The Moon Landing - World's Greatest Hoax? | Free Documentary History

[Music] as a surprising number of people still believe that we never landed on the moon the question lies at the heart of one of the greatest conspiracy theories of all time a theory born from an era of global suspicion political mistrust and fake news the whole apollo program was a complete fabrication any idea could have been hoaxed is quite frankly insane but when put to the test can we unlock the scientific truth and once and for all put these conspiracy theories to rest [Music] [Music] in the 21st century one of the greatest achievements in history still remains a source of controversy as did the apollo moon landings really happen or were they the biggest hoax of all time trevor weaver has dedicated years of research to the apollo missions and was once a supporter of the moon landings we didn't go to the moon and that is an established fact nasa provided all the topographical data they had all the photographs all the massive models just on the cubic so they could actually fake moon scenes could the moon landings actually have been faked by hollywood director stanley kubrick the history books say otherwise that apollo 11 astronaut edwin buzz aldrin spent three days traveling to the moon and was the first to follow neil armstrong's historic footsteps i'm totally in favor of freedom of speech but i think people need to be responsible when they think about intentionally for their own benefit misleading the young people who are the future leaders of our world moon conspiracy theorists have been a small but persistent and vocal group over the years often confronting and accusing astronauts of lying in 2002 when conspiracy theorist bart cybril button holds buzz aldrin his temper got the better of him you're the one who said you walked on the moon when you didn't calling a kettle black if you ever thought it was saying that you misrepresented it away from me you're a coward and a liar and a thief the punch stirred a generation less trusting of traditional media more open to believing fake news and theories spread on the internet and revived the moon landings hoax theories nasa never realized that we would have something called the internet it's only now when all those videos are available that people can see what the problems are i think the propagation of so-called fake news the spread which is very welcome of access to the internet means that we have far more sources than we used to there is a real crisis in understanding the strength of those sources people often have some kind of distrust of authority governments and so on and they assume that there's a some kind of plot to keep the information from us that actually the propaganda victory of going to the moon could be based on something that was entirely fabricated but if the apollo missions were faked it would mean nasa had managed to keep one of the biggest secrets ever created 50 years ago the soviet union and the usa were locked in a struggle for global dominance then on october the 4th 1957 the soviets launched sputnik the world's first satellite into orbit a breakthrough that hit america hard and made the race to space even more crucial there's no doubt that the space race in the 1960s was driven by superpower rivalry there was a degree of anxiety in the west about the advancement in soviet technology and feeling the west somehow had lost its leadership and needed to catch up we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard at the peak of the apollo program nasa employed 400 000 people but was putting a man on the moon so important that the united states government faked it if so a legion of nasa employees not only participated in the deception but they kept the secret from the rest of the world that was such a seminal event that it wasn't just about the mission itself but the way that that influenced wider life you know people began to think oh we can do space travel we can actually go to other worlds on july the 16th 1969 the three apollo 11 astronauts prepared for liftoff but while the world eagerly awaited for history to be made one man was already skeptical during the 1960s bill casing was the head of technical publications for rocketdyne the company that helped manufacture the apollo rockets casing who claimed he had access to some of its top secret documents questioned the competence of the apollo project i really believe that they weren't in the command capsule at launch they they did a little bit of a magician act with the astronauts they went up the elevator but they came down the elevator in other words they did not want to risk the lives of the astronauts in case the saturn blew up an explosive claim which casing said the cia tried to silence by making three attempts on his life like casing marcus allen british publisher of nexus a magazine of alternative politics history and science also questions nasa's engineering capability at the time of the launches the problem is the whole apollo program was a complete fabrication in order to be seen to succeed in the cold war the myth of apollo is what is holding nasa back from future space travel it's a tragedy we didn't go the first time we can't go now we've never been they lied to us but if nasa didn't put a man on the moon it would have had to fake the evidence and its own visual images have done the most to fuel conspiracy theories every photograph taken on the lunar surface is online 5771 some of them are not particularly good some are out of focus some are light struck some just don't show very much of interest and some of them are very good indeed and it's the very good ones i question i do not believe they were taken on the moon they were taken here on earth conspiracy theorists believe nasa faked all six of the apollo moon landings and point to these nasa photographs as proof some of the most renowned claims suggest that areas lit from behind should be in dark shade when in fact they reveal full detail in others the shadows don't run parallel is this because they were lit by separate sources suggesting film lighting despite being taken in space no stars are visible in any of the apollo photographs gravity on the moon is one-sixth of that on earth but when archive footage is sped up the astronauts appear to be running at normal speed in earth's gravity and with no atmosphere on the moon why does the flag seem to wave in a breeze for the purpose of this program we filmed an experiment on a lunar set built in the trona pinnacles in the californian desert to challenge the hoax theories and put these claims to the test by testing some of the most famous conspiracy arguments and addressing new evidence can we put the lunar hoax theories to rest once and for all [Music] this is apollo control houston at uh 105 hours uh now another flight to apollo 11. people all over the world were eagerly tuned in to the historic event astronomer sir patrick moore reported the mission live on british television ever since the dawn of human history we've dreamed about going to other worlds and this was the first time it had been done and of course it was an exciting time and also a very tense one five four three two one zero liftoff we have a liftoff there was some amateur radio enthusiasts who built a very large dish were able to actually listen into the astronauts talking from the moon's surface they didn't hear mission control they were able to pick up just the astronauts by themselves ian morrison witnessed the event from a unique perspective a student at the jodrell bank radio telescope near manchester england he took advantage of the facilities and listened into the mission of his own accord i should say that we were not officially tracking the apollo craft we were doing this for fun our own fun and our own interest we could hear the whole conversation of the astronauts all the way down to surface they're obviously highly excited and it must have been wonderful as they sort of literally reach the surface of north america okay engine stop we copy it down eagle tranquility base here the eagle has landed and then the voice came through the eagle has landed and that to me was a matter of intense relief and since i've on the air alive i had to watch what i said that's one small step for man [Music] in 1969 the public had little reason to question mankind's historic first step on the moon after all the achievement was a celebration of technological supremacy america had finally won the space race mankind's first steps on the moon have become the epicenter of hoax theories conspiracy theorists claim nasa faced a formidable challenge with its primitive 1960s technology just 14 months before the apollo 11 mission neil armstrong test piloted a prototype lunar lander the result was disastrous unfortunately it went out of his control and luckily he was able to eject before it crashed in flames if they couldn't get a simulator to work on earth how in the world could they get the actual lunar module to work on the moon and of course i knew both neil and bars there was no professional rescue had they made a faulty landing they couldn't have gone back and that would have been two ghastly content plates conspiracy theorists question not only the technical capabilities of the landing craft but also the computing power that guided it they didn't have the technology to do it the risk is too great they could not afford to risk failure they wouldn't allow themselves to rely on science and technology to get them there pat norris is a former space system and software engineer hired by nasa to analyze the challenges of navigating to the moon and back in the 1950s computers didn't really exist but by the mid 1960s computers were available that were powerful enough to do the calculations needed for such a complicated mission of course by comparison with today's computers they were very primitive while these advancements should surely encourage a new line of missions conspiracy theorists argue that this is enough to question if we ever could have gone in the first place we're talking about the mid-1960s here when computers occupied rooms the sort of computing power that you have in a mobile phone today would be greater than the computing power that was alleged to have been used to land man on the moon one of the reasons that we had difficulty in navigating close to the moon was that the computers available weren't able to provide a sufficiently detailed mathematical model of the moon's gravity perhaps there wasn't enough information but even if there had been enough information the computers probably wouldn't have been able to cope with it they were adequate for the mission at the time but only just unlike modern day pcs the apollo computers didn't have to store files or process images most of the number crunching was done at mission control and the information transmitted back to the astronauts in their attempt to disprove the missions conspiracy theorists have analyzed the footage of the moon landings frame by frame one of the most famous pieces of footage in history is buzz aldrin's dance across the moonscape near the end of the two and a half hours in front of the television camera i did have an opportunity to to prance around and and hop and demonstrate different methods of moving around the movement because of the restrictions of the spacesuit was basically like being in slow motion [Music] the famous lunar walk shows aldrin experimenting with the restrictions of the spacesuit so-called kangaroo [Music] conspiracy theorists have claimed that the footage was actually filmed in slow motion in a studio and that the astronauts were supported by wires to replicate these movements on the moon the astronaut is dangling on a white to take off if you like the the difference between the earth gravity and the moon's gravity the wire was between the back back and the body the problem is the astronauts tended to rely on this wire so you see lots of jerky movements astronauts were wearing pretty big and bulky spacesuits and the weight distribution isn't the same as uri walking around on the surface of the earth here the astronauts had to really cope with that and work out if they're top heavy how to move around such that they weren't going to fall over all the time and be unbalanced you do have to be careful to keep track of where your center of mass is you can see that astronauts really adapted really well to that and started to kind of develop this new walk while the exact conditions of the moon couldn't be replicated on earth nasa introduced methods to adapt the astronauts one of their favorite methods was parabolic flight or as the astronauts called it the vomit comet by climbing and diving in a series of arcs an airplane could simulate 30-second windows of reduced gravity these sessions served as road tests for the space suits and gave astronauts their first taste of lunar gravity [Music] if as the conspiracy theorists claim nasa faked the apollo missions then it also had to fake the photographic evidence i was trained as a photographer in london back in the 1960s i was familiar with the camera that was used the hasselblad camera and also with the film that was used kodak ekta chrome transparency material so i was familiar with the the technical side of it and the more i looked at the photographs the more i started to doubt whether what we've been told had happened had actually happened the way we've been told also siding with marcus american conspiracy theorist ralph renee raised a different technical question could the gloves the astronauts wore on their pressurized spacesuits have actually worked on the moon what i do is i pull a vacuum in this chamber i created and i have a glove inserted inside of it and it was to prove that the flexibility they've shown in their suits and gloves are impossible right now i can put my hand in there and i can move it every which way i can grasp i make a fist i can lift up down but as soon as i throw this switch here i evacuate the chamber as air is sucked out of the machine the vacuum makes it more and more difficult to move the glove and this glove doesn't want to move i can't bend it backwards i can hardly force it down i mean how could you pick up small screws and bolts like they've shown them to do or trigger a little tiny trigger on a camera with the glove doing this if it seems impossible to operate a camera properly in pressurized gloves how could these perfect pictures have been taken trained aerospace engineer jay windley has extensively researched the moon landing conspiracies and was present at the experiment on the moonset to refute these theories this is a hasselblad el 500 camera manufactured especially for the lunar missions it attached to the spacesuit via this bayonet the camera would have a framework surrounding the bottom and rear of the camera and it would slide down onto the control unit here so that the astronaut could work with his hands without worrying about the camera luna cameras didn't have a viewfinder because the astronaut's helmets prevented them from looking down and framing the shot basically you could just sort of point that camera at what you wanted without having to really look through a viewfinder but according to conspiracy theorists this was a problem that couldn't be solved i had to focus it set the shutter speed set the aperture by hand wearing armored gauntlets you can't see the shutter button on a hasselblad it's on the front of the camera you didn't know if you'd taken a photograph because you can't hear anything in space you can't see the counter dials on the side of the camera so with all those restrictions we have some of the most iconic images ever taken in the 20th century i don't believe it i'll step out and take some of my first pictures here jay windley investigated how these design features on the hasselblad would have been operated by the astronauts the zeiss bygone lens here has been fitted with these little paddles to allow the astronaut to manipulate them with clumsy fingers you just push it in either direction the shutter release normally a very small button has been made especially large so that it can be pressed with an astronaut's glove the focus ring has been fitted with stops that correspond to near medium far and infinity so he didn't have to pay attention to whether he was eight feet or nine feet away from a subject you wouldn't have to very carefully measure it richard underwood was responsible for teaching apollo astronauts the art of lunar photography even in the early days before they went the moon i'd say you know when you get back from this journey you will be a national hero but your photographs they say if they're good they'll live forever i tell them your only key to immortality is the quality of your photography nothing else forget all the other stuff the astronauts were told to take their lunar cameras everywhere they went and practice they took them home to photograph their friends and family and barbecues and sporting events and all other types of things they knew that camera very very effectively all of the crew members understood pretty well how to operate this and the film turned out to be very very versatile in coming up with just outstanding results but these outstanding results led to one of the most famous photographic anomalies the strange case of the lunar shadows the shadows are one of the strong proofs that we never went to the moon if you examine pictures offered by nasa as genuine you find that in many cases the shadows are not parallel well since the sun was the only source of light all shadows on the moon should be exactly parallel but they aren't because the lunar shadows fall in different directions some conspiracy theorists claim that they were created by separate artificial light sources there's only one sun there are not two but these shadows are anomalous in that sometimes they are diverging from objects and sometimes converging and and it can't be you can go anyplace on this planet when the sun's up and you look at two objects and those sun shadows are parallel but according to physicists there are reasonable explanations for why we find that shadows aren't always parallel there's lots of different things which can make shadows go in different directions i mean obviously you have shadows pointing away from the sun but if your camera is a wide angle camera you will get a perspective effect on the shadows the effect of converging shadows is a well-known optical phenomena in photography this effect is created where there is a single light source for both the moon and the earth this source is the sun if you have bits of topography on the surface like troughs they can produce shadows which appear to be at right angles to the main direction of the sun but if we look at the photos aldrin appears to be brightly lit up shouldn't the astronauts body be in darkness he's standing in a pool of light it's a spotlight it's not the sun this is taken here on earth under control studio lighting conditions with a whacking great probably a 12k aries spotlight on the moon you're not just illuminated by the sun shining towards you and casting a shadow behind you but there's also huge area of the lunar surface around you and that provides backlight to any subject on the moon's surface you can also get reflections of light off bright objects like spacesuits if they're fairly close to whatever they're illuminating and specifically the light bouncing off the highly reflective lunar module in these pictures you can clearly see where a pool of light appears if you look at pictures where the astronauts are away from the module the surface appears evenly lit another cause for suspicion among conspiracy theorists is apollo's symbolic highlight the american flag wherever there's an american flag it's always brilliantly lit up even if it's on the shadow side and on the shadow side that should be really dark black but they had little spotlights obviously because that's the only way you can do it the flag they took to the moon was made of nylon which is fairly translucent material it lets light through so i wouldn't expect to see one side bright on one side dark here we can see our flag brightly lit from the front but if we move around to the back we can see that even with our single light source it's still brightly lit the light is shining through and making the flag glow but why does the lunar flag wave around if there's no wind on the moon stage sets were very hot because when you film me in slow motion you need more light because each frame is being exposed they had 144 frames per second so they needed very very strong light therefore it was probably very hot probably they had some cooling is this waving flag the ultimate proof the landings were faked in a studio with no atmosphere on the moon the planting of the apollo flag has caused some controversy if you look at how the flag swings the edge of the flag is acting like a pendulum if you know the length of the pendulum you know the time of the swing you can say where the gravity is and it was on earth so how could the flag flapping on the windless moon be explained neil armstrong and buzz aldrin may not have been thinking about that question as they prepared for the historic moment putting the flag on the moon was really a symbolic highlight of the mission it was one that we had not really rehearsed uh neil knew where the flag was stowed uh we brought it out then we had to put the two pieces together the astronauts had to drive the flagstaff into the hard lunar surface with a twisting motion a horizontal aluminium rod kept the flag suspended and this caused the free end of the flag to flip up and back in response to that also this is an aluminum tube very similar to the ones used on the apollo mission it's very springy if i cause it to spring and then let go of it we see that this motion continues long after i've let go of it once it's in the surface then those oscillations gradually dampen away over time the vibrations going down the flagpole and then it's pretty much stable after that conspiracy theorists point to another strange anomaly one that can't be explained by lack of atmosphere as the 16-ton landing craft touched down its powerful rockets would be expected to blast away the top layer of dust exposing the rocky lunar surface but footprints were visibly photographed beneath the spacecraft and there seems to be no dust on the landing pads one of the problems that was encountered of course is lunar dust that the moon is covered with it and in fact prior to landing they'd send unmanned landis one of the concerns was the fact the lunar surface might actually be so dusty that any spacecraft that tried to land on it might actually sink in and if you wouldn't support her unmanned probe certainly wasn't going to support a man ralph rene devised an experiment to illustrate his notion that the rocket-powered lander should have left a crater if a garden leaf blower which is dramatically less powerful can move dust with earth's gravity why didn't a rocket which produced ten thousand pounds of thrust they didn't move dry dust they didn't move little rocks they didn't move anything so the demonstration is to show that this stuff will disappear immediately and i'll even be able to get some kind of a hole if renee is correct the lunar surface like the gravel pit would show visible signs of disturbance but when it actually landed the dust was all still there now how can that be you know if you blow dust away it goes away like i just did here i swept the ground some people think that when you land on the moon you should get a very big crater underneath the the rocket nozzle on the the lunar module now that's not the case because when they were coming in they'd already throttled down to at least about a quarter of the the maximum thrust and just above the surface they turned off the the rocket motors so any exhaust was actually pretty feeble when it landed on the moon's surface if an engine did not leave a crater of any size if you look at the pictures you can see a very slight depression underneath the rocket nozzle where dust and a little bit of soil has been radially blown away in different directions around the lunar module and a closer inspection of some of the photographs reveals that the landing did in fact disturb a very fine layer of dust but not enough to cover the landing pads i can see uh some evidence of rays emanating from the defect engine but a very insignificant amount but the nasa images from the mission aren't the only proof of the module landing on the surface satellite images taken of the lunar surface in more recent years could suggest more compelling evidence of the apollo landings the lunar reconnaissance orbiter is a robotic spacecraft launched by nasa in 2009 to orbit the moon using some very high resolution cameras and being relatively close to the moon's surface it has actually been able to pick out each of the six apollo landing sites and not only the descent stages where they landed the locations of the flags the experiments the three rovers that were left on the last three missions but some argue that these satellite images aren't as detailed as they expected when they were taken in 2011. the lunar occurrences orbiter was deliberately flown over what is purported to be the apollo landing sites and from a height of 12 miles i.e not very far at all what do you see a couple of pixels if you looked at these images without nasa putting on a whacking gray arrow you wouldn't know what you're looking at while satellite images of the equipment left behind may not be detailed enough to persuade some there are other markers of man-made interference in the images i have to say what you see is just one or two pixels but you you don't get a sharp picture a nice clean picture of the lunar module but the lro pictures do show some discoloration of the area where the lunar module took off so that that seems fairly consistent with what nasa said alongside the lunar reconnaissance images evidence from other missions have also been able to confirm the apollo landing sites altitude 4200 for landing over of course we've also had the chinese and the japanese with their own lunar missions they are able to image the areas in which the landings took place and there are evidence of soil disturbance so you do have that third-party verification that the landings itself took place there's one more big question conspiracy theorists ask about the apollo 11 photographs with no weather on the moon you would expect a spectacular view of space yet there are no stars in the apollo photographs some of these conspiracy theories they think that if you go to the moon you should be able to see stars because there's no atmosphere there so space should be nice and black so you should be able to see a lot more stars than are shown in the polar photographs bill casing is convinced this was a conscious decision on nasa's part if you were to talk to aldrin or armstrong or any of the other apollo astronauts they would actually not respond in any way to questions regarding stars when you looked up at the sky could you actually see the stars in the solar corona in spite of the glare we were never able to see stars from the lunar surface or on the daylight side of the moon by eye without looking through the optics i asked the armstrong whether he saw stars because i knew everybody else asking i knew the answer of course the point is that your eyes aren't adapted to that the human eye reacts to light by opening and closing the iris in bright light the iris becomes smaller in the dark it widens on the moon the eye like the camera aperture can't adjust to the brightness of the lunar surface and the darkness of space at the same time if you increase the aperture you increase the amount of light going in and if you increase the exposure time you also increase the amount of light going in now if you were to do that on the moon to get the stars then that would mean that the foreground would just be completely washed out and overexposed when really what the astronauts were trying to take pictures of was themselves the surface features of the moon if you imagine um going let's say to a football stadium and all the lights are turned out you look up at the sky you can see lots of stars now if you can imagine some person turned on a floodlight it would drown out pretty much all the stars with the powerful light even our own television camera can't adjust to the extreme contrast to see the stars in the sky on our moon set jay windley puts this theory into practice in the hope of disproving one of the conspiracy theorists recurring arguments we're going to find out that if we use an identical camera loaded with identical film and we shoot pictures of the night sky we won't get stars okay i'm going to take a shot here you'll notice here i'm not using any sort of a viewfinder i'm just aiming will this experiment be enough to invalidate the conspiracy theorists claims [Music] the morning after the shoot the negatives are developed at a professional processing laboratory in los angeles in our experiment in the desert we shot a variety of photographs using different film formats like the apollo astronauts we had to guess at our focusing distances and our exposure settings and because we had no viewfinder we had to guess at the direction the camera was pointing and you can clearly see that even with those handicaps we were able to take quite usable photographs you can immediately see that there are no stars in this photograph even though the stars were very bright during our experiment they're simply too dim to be registered on film at the exposure levels that we used to take these photographs our experiment demonstrates that the stars could not have been seen in the photographs taken on the lunar surface but this explanation doesn't satisfy magazine publisher marcus allen he believes it's impossible that any of these photographs could survive a journey to the moon and back in the first place photographic film cannot withstand the vacuum of space so how did they get all these fantastic photographs we've been shown forever about apollo astronauts on the moon when the film was not in a pressurized environment let alone radiation protection conspiracy theorists believe this is their trump card not only would it destroy film it would kill the astronauts the earth's magnetic field protects our planet from solar rays but beyond this zone deep in space is where conspiracy theorists believe astronauts would be vulnerable to radiation's deadly effects the moon is irradiated by the sun constantly with terrible heat and of course there's cosmic radiation and then there are micro meteorites that travel 60 000 miles an hour that would go right through the camera the film and of course the astronauts themselves after leaving the earth's atmosphere the astronauts rocketed through the van allen belts van allen he said it was a sea of deadly radiation you would pick up a death dose just about the time you got through the van island shield you'd be cooked and you'd be dying these radioactive belts form a thick ring encircling the equator thinning out around the north and south poles until they get an engine that'll lift the life capsule surrounded by six feet of water or equivalent mass of lead they don't even there go through the van allen shield nothing knew it was dangerous don't you think that when they went through the van allen belts they would have said how are you feeling guys and the effect you're still feeling okay surely you would say this because if they were in any way incapacitated it would be a disaster [Music] when nasa designed the trajectory to go through the van and radiation belt it was done so the astronauts would go very very quickly through there so they wouldn't get a very high dosage and they also picked a part of an allen radiation belt which the the levels of radiation were quite weak nasa claims the astronauts endured only a brief exposure penetrating the thinnest section of the belts in one hour the valon radiation belt is a zone of radiation around the earth it shapes a little bit like a doughnut with two centers in it it's got a very strong nasty area around here as you can see that's a darker area and that's the inner belt and an outer belt over here which is a little bit more benign now the apollo astronauts were sent on a trajectory which avoided the inner belt so they were at a relatively safe part of there and they went through fairly quickly so they didn't hang around inside the banana radiation belt for very long but once they passed through they faced an even greater danger so here we have these clowns running around in tin foil craft stopping solar radiation and i'm not talking about the light i'm talking about the radiation from the solar storms there's always risk in space for example you can have solar storms where you get masses doses of radiation being flung out from the sun these eruptions from the sun can knock out satellites and electricity grids on earth [Music] but they can also be detected by an early warning computer system if there was some form of solar storm a big radiation discharge that the astronauts could actually be exposed to an acceptable and unacceptable hazard which would be a real risk so there were solar and solar scientists actually monitoring the solar activity to make sure that they weren't about to launch into a potential problem just three months after the apollo 16 mission nasa admitted that a violent solar flare hit the moon's surface an eruption so powerful it could have killed the astronauts had they been there the point is the american apollo astronauts did not have protection against these levels of radiation and we know that because nasa now admit as a result of the orion craft which is apollo 2.0 that the levels of radiation are such that they have to find out means to protect them before they can send humans through these levels of radiation but they sent the apollo astronauts so what's the problem the problem is they didn't send the apollo astronauts i believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth those were the words of president kennedy in 1961. there were three parts of that sentence there was get humans to the moon before the decade is out and safely and safely was only one of the three and there were a number of occasions during the course of the apollo program when the particularly the phrase before the decade is out all kind of took priority over safety sometimes they had to take some risks in order to keep to the schedule [Music] the astronauts could only rely on their spacecraft to survive a solar flare by studying the disk of the sun you can make predictions about when these are going to likely happen and avoid those times even if there was a storm if the astronauts were in the command module you could rotate the command module so you've got a lot of the fuel the oxygen and the water in between the astronauts and the direction the radiation is coming in and if we're on the surface then you could potentially go and hide behind a rock or you could even launch off from the surface before the nasty bits of the solar storm arrive for conspiracy theorists radiation is the final nail in the coffin they believe the astronauts could never have survived a trip to the moon and back but could the objects they returned with also be the key to unlocking secrets from the lunar surface itself and provide a definitive answer to the question did we really land on the moon conspiracy theorists believe that the moon rock from the missions was just another part of nasa's carefully engineered deception gerda von braun and a few guys from nasa went down to antarctica what's he doing in antarctica finding moon rocks quite possible that these uh earth lying rocks have been doctored to give the semblance of moon rocks it would be really really tough to fake these things it would be really hard now and certainly 50 years ago the idea that you would spend resources on producing some kind of secret lab rather than actually sending people to the moon to bring them back but how many people have actually examined the moon rock and can confirm where they came from there's a great deal of doubt about it in total the apollo missions brought back over 382 kilograms of lunar soil and rock these samples were distributed to laboratories all over the world at the independent barclays geochronology center in california geologist paul renee has been studying lunar rock samples throughout his career his main interest is these tiny glass spherules from the moon's surface created by the intense heat of a meteorite impact the spherules that we've been analyzing are tiny balls of of glass so they're like magma that we find on the earth in that sense but they've they've cooled very very quickly and so they form an essentially uniform glass sphere using a laser heating system to release gases locked inside these spherules paul rennie looks for evidence of cosmic radiation to uncover clues about their age and place of origin the lunar materials that we've analyzed and and that others have analyzed show evidence of having been bombarded by cosmic radiation and which we don't see on earth because we have an atmosphere that really shields them very effectively rene has determined these spherules date back 3.9 billion years this finding eliminates the possibility that they originated on earth so the earth with its very dynamic environment does not tend to preserve these glassy objects whereas the moon being essentially dead from a from a thermal point of view does tend to preserve these things the results that we obtained are absolutely definitively proof of a lunar origin i can say with utmost assurance that they're that they were derived from the moon [Music] but it's evidence the astronauts left behind and not what they brought back that may offer the clinching proof each successful apollo mission set up a range of experiments and 50 years after apollo 11 the lunar laser range is still in use there were two major experiments one was a a series of corner reflectors to reflect laser beams from the earth sent to the moon that then because of the geometry of these corner reflectors would send the beam back in exactly the direction that it came from but conspiracy theorists believe that these experiments were taking place before the apollo missions you don't need retroflectors to fire a laser it was being done by the massachusetts institute of technology in 1963. they were firing lasers at the moon no reflectors there then nobody had landed then and they were getting a signal back if this had already been achieved without a reflector what was the advantage of nasa placing these on the lunar surface there are no lasers there nasa only did the reflective business so they could prove they went to the moon it was another part of their ploy [Music] you send a laser pulse from the earth with a very powerful laser pointing for a big telescope at a location on the moon and it reflects a lot of that light back to you so it's fairly directional it comes straight back to it doesn't get scattered and by measuring the time difference between when you send the pulse and when you get the receive pulse back you can work out the distance to the moon very precisely to literally centimeters the reflectors placed by the apollo 11 crew allowed scientists to achieve greater accuracy about the earth's position in the solar system pretty much anybody in the world with a big telescope a powerful laser can bounce without getting permission from nasa lasers offer those reflectors and measure the distance to the moon so that proves to me that the astronauts went there and they left these laser reflectors at these different locations if nasa had faked this surely the russians would have exposed the legitimacy of this half a century ago at the height of the space race the soviet union and east germany also had the technology to listen in on the apollo missions and yet conspiracy theorists ignore the eavesdropping power and silence of america's arch enemies they weren't at war but this was as close as they could get like any form of fraud on the part of either party would have been exposed by the other party very quickly if the russians said publicly it was a fake it would need evidence otherwise it would just be sour it would look like sour grapes but they had no evidence because nasa had everything but even with no doubt raised by the russians 50 years on perhaps all great human achievements are destined to attract skepticism and controversy there will be landings there will be men that will be women on mars soon i hope that we don't see the same pack of conspiracy theories surfacing simply because it'll be a one of the biggest if not the biggest achievement of mankind they got to the with basically 1960s technology now with our technology with advanced computers etc it's still going to take them 25 years just to get back to the moon now really there's something wrong there when we see real conspiracy theories that that become public whistleblowers give away the secret after a few years even though there are only a small number of people involved some people seem to feel that a conspiracy has kept it secret for 50 years even though tens of thousands of people were in on the secret for all the effort it would take to create and hide a lie of such magnitude it would have been far easier for nasa to build a rocket and put man on the moon [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Free Documentary - History

Views: 7,504,874

Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full Documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), History, History Documentaries, Free Documentary History, Moon, Moon Landing, Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, NASA, Space Race, Space Program, Moon Landing Hoax, Conspiracy Theory, Moon Landing Conspiracy Theory, moon landing conspiracy, Soviet Union, we choose to go to the moon, JFK Moon Speech, The Eagle Has Landed, One Small Step, Bart Sibrel

Id: DxW__ZtZApo

Length: 52min 3sec (3123 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021