“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.