“Moon Hoax Not”: Short Film Explains Why It Was Impossible to Fake the Moon Landing

S.G. Collins does­n’t trust the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment. They “lie all the time, about all kinds of things,” he insists, “and if they haven’t lied to you today, maybe they haven’t had cof­fee yet.” Like some of those who express a sim­i­lar dis­trust, he claims he has no way to ver­i­fy that NASA land­ed on the moon in 1969. But unlike most of that sub­set, he does­n’t think the gov­ern­ment could have pulled off a con­vinc­ing hoax about it. In oth­er words, Amer­i­ca “did have the tech­ni­cal abil­i­ty, not to men­tion the req­ui­site mad­ness, to send three guys to the moon and back. They did not have the tech­nol­o­gy to fake it on video.” Calm­ly, method­i­cal­ly, with a dead­pan wit, Collins uses the thir­teen min­utes of Moon Hoax Not to explain exact­ly why, as improb­a­ble as the real moon land­ing sounds, a fake moon land­ing would have been down­right impos­si­ble.

“The lat­er you were born,” Collins says, “the more all-pow­er­ful movie mag­ic seems.” Hol­ly­wood could now fake dozens of moon land­ings every day, but they did­n’t always have that abil­i­ty. Mar­shal­ing knowl­edge accrued over thir­ty years as a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, he address­es each of the points that moon-land­ing con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists com­mon­ly cite as visu­al evi­dence of the sup­posed fraud. He also brings to bear facts from the his­to­ry of video tech­nol­o­gy, such as 1969’s com­plete lack of the high-speed video cam­eras, need­ed to shoot the sort of slow motion nec­es­sary to cre­ate the illu­sion of low grav­i­ty. And what if they’d shot the entire Apol­lo 11 tele­cast on film instead? Collins also knows, and names, exact­ly the prob­lems even the most ambi­tious, tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced char­la­tans would have encoun­tered, even—as in moon-land­ing hoax mock­u­men­tary Dark Side of the Moon—with Stan­ley Kubrick on their side.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dark Side of the Moon: A Mock­u­men­tary on Stan­ley Kubrick and the Moon Land­ing Hoax

Michio Kaku Schools Takes on Moon Land­ing-Con­spir­a­cy Believ­er on His Sci­ence Fan­tas­tic Pod­cast

The Moon Dis­as­ter That Wasn’t: Nixon’s Speech In Case Apol­lo 11 Failed to Return

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.


by | Permalink | Comments (14) |

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!


Comments (14)
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
  • yup says:

    My 9th year his­to­ry teacher claimed the moon land­ing was fake. He did it as an exer­cise to get us ques­tion­ing “facts” but I always did won­der after that… This guy nice­ly answers those lin­ger­ing ques­tions.

    Yet this video still urges us to ques­tion as my teacher did — bril­liant, bril­liant!

  • Ben P says:

    The omis­sion of facts and neces­si­ty to lie to fur­ther the the­o­ry pro­posed by SG Collins in his video is fright­en­ing. For a thor­ough­ly researched counter to these claims (that even explains the min­i­mal­ist amount of research SG Collins should/could have put into his video), the link is below.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3zhZqiSe5c

  • AwE130 says:

    In Octo­ber 2012 we dis­cov­ered a reflec­tion that showed up in one of the Apol­lo 11 images. We asked peo­ple from both sides of the debate to have a look at it and to see what may have caused this reflec­tion. We will now present our own inves­ti­ga­tion and the the­o­ry we would like to put for­ward for debate. We will start with the image that shows the upside down reflec­tion of the num­ber two.
    http://awe130.nl

  • Marc Barrett says:

    What real­ly inter­ests me is the incred­i­ble igno­rance nec­es­sary to believe in these ‘Apol­lo con­spir­a­cy’ the­o­ries. In order to believe in these things, it is nec­es­sary to know prac­ti­cal­ly noth­ing about the Apol­lo, Gem­i­ni, and Mer­cury mis­sions. Study just a lit­tle bit about these mis­sions, and it is easy to see how the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries fall to pieces.

    The Mer­cury, Gem­i­ni, and Apol­lo mis­sions were a series of small steps. We first learned how to get into orbit and back, and maneu­ver while in orbit, with Mer­cury. Then with Gem­i­ni we learned how to con­duct a dock­ing between two vehi­cles and how to con­duct an EVA, among oth­er things. All of the nec­es­sary skills and tech­niques need­ed to con­duct a moon land­ing were estab­lished with the Gem­i­ni mis­sions. So why con­duct the Gem­i­ni mis­sions if the moon land­ings were going to be faked? Or, put the oth­er ways, why fake the moon land­ings if we have all the skills and tech­niques need­ed to do it as estab­lished by the Gem­i­ni mis­sions? Either ways, it just does not not make sense.

  • AwE130 says:

    Eye­wit­ness Report Richard C Hoagland.
    We found this eye­wit­ness report from Richard C hoagland, He was a Sci­ence Advi­sor to CBS News dur­ing the Apol­lo pro­gram, 1968–1971.
    http://awe130.nl/index.php/the-news-awe130/22-eyewitness-report-richard-c-hoagland.html

  • AwE130 says:

    Eye­wit­ness Report Richard C Hoagland.
    We found this eye­wit­ness report from Richard C hoagland, He was a Sci­ence Advi­sor to CBS News dur­ing the Apol­lo pro­gram, 1968–1971. Apol­lo 11 filmed in a sound stu­dio?
    http://awe130.nl/index.php/the-news-awe130/22-eyewitness-report-richard-c-hoagland.html

  • AwE130 says:

    http://www.awe130.nl/index.php/apollo-image-gallery‑1.html
    Apol­lo images that where on dis­play in the “Apol­lo Lunar Sur­face Jour­nal” form 1997 to 2003. They look very dif­fer­ent from the enhanced images they show today in the ALSJ. It is time that NASA is gone inves­ti­gate the ALSJ and what they did to the images. Many peo­ple today have doubt about the Apol­lo moon land­ings and it could well be that the ALSJ are the rea­son why. Look at the images and make up your own mind.

  • AwE130 says:

    Dutch live Apol­lo 11 broad­cast was erased with­in 5 years.

    http://www.awe130.nl/index.php/interviews/147
    In the Nether­lands the Apol­lo 11 live broad­cast was erased with­in 5 years (accord­ing to Rudolf Spoor, Tele­vi­sion Direc­tor of the Apol­lo moon land­ings NOS). ED Hengeveld, an “Apol­lo Lunar Sur­face Jour­nal” (ALSJ)contributor who works for the NOS (the Dutch equiv­a­lent of BBC) spent some years search­ing for the tapes before com­ing to the con­clu­sion that they were gone.

  • Salim Khan says:

    It is ridicu­lous to hear that NASA did­n’t have the cam­era to demon­strate the fak­ing of the moon back in 1969 but it did have the tech­nol­o­gy to land on the moon. Fun­ny staff

  • AwE130 says:

    We would like you to have a look at this.
    http://www.awe130.nl/the-news-awe130/383

  • AwE130 says:

    Impos­si­ble cam­era shots Apol­lo 11nhttp://www.awe130.com/index.php/the-latest-news/114

  • Tawney says:

    Haha­ha­ha

  • AwE130 says:

    Ques­tion for the film mak­er.
    http://www.awe130.com/index.php/the-latest-news/240
    Quote Neil Arm­strong: “I remem­ber all the pre-flight test­ing we were doing on that lit­tle black and white image TV cam­era. In all that test­ing I nev­er saw a pic­ture suc­cess­ful­ly trans­mit­ted but the chaps assured us that it would and in fact work, and it did. And I was prob­a­bly the most sur­prised per­son in the human race when mis­sion con­trol announced they were get­ting a pic­ture. So I was nev­er con­cerned that the pic­ture qual­i­ty was less then opti­mum I was just amazed that there was any pic­ture at all.”

  • Wild Boar says:

    Hey man Was one of the late Com­mers on the old action. So your account got tak­en down as your site?

Leave a Reply

Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.