Conspiracy Classics: Apollo Moon Missions

Between 1969 and 1972, six crews of Apollo astronauts landed on the moon. They collected rocks, played golf, planted a flag and drove around in a lunar buggy.

Or maybe they just did all that in studios either in Nevada or California, and no human being has ever set foot on the moon.

That NASA hoodwinked the American public for years, spending billions of dollars on space exploration, and yet never meeting John F. Kennedy's goal to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, is one of the most famous conspiracy theories, ever.

Thirty-nine years ago this past Sunday, 20 July, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were supposed to have walked on the moon, put the ol' Stars & Stripes into the surface and leave a commemorative bronze plaque that they had "come in peace" to the lunar realm. Did Armstrong really take that "small step for a man," or did the government and/or New World Order dupe us again?

Why do it? To impress the Soviets during the Cold War, for one. Another reason is to justify the space program and the billions of taxpayer dollars required.

William Kaysing and Ralph Rene are two of the leading moon hoax conspiracy theorists.

Kaysing (1922-2005) could be called the "father" of the moon hoax theory. He was a Navy veteran and later technical writer and analyst at Rocketdyne, a NASA contractor, where he said he looked at numerous documents linked to the Apollo, Mercury, Gemini and Atlas programs. He concluded, after sorting through all those files, that NASA had created one gigantic hoax. In 1974 he published a book, We Never Went to the Moon, in which he lays out why he thought the Apollo missions were bogus. His daughter maintains a Web site with this book and many others here.

Rene describes himself as "a mostly self taught 'extra bright kid from the slums.' " He also has been an inventor, tradesman and small press publisher. He turned to researching and writing after the onset of athritis limited his capability for physical labor. He wrote and self-published NASA Mooned America!, another text which tries to prove that no one has ever seen the moon in person. Rene is also a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, and his Web site can be accessed here.

Other hoax theorists are filmmakers David Bradley and Bart Sibrel. Sibrel, based in Tennessee, made two movies, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon and Astronauts Gone Wild. Both are sold by a site called Moon Landing Hoax. In the second film, Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin actually punched Sibrel after he confronted him, demanding that Aldrin swear on a Bible that he landed on the moon. In fact, most astronauts Sibrel has confronted have become angry when he questions their moon experiences.

David Bradley is English and connected to the Aulis Web site that explores not only space travel but also the origins of humankind. Bradley wrote and produced the documentary What Happened on the Moon?, which questions the Apollo programs. Being a filmmaker-photographer, much of the DVD covers analysis of film and photos to show how NASA faked the moon landings.

Here is a summary of the main points of contention of Kaysing, Rene and other moon conspiracy theorists:

• Computers in 1969 had a total memory capability of 256,000 bytes, about the equivalent of a pocket calculator, and were giant machines that took up an entire room. The Apollo 11 computer was supposed to have 32,000 bytes of memory. Somehow this machine expertly pushed a rocket through the atmosphere, flew men 240,000 miles to the moon, landed and then came back.
• The film and photos released by NASA and broadcast on the TV networks were doctored, sometimes sloppily. One of the most commonly cited photos is a picture of a rock with a letter "C" on it, near a letter "C" on the ground, as if marking a place on a movie set.
• The photographs and film are perfectly focused and framed almost every single time.
  
• How was Neil Armstrong filmed coming out of the lunar module when he was the first man ever to set foot on the moon?
  
• The Van Allen belts of radiation around the earth are so lethal that people would be killed leaving the atmosphere, and the lunar crafts did not have adequate shielding or materials to protect the astronauts. In addition, the space suits the astronauts wore also were not sufficient to protect them from the moon's temperature extremes and radiation.
  
• There were no stars in any of the photos or films of men on the moon.
• The moon atmosphere is a vacuum, and yet film of the flag planted into the surface show it flapping and waving.
• Shadows of astronauts and objects are inconsistent with the light sources that would have been on the moon.
• Film and cameras subjected to the moon's environment would have destroyed them due to its harsh nature, such as radiation and temperature swings. Ordinary cameras by Hasselblad of Sweden, and Kodak Ektrachrome film, were taken on the missions.

Conspiracy theorists say that the astronauts ever never went up in the Apollo rockets, or if they did, they never left earth's orbit. The moon landings and explorations were filmed in advance in a studio, allegedly in either Nevada's Area 51 or even at The Walt Disney Co, and with help from Hollywood; Stanley Kubrick has been implicated because he directed 2001: A Space Odyssey. NASA's TETR-A satellite was probably used to broadcast communications back and forth between astronauts and Houston to create the illusion that they were on the moon. After a few days orbiting the earth, the astronauts splashed down in the ocean to complete that illusion.

In addition, all those moon rocks were really collected in Antartica and then irradiated to make them seem as if they came from space, or were meteorites. One theorist claimed that Wernher von Braun, head of the NASA rocket program (and formerly of the Nazi rocket one, too) went to the South Pole shortly before Apollo 11 and collected a bunch of meteorites to use in the phony mission.

One awful theory proposed by Moon Landing Hoax, a maker of conspiracy DVDs, is that the launchpad fire of January 1967 that killed Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger B. Chaffee was actually a homicide. Apparently Grissom was going to go to the press and tell the truth about moon hoaxing, so NASA put out a contract on him and his colleagues. Grissom put a lemon in the window of the Apollo capsule as a sign of his betrayal, the site says. Later Chaffee's wife Pat committed suicide, which is alleged to also be actually a murder, so they were all being silenced!

One question, and one I ask about all conspiracy theories, is if there were thousands of people involved in NASA space programs, how have they been able to keep this "truth" secret all these decades?

Moon Landing Hoax has made about seven DVDs about the moon hoaxes, and it gives the best answer to this: perhaps only a couple hundred people knew about the moon fakery and cover-up, and everyone else was in the dark and honestly believed like most of the public that we did go that deeply into space. Further, the idea that multiple teams were assigned to many, many different small moon projects was a way that the hoaxers kept any one employee from knowing too much about the missions. The full body of knowledge was open only to a select few at NASA and the U.S. government.

Another page I found that nicely summarized the allegations against NASA are on this, of all things, a British Web site, on this page. One of the more intriguing claims is that some Australians were the very first viewers of the 1969 mission films, and one woman said while watching Neil Armstrong walking around, she actually saw a glass Coca-Cola bottle in the right hand of the picture! Several others said they saw the soft drink bottle, enough to be covered by a local newspaper. When the footage was rebroadcast in North America, of course there was no Coke bottle on the moon.

In 1978, Hollywood released a movie about a variation of this conspiracy theory called Capricorn One. Three astronauts are coerced into filming a fake Mars mission over several months. The government then decides to kill off the astronauts after their capsule burns up in space, in order to make the illusion appear real. One of the astronauts, strangely enough, was O.J. Simpson years before his infamy (the other astronauts were Sam Waterston and James Brolin). It appears this movie will be remade for release in 2010. No doubt the moon conspiracy theories inspired these movies.

Conspiracy Classics: TWA Flight 800

Twelve years ago today, a routine flight from New York to Paris became anything but when it plunged 2-1/2 miles out of the sky and into the Atlantic Ocean, near the shore of Long Island, New York.

At 8:02 p.m. on Wednesday, 17 July 1996, TWA Flight 800 took off from Kennedy International Airport, with 212 passengers, 14 flight attendants, two flight engineers and two pilots. Among the passengers were business professionals and young students headed for a cultural exchange in France. The flight was supposed to last seven hours and land at Charles de Gaulle International Airport. At 8:32 p.m., the Boeing 747-100 exploded in a massive fireball and rocketed toward into the ocean.

The remains of all 230 aboard were recovered, along with 95 percent of the plane's debris. The National Transportation Safety Board conducted the usual investigation that follows crashes, concluding that the explosion originated in the central fuel tank. The NTSB interviewed 670 eyewitnesses, analyzed the cockpit voice and data recorders and examined the debris, which today is still kept in a hangar in Viriginia and used to train aviation accident investigators.

Where conspiracy theorists see a cover-up or lack of truth is in the explanation of what caused the jet to blow up and drop like a rock out of the sky.

The two main organizations for Flight 800 truth on the Web are The Flight 800 Investigation and Flight 800 Independent Investigators Association. Flight 800 Investigation is the Associated Retired Aviation Professionals and was formed in early 1997. Membership consists of "former military, civilian, and aviation professionals who are committed to independently investigating the mysterious crash."

The Independent Researchers group was formed in 1999 by "citizens concerned with the course of the official investigation into the crash of TWA Flight 800 ... ," and says that "...during the investigation, the FBI unlawfully denied the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) access to forensic results and eyewitness interview documents."

Conspiracy theorists believe the U.S. government covered up the actual cause of the crash. The most common theory is that Flight 800 was shot down by a missile, either by the U.S. Navy during a training exercise on the night of the crash, or by terrorists wielding a shoulder firing missile launcher. A second theory is that a bomb made it aboard the jet and caused the disaster.

Many witnesses, first to media on the scene and later to the NTSB, said they saw a streak of light or a flash moving toward the jet before the explosion. This serves as the main basis for the missile theory. People described the object as a red streak or flare moving toward the plane, that there was horizontal travel and that it turned in midair before striking the aircraft, as noted on this page.

The page also notes that the Navy later admitted there were three submarines in the Long Island area, all equipped with missiles. Another page on Hidden Mysteries quotes James Sanders' book on the disaster that the Navy was in the area on 17 July 1996, testing a new secret missile system.

Hidden Mysteries also presents a letter sent by a retired Navy officer that he and a team had assembled evidence that Flight 800 had been downed by a shoulder fired missile. Known as a MANPAD, or Man Portable Air Defense System, this device dates to the 1950s and can shoot a surface to air missile at an airborne object. In this post-9/11 environment, the greatest concern is of MANPADs being used by terrorists to knock out planes, particularly those of the United States and its allies. Flight 800 Investigation notes that the FIM-92 Stinger MANPAD could have easily taken out the TWA jet, if indeed terrorists had caused the explosion and the crash.

The NTSB investigation concluded there were no explosives aboard the jet, but even mainstream media, such as The New York Times and CNN, carried reports that explosive residue was found on the wreckage. Their explanation? It was left behind by bomb sniffing dogs that had gone through the plane.

Some CT's have declared something was even more sinister about the flight, that perhaps Bill Clinton and Al Gore thought passengers were carrying damaging evidence on board that could have doomed their re-election that fall -- in this case, two Arkansas state troopers who wanted to talk about Clinton's evil ways. This was later found to be a hoax. A second suggestion was that terrorists really had destroyed the plane, another factor that could have affected the presidential election.

The NTSB's accident report is also available online, with the conclusion that a short circuit by the central wing fuel tank set off the explosion.

But a dozen years later, that explanation still does not hold water with the conspiracy world, and to this day they demand that the government tell the truth about TWA Flight 800.