a convenient stepping stone for their trips to our planet. This might even mean, enthuses the author, that the moon is really "a spaceship with an inner metallic-rock shell beneath miles of dirt and dust and rock."

 

Schoolchildren and Congressmen

Although very few Americans subscribe to such grandiose theories, millions of people doubt the authenticity of the lunar missions, much to NASA’s exasperation. Over the years, the agency’s public services department went through reams of paper answering incredulous schoolchildren, teachers, librarians - and even Senators like Alan Cranston and Strom Thurmond, who had written to NASA relaying the doubts of some of their constituents. As many as 100 million Americans, says Kaysing, are inclined to disbelieve the whole lunar adventure. Like many of his statements, that one should be taken with a grain of salt. That "almost half the people who phoned in to radio and TV shows" he has been on supported him is hardly irrefutable proof. A newspaper chain polled more than 1,700 U.S. residents a year after the first moonlanding, and found that more than thirty percent of the respondents were suspicious of NASA’s trips to the moon. A conservative estimate by James Oberg, a Kaysing nemesis, still puts the number of disbeliever’s at 10 to 25 million Americans.

Oberg works for NASA contractor Rockwell as a space flight operations engineer with the Shuttle program. He writes as a second profession, covering all aspects of space activity, with a special interest in space folklore. Myths have a way of blossoming on the fertile soil of scientific discovery, Oberg notes. "Every age of exploration is the same in that respect - from the time of the Phoenicians to Jason and the Argonauts, to Marco Polo, to mermaids and unipeds and all these mythological creatures that lurk at the edge of our exploration. To me, it’s extremely humanising, to have this typically human reaction - this denial, this mythmaking - to our lunar adventure. I’m not at all surprised that these stories or interpretations exist. Actually, I’m surprised they aren’t more widespread."

Nonetheless, hoax believers can be found in many parts of society, here and abroad. According to Oberg, Cuban children are officially taught that Yankee space technology failed miserably and that NASA was reduced to pitifully faking every single lunar landing. Some new agers also contest the possibility of moonlandings, as do Hare Krishnas. The same is true for many fundamentalist Muslims, and for non-mainstream Christians such as the folks at the Flat Earth Society, who liken the towering launch pads to the tower of Babel.

The eccentricity of such convictions does little to deter James Oberg. "I respect these people’s dedication to their view of the world. One reason they fascinate me is because they’re a constant reminder to me that we can’t rest on common knowledge, we can’t be complacent with our traditional interpretations of things - even though these interpretations are almost always right. But I also find their pathology of reasoning, or non-reasoning, compelling. We define health by the boundaries of pathology, and I try and define rational thought by looking at cases that go over the edge."

That’s damning praise indeed, and it’s no surprise that Bill Kaysing doesn’t much care for Oberg, whom he dismisses as "a NASA agent."

 

Was Seeing Believing?

If NASA had really wanted to fake the moonlandings - we’re talking purely hypothetical here - the timing was certainly right. The advent of television, having reached worldwide critical mass only years prior to the moonlanding, was instrumental in the fraud’s success; in this case, seeing really was believing. The ‘magic’ of satellites, with their ability to enable live global (and interplanetary?) communication, fascinated and awed millions of people, much like anything ‘atomic’ had caught the public’s fancy ten, fifteen years earlier. There was also the fact that space research and (rocket) science had advanced far enough to make a trip to the moon likely - or, at the very least, remotely feasible. "The structural nature of technology had changed to make the moonlanding possible, but that also made it possible for people to doubt it," says Gary Fine, a University of Athens, Georgia, sociology professor specialising in rumour and contemporary legend.

Perhaps more important, Watergate hadn’t happened yet, and people still trusted their elected officials. "A distrust of authority clearly plays into this whole thing," argues Fred Fedler, who teaches journalism at the University of Central Florida and has written a book on media hoaxes. "With Vietnam and Watergate, people have become less trusting, and to some people it doesn’t matter what the government says; their immediate reaction is to disbelieve and to sometimes embrace the opposite view."

The distrust continues to be fed by the mass media, especially in the film and TV business. It is rare to find a movie in which a government agency is actually depicted as a bunch of fairly efficient, competent people who serve their country to the best of their ability. Dramatically speaking, an elite of sinister, evil bureaucrats is much more appealing. Linda Degh, a retired folklorist who taught at Bloomington University in Indiana, and who has published a 1993 book titled "American Folklore and Mass Media," is reminded of "Capricorn One." Released in 1978, the film tells the story of a staged flight to Mars. The astronauts grapple with the moral implications of the giant charade, and fear they might be killed to keep them from blowing the whistle. Sure enough, they find themselves hunted down by bloodthirsty government thugs; only one of the astronauts makes it to freedom and reporter’s microphones. Degh recalls that it was "quite a slanderous movie, pretending that the government had been killing people," and she believes that it must have given a powerful boost to the moonlanding hoax theory. "The mass media catapult these half-truths into a kind of twilight zone where people can make their guesses sound as truths. Mass media have a terrible impact on people who lack guidance."

 

Totally Ludicrous

Peter Hyams, Capricorn One’s director, agrees that mass media can be very powerful - dangerously so, in fact. "My parents believed that if it was in the New York Times, it was true. I was part of the generation that grew up believing that if we saw it on television, it was true. And I learned how inaccurate newspapers were, and I realised that TV is just as inaccurate, or it can be. So I said, wouldn’t it be interesting if you took a major event where the only source that people have is a television screen, and you showed how easy it would be to manipulate everybody." Hyams insists that he made Capricorn One "for entertainment, for fun," not because he was making not-so-veiled references to the alleged Apollo hoax. "I was aware that there were people who believed that we never walked on the moon, but I never read their books or consulted with them. And frankly, I think they are being totally ludicrous." (Nevertheless, an invitation to a sneak preview screening at the time of Capricorn One’s release said: "Would you be shocked to find out that the greatest moment of our recent history may not have happened at all?")

The concept of the moon swindle holds a certain appeal to other film makers as well. In "Diamonds Are Forever" (1971), James Bond accidentally stumbles onto a movie set in Nevada that consists of rocks, a lunar backdrop, and a vehicle that looks like NASA’s Eagle. Men in spacesuits move about slowly and clumsily, as if simulating low gravity. Bond’s pursuers give chase, but 007 - stirred, but not shaken - climbs into the lunar lander and makes his escape over land. The scene is never explained. In the hi-tech thriller "Sneakers" (1992), Dan Ackroyd’s character, a gadgeteer and conspiracy enthusiast, refers to the moonlanding by casually remarking that he is using "an XLT71 concealable mike, part of the same system NASA used to fake the moonlanding." And a small Bay Area production company with a big name, Independent Film and Video Productions, is working on an as yet untitled fiction film in which a writer "puts two and two together," and discovers that the moonlandings may have been simulated - and then nearly gets killed in his quest for the truth.

 

Simulating One-Sixth Gravity

Technically speaking, could the moonlandings have been faked? Was the state of special effects advanced enough in the late sixties to fool even the most discriminating eye? Simulating one-sixth gravity could have been done with the use of hydraulic cranes and thin wires - the Peter Pan approach - or by filming scenes under water, says Dennis Muren. Muren, an eight-time Oscar winner, is the senior visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, a division of Lucas Digital. He was responsible for making the Jurassic Park monsters come alive, and for every scene in Terminator 2, the Star Wars movies, and The Abyss that either grossed you out or scared the wits out of you. "[A moonlanding simulation] might have looked pretty real to 99.9 percent of the people. The thing is, though, that it wouldn’t have looked the way it did. I’ve always been acutely aware of what’s fake and what’s real, and the moonlandings were definitely real," boasts Muren. "Look at 2001 or Destination Moon or Capricorn One or any other space movie: everybody was wrong. That wasn’t the way the moon looked at all. There was a very unusual sheen to the images from the moon, in the way that the light reflected in the camera, that is literally out of this world. Nobody could have faked that. And it’s got very little to do with advanced technology or computing power. That wouldn’t have been a problem. What I’m talking about is aesthetic."

Of course, Bill Kaysing will have none of it: "Perhaps [Muren] was part of the cover-up. Anything is possible." Kaysing likes to quote Alvin Toffler: "He writes that most people are producer/consumers - he calls them prosumers. They go through life not questioning anything, not knowing anything. Ninety percent of the American population has no idea what’s going on in this country. I’d like to be the one to tell them - tell them at least part of it. I’m either going to share the truth about the moon with them, or I am going to die trying."

 

Sidebar 1: NASA Bites Back

Q: So, how come there is no crater beneath the lunar lander?

A: "Although the descent engine of the LM is powerful, most of its operation takes place thousands of feet above the moon during the early stages of the landing," says a NASA information sheet. "At the moment of touchdown, a small amount of surface dust is blown away, but the relatively cohesive lunar surface seems to deflect the blast sideways."

Q: Why is there an artificial-looking line between a sharp foreground and a blurry background in some of the pictures of the lunar surface?

A: "What you see is simply the curvature of the moon," explains Paul Lowman, a NASA geologist. "Because the moon is such a small body, the curvature horizon is only two or three miles away from eye level. That sharp line you see in some pictures is the visible horizon. The blurry part you see are mountains sticking up from beyond the horizon."

Q: Why are there no stars in many of the photographs taken on the moon?

A: "That’s one of Kaysing’s sillier arguments," says James Oberg, a space flight operations engineer with the Shuttle program who works for NASA contractor Rockwell. "Go out at night and take a picture of yourself under a streetlight. Even if there’s a star-studded sky, you’ll see no stars in your picture because the camera was set to properly expose that big lighted object in the foreground - you - and will not register much weaker light sources."

Q: How about the various lighting anomalies?

A: "On some pictures, astronauts are lit from more than one side because the sunlight is reflected off the lunar surface or off the landing vehicle," a NASA spokesperson says. Paul Lowman adds that some conspiracy believers are unknowingly or deliberately using pictures of astronauts that NASA never claimed were taken on the moon. "There are pictures being passed on and published in their circles that appeared in pre-moonlanding issues of Aviation Week - nothing mysterious about them," Lowman sighs. "These are photographs taken in a moonlike training facility at the Johnson Space Center where, indeed, there were several sources of light."

 

Sidebar 2: Moon Hoaxes in History

Tall Tale #1

Not to rain on anyone’s parade - but a balloon-faring Dutchman walked on the moon some 140 years before Neil Armstrong did. In the "Southern Literary Messenger" of June 1835, Edgar Allan Poe published the first instalment of that prodigious fable, which he unsuccessfully tried to pass off as a genuine news story.

Fed up with his miserable life in Rotterdam, one Hans Pfaall, an unemployed bellows mender, secretly built a giant balloon. His goal: "to force a passage, if I could, to the moon." He gambled that he would gradually get accustomed to the very high altitudes. Pfaall took off on April 1, and, because of the thinning atmosphere, soon suffered spasms and began bleeding from the ears, nose and eyes. He made it though: after nineteen days in space, the Flying Dutchman landed in a crowd of ugly little moon people, who "stood like a parcel of idiots, grinning in a ludicrous manner, and eyeing me and my balloon askant, with their arms set akimbo."

Despite the awkward welcome, the world’s first astronaut lived among the unsightly critters for five years, then wrote a letter to the Mayor of Rotterdam in which he described some of his experiences and negotiated his return. A lunar messenger whom Pfaall had entrusted with the missive did reach the city (by balloon, of course), but couldn’t be persuaded to land; after dropping off the letter, he disappeared into the heavens without waiting for a reply - no doubt, Poe muses, "frightened to death by the savage appearance of the residents of Rotterdam."

 

Tall Tale #2

Imagine a telescope lens with a diameter of twenty-four feet and a weight of almost 15,000 pounds. With it, you could see insects on the moon. Okay, so there is no life on the moon - but that’s not what the readers of the New York Sun were told. In August 1835, the penny paper reported the findings’ of the British astronomer Sir John Herschel. In a six-part series, reporter Richard Adams Locke wrote that the famed scientist, using a huge custom-built telescope in a planetarium at the Cape of Good Hope, had spotted many spectacular species on the moon. Among them: horned bears; tailless beavers; and four-feet-tall ape-like creatures with thick beards and large wings. Locke referred to them as "bat-men." Actually, there were plenty of bat-women too, and the two sexes engaged freely in behaviour that Locke declined to describe, except to say that it would have been "improper" on earth.

Herschel was a legitimate, respected scientist who remained unaware of his fictional discoveries for months. When word of Locke’s elaborate yarn reached him, he reportedly laughed and tried to expose the hoax - to little avail. Other newspapers, especially European ones, breathlessly presented the bat-men story as fact. They were perhaps unaware that the Sun had issued an unapologetic confession within a month of Locke’s shenanigans, boasting that the story had entertained the public and hoodwinked the experts - and had sold untold scores of extra copies.

 

Tall Tale #3

On June 20, 1977, Anglia TV in England caused a nation-wide stir when it broadcast a documentary called Alternative 3. By linking facts with half-truths, and by staging interviews with astronomers’ and astronauts,’ the makers suggested that NASA’s space program and the Cold War were a decoy. The power elite in the USSR, the U.S. and Great Britain had in fact been working together on a secret project - Alternative 3 - that had established bases on the moon and on Mars, so that they could escape the coming ecological nightmare on earth. Insiders who were deemed a security risk were callously murdered. Scientists had been abducted to do fieldwork in the space colonies. Even ordinary folks had been snatched and forced into slave labour on the moon, and on the red planet.

Surprise! It was all a hoax, made clear by the closing credits that listed the actors on the show, and that contained a copyright notice dated April 1.’ Nonetheless, Anglia was flooded with calls, and newspaper headlines reported "Shock" and "Panic." To this day, some people believe that all of it, or some of it, is true, as evidenced by a recent book on the subject, Jim Keith’s "Casebook on Alternative 3."