Moon Landing Conspiracy Theories - Conspiracists and Their Main Proposals

Conspiracists and Their Main Proposals

• Bill Kaysing (1922–2005) – an ex-employee of Rocketdyne, the company which built the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V rocket. Kaysing was not technically qualified, and worked at Rocketdyne as a librarian. Kaysing's self-published book, We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, made many allegations, effectively beginning the discussion of the Moon landings being faked. Kaysing maintains that, despite close monitoring by the USSR, it would have been easier for NASA to fake the Moon landings, thereby guaranteeing success, than for NASA to really go there. He claimed that the chance of a successful manned landing on the Moon was calculated to be 0.017%. NASA and others have debunked the claims made in the book.
• Bart Sibrel – a filmmaker, produced and directed four films for his company AFTH, including a film in 2001 called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, examining the evidence of a hoax. The arguments that Sibrel puts forward in this film have been debunked by many sources, including Svector's video series Lunar Legacy, which disproves the documentary's main argument that the Apollo crew faked their distance from the Earth command module, while in low orbit. Sibrel has said that the effect on the shot covered in his film was made through the use of a transparency of the Earth. Some parts of the original footage, according to Sibrel, were not able to be included on the official releases for the media. On such allegedly censored parts, the correlation between Earth and Moon Phases can be clearly confirmed, refuting Sibrel's claim that these shots were faked. On September 9, 2002 Sibrel was punched in the face by Buzz Aldrin after Sibrel confronted Aldrin with his theories and accused the former astronaut of being "a coward, and a liar, and a thief". The Los Angeles County district attorney's office refused to file charges against Aldrin, saying that he had been provoked by Sibrel.
• William L. Brian – a nuclear engineer who self-published a book in 1982 called Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the U.S. Space Program, in which he disputes the Moon's surface gravity.
• David Percy – TV producer and expert in audiovisual technologies and member of the Royal Photographic Society. He is co-writer, along with Mary Bennett of Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers (ISBN 1-898541-10-8) and co-producer of What Happened On the Moon?. He is the main proponent of the 'whistle-blower' accusation, arguing that mistakes in the NASA photos are so obvious that they are evidence that insiders are trying to 'blow the whistle' on the hoax by knowingly adding mistakes that they know will be seen.
• Ralph Rene – an inventor and 'self taught' engineering buff. Writer of NASA Mooned America (second edition OCLC 36317224).
• James M. Collier (d. 1998) – American journalist and writer, producer of the video Was It Only a Paper Moon? (1997).
• Jack White – American photo historian known for his attempt to prove forgery in photos related to the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy.
• Marcus Allen – British publisher of Nexus who said that photographs of the lander would not prove that the US put men on the Moon. He said, "Getting to the Moon really isn't much of a problem – the Russians did that in 1959, the big problem is getting people there". He suggests that NASA sent robot missions because radiation levels in space would be deadly. Another variant on this is the idea that NASA and its contractors did not recover quickly enough from the Apollo 1 fire, and so all the early Apollo missions were faked, with Apollo 14 or 15 being the first real mission.
• Aron Ranen – states in his documentary film Did We Go? (2005) that "right now I'm about 75% believing we went". However, on July 20, 2009, Ranen appeared on the show Geraldo at Large to argue that no one has landed on the Moon.
• Clyde Lewis – radio talk show host.
• David Groves – works for Quantech Image Processing and worked on some of the NASA photos. He examined the photo of Aldrin emerging from the lander and said he can pinpoint when a spotlight was used. Using the focal length of the camera's lens and an actual boot, he allegedly calculated, using ray-tracing, that the spotlight is between 24 to 36 centimetres (9.4 to 14 in) to the right of the camera. This matches with the sunlit part of Armstrong's spacesuit.
• Yuri Mukhin – Russian opposition politician, publicist and writer of the book The Moon Affair of the USA (2006) in which he denies all Moon landing evidence and accuses the US government of plundering the money paid by the American taxpayers for the Moon program. He also claims the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and some Soviet scientists helped NASA fake the landings.
• Alexander Popov – Russian doctor of physical-mathematical sciences and writer of the book Americans on the Moon – A Great Breakthrough or a Space Affair? (Moscow, 2009, ISBN 978-5-9533-3315-3) in which he aims to prove that Saturn V was in fact a camouflaged Saturn 1B and denies all Moon landing evidence.
• Stanislav Pokrovsky – Russian candidate of technical sciences and General Director of a scientific-manufacturing enterprise Project-D-MSK who calculated that the real speed of the Saturn V rocket at S-IC staging time was only half of what was declared. His analysis appears to assume that the solid rocket plumes from the fuselage and retro rockets on the two stages came to an instant halt in the surrounding air so they can be used to estimate the velocity of the rocket. He ignored high altitude winds and the altitude at staging, 67 km, where air is about 1/10,000 as dense as at sea level, and claimed that only a loop around the Moon was possible, not a manned landing on the Moon with return to Earth. He also allegedly found the reason for this – problems with the Inconel superalloy used in the F-1 engine.
• Philippe Lheureux – French writer of Moon Landings: Did NASA Lie? and Lights on the Moon: Did NASA Lie? (Lumières sur la Lune: La NASA a-t-elle menti?). He said that astronauts did land on the Moon but to stop other states from benefiting from scientific information in the real photos, NASA published fake images.