Bad: The show claims that 20% of Americans have doubts that we went to the Moon.

Bad: The program talks about the movie ``Capricorn 1'', an entertaining if ultimately silly movie about how NASA must fake a manned Mars expedition. The program says ``The Apollo footage [from the surface of the Moon] is strikingly similar to the scenes in ``Capricorn 1''.

Good: Is it just an amazing coincidence that the actual Moon images look like the movie, or is it evidence of conspiracy? Neither! The movie was filmed in 1978, many years after the last man walked on the Moon. The movie was made to look like the real thing! This statement by the program is particularly ludicrous, and indicates just how far the producers were willing to go to make a sensational program.

Bad: In the pictures taken of the lunar lander by the astronauts, the TV show continues, there is no blast crater. A rocket capable of landing on the Moon should have burned out a huge crater on the surface, yet there is nothing there.

Good: When someone driving a car pulls into a parking spot, do they do it at 100 kilometers per hour? Of course not. They slow down first, easing off the accelerator. The astronauts did the same thing. Sure, the rocket on the lander was capable of 10,000 pounds of thrust, but they had a throttle. They fired the rocket hard to deorbit and slow enough to land on the Moon, but they didn't need to thrust that hard as they approached the lunar surface; they throttled down to about 3000 pounds of thrust.

Bad: The next argument presented on the show deals with the lunar dust. As the lander descended, we clearly see dust getting blown away by the rocket. The exhaust should have blown all the dust away, yet we can clearly see the astronauts' footprints in the dust mere meters from the lander. Obviously, when NASA faked this they messed it up.

Good: Once again, the weird alien environment of the Moon comes to play. Imagine taking a bag of flour and dumping it onto your kitchen floor (kids: ask your folks first!). Now bend over the pile, take a deep breath, and blow into it as hard as you can. Poof! Flour goes everywhere. Why? Because the momentum of your breath goes into the flour, which makes it move. But note that the flour goes up, and sideways, and aloft into the air. If you blow hard enough, you might see little curlicues of air lifting the flour farther than your breath alone could have, and doing so to dust well outside of where your breath actually blew.

That's the heart of this problem. We are used to air helping us blow things around. The air itself is displaced by your breath, which pushed on more air, and so on. On the Earth, your breath might blow flour that was dozens of centimeters away, even though your actual breath didn't reach that far. On the Moon, there is no air. The only dust that gets blown around by the exhaust of the rocket (which, remember, isn't nearly as strong as the HBs claim) is the dust physically touched by the exhaust, or dust hit by other bits of flying dust. In the end, only the dust directly under or a bit around the rocket was blown out by the exhaust. The rest was left where it was. Ironically, the dust around the landing site was probably a bit thicker than before, since the dust blown out would have piled up there.

Bad: The next evidence also involves pictures. In all the pictures taken by the astronauts, the shadows are not black. Objects in shadow can be seen, sometimes fairly clearly, including a plaque on the side of the lander that can be read easily. If the Sun is the only source of light on the Moon, the HBs say, and there is no air to scatter that light, shadows should be utterly black.

Good: This is one of my favorite HB claims. They give you the answer in the claim itself: "...if the Sun is the only source of light..." It isn't. Initially, I thought the Earth was bright enough to fill in the shadows, but subsequently realized that cannot be the case. The Earth is a fraction of the brightness of the Sun, not nearly enough to fill in the shadows. So then what is that other light source?

The answer is: The Moon itself. Surprise! The lunar dust has a peculiar property: it tends to reflect light back in the direction from where it came. So if you were to stand on the Moon and shine a flashlight at the surface, you would see a very bright spot where the light hits the ground, but, oddly, someone standing a bit to the side would hardly see it at all. The light is preferentially reflected back toward the flashlight (and therefore you), and not the person on the side.

Now think about the sunlight. Let's say the sun is off to the right in a picture. It is illuminating the right side of the lander, and the left is in shadow. However, the sunlight falling beyond the lander on the left is being reflected back toward the Sun. That light hits the surface and reflects to the right and up, directly onto the shadowed part of the lander. In other words, the lunar surface is so bright that it easily lights up the shadows of vertical surfaces.

Bad: Another argument by the HBs deals with shadows. Several photos from the Moon are shown where objects on the lunar landscape have long shadows. If the Sun were the only light source, the program claims, the shadows should be parallel. The shadows are not parallel, and therefore the images are fake.

Good: This is an interesting claim on the part of the HBs, because on the surface (haha) it seems to make sense. However, let's assume the shadows are not parallel. One explanation is that there are (at least) two light sources, and that is certainly what many HBs are trying to imply. So if there are multiple light sources, where are the multiple shadows? Each object casts one shadow, so there can only be one light source.

Bad: The program has two segments dealing with what they call ``identical backgrounds''. In one, they show the lunar lander with a mountain in the background. They then show another picture of the same mountain, but no lander in the foreground at all. The astronauts could not have taken either picture before landing, of course, and after it lifts off the lander leaves the bottom section behind. Therefore, there would have been something in the second image no matter what, and the foreground could not be empty. Obviously, the mountain background is a fake set, and was reused by NASA for another shot.

Good: Actually, the pictures are real, of course. As always, repeat after me: the Moon is not the Earth. On the Earth, distant objects are obscured a bit by haze in the air, and we use that to mentally gauge distances. However, with no air, an object can be very far away on the Moon and still be crisp and sharp to the eye. You can't tell if a boulder is a meter across and 100 meters away, or 100 meters across and 10 kilometers away!

Bad: The other ``identical background'' segment shows an astronaut on a hilltop. A second video shows two astronauts on the same hill (and this time it really is the same hill), and claims that NASA itself says these two videos were taken on two different hills separated by many kilometers. How can this be? They are obviously the same hill, so NASA must be lying!

Good: Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to a mistake. A videotape about Apollo 16 ironically titled ``Nothing So Hidden...'' released by NASA does indeed make that claim, but in this case it looks to me to be a simple error. I asked Eric Jones, who is the editor of the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, and he told me those two clips were taken about three minutes apart. Eric's assistant, Ken Glover, uncovered this problem. He sent me this transcript (which I edited a bit to make links to the video clips) of the Fox show with his comments, which I will highlight in red:

Bad: Ralph Rene, a self-proclaimed physicist, claims that the astronauts shifting in the cabin would change the center of mass, throwing the lunar lander off balance. They couldn't compensate for this, which would have crashed the lander. Thus, the landing was faked.

Bad: The program claims that when the top half of the lander took off from the Moon to bring the astronauts back into orbit, there was no flame from the rocket. Obviously, every rocket has a visible flame, so the takeoff was faked.

Bad: When the movies of the astronauts walking and driving the lunar rover are doubled in speed, they look just like they were filmed on Earth and slowed down. This is clearly how the movies were faked.

Good: This was the first new bit I have seen from the HBs, and it's funny. To me even when sped up, the images didn't look like they were filmed in Earth's gravity. The astronauts were sidling down a slope, and they looked weird to me, not at all like they would on Earth. I will admit that if wires were used, the astronauts' gait could be simulated.

However, not the rover! If you watch the clip, you will see dust thrown up by the wheels of the rover. The dust goes up in a perfect parabolic arc and falls back down to the surface. Again, the Moon isn't the Earth! If this were filmed on the Earth, which has air, the dust would have billowed up around the wheel and floated over the surface. This clearly does not happen in the video clips; the dust goes up and right back down. It's actually a beautiful demonstration of ballistic flight in a vacuum. Had NASA faked this shot, they would have had to have a whole set (which would have been very large) with all the air removed. We don't have this technology today!

Bad: When the astronauts are assembling the American flag, the flag waves. Kaysing says this must have been from an errant breeze on the set. A flag wouldn't wave in a vacuum.

Good: Of course a flag can wave in a vacuum. In the shot of the astronaut and the flag, the astronaut is rotating the pole on which the flag is mounted, trying to get it to stay up. The flag is mounted on one side on the pole, and along the top by another pole that sticks out to the side. In a vacuum or not, when you whip around the vertical pole, the flag will ``wave'', since it is attached at the top. The top will move first, then the cloth will follow along in a wave that moves down. This isn't air that is moving the flag, it's the cloth itself.

Bad: The program makes a big deal out of how well the pictures taken from the Moon were exposed and set. Every picture we see is just right, with the scene always centered perfectly. However, the cameras were mounted on the front of the astronauts' spacesuit, and there was no finder. They couldn't have taken perfect pictures every time!

Good ... and of course, no one claims they did. Thousands of pictures were taken on the Moon, and the ones you see will tend to be the good ones. If Buzz Aldrin accidentally cut off Neil Armstrong's head, you probably won't see that image in a magazine. Also, everything done on the Moon was practiced endlessly by the astronauts. The people working on the mission knew that these pictures would be some of the most important images ever taken, so they would have taken particular care in making sure the astronauts could do it cold. When fabled astronaut Story Musgrave replaced a camera on board the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, someone commented that he made it look easy. "Sure," he replied, "I had practiced it thousands of times!"

Bad: Crosshairs were etched in the astronauts' cameras to better help measure objects in the pictures. However, in several images, it looks like the objects are actually in front of the crosshairs, which is impossible if the crosshairs were inside the camera! Therefore, the images were faked.

Good: This argument is pretty silly. Do the HBs think that NASA had painted crosshairs on the set behind the astronauts? I heard one HB claim the crosshairs were added later on, and NASA had messed up some of the imaging. That's ridiculous! Why add in crosshairs later? Cameras equipped with crosshairs have been used for a long time, and it would have been easy to simply use some to take pictures on the faked set. Clearly, the HBs are wrong here, but the images do look funny. What happened?

What happened becomes clearer when you look more closely at the images. The times it looks like an object is in front of the crosshair (because the crosshair looks blocked by the object) is when the object photographed is white. The crosshair is black. Have you ever taken an image that is overexposed? White parts bleed into the film around them, making them look white too. That's all that happened here; the white object in the image ``fills in'' the black crosshair. It's a matter of contrast: the crosshair becomes invisible because the white part overwhelms the film. This is basic photography.

[Note (added February 18, 2001): I have been informed by David Percy, a photographer quoted in the Fox show, that he does indeed believe that man went to the Moon, but he believes there are anomalies in the imagery taken which ``put into question many aspects of the missions'', which is a different matter. While I disagree that there are anomalies, I have edited out what is essentially a personal attack on Mr. Percy that I had here originally. It is an easy matter to let one's emotions get carried away when writing these essays, and I apologize to him and my readers for letting that get in. I make it a policy to correct Bad Astronomy based on facts, not personalities.]

Bad: A big staple of the HBs is the claim that radiation in the van Allen Belts and in deep space would have killed the astronauts in minutes. They interview a Russian cosmonaut involved in the USSR Moon program, who says that they were worried about going in to the unknowns of space, and suspected that radiation would have penetrated the hull of the spacecraft.

Good: Kaysing's exact words in the program are ``Any human being traveling through the van Allen belt would have been rendered either extremely ill or actually killed by the radiation within a short time thereof.''

Very, very Bad: Kaysing says that the Apollo 1 fire that killed Roger Chaffee, Ed White and Gus Grissom was no accident. Grissom was ready to talk to the press about the Moon hoax, so NASA killed him. Kaysing says NASA also killed other people who were about to blow the whistle as well.

The utter bilge pumped out in this program goes on and on, and indeed, if you go to the HBs websites you can read more than any brain can handle. I have read literally dozens of things that ``prove'' the landings were faked, and each one is rather easily shown to be wrong by anyone with experience in such things. I think the problem here is twofold: we tend to want to believe (or at least listen to) conspiracy theories, and this one is a whopper. Also, the evidence is presented in such a way that, if you are unfamiliar with the odd nature of the vacuum of space and of space travel, it sounds reasonable.

But it isn't reasonable. Their evidence is actually as tenuous as the vacuum of space itself. I find it amazing that they are so willing to scrutinize every available frame of data from the astronauts, yet miss the most obvious thing right in front of them. Fox television and the producers of this program should be ashamed of themselves. Even worse, the Fox Family Channel broadcast a show just last year that was skeptical and even handed about the Moon Hoax! Amazingly, Mitch Pileggi hosted that program as well.

I'll end this on one more bit the HBs don't talk about. When Jim Lovell, two time Apollo astronaut and commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, was told about Kaysing's claims, Lovell called him a kook. Kaysing, ever the rational thinker, sued Lovell for slander. Imagine: Kaysing, who says that NASA murdered three men outright and arranged for the murders of others, sued Commander James Lovell for slander! After some time, a judge wisely threw the case out of court.

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