In today’s world, there are a lot of people who believe a lot of crazy things. By far the craziest thing I’ve heard people try to rationalize is how the moon landing in 1969 was totally faked. The sad thing is, there’s a whole community that believes that the NASA moon landing wasn’t real at all. Let’s discuss what they think and prove how the moon landing couldn’t have been faked.

Conspiracy theorists believe that there was no possible way that NASA had the technology to send a man to the moon and they believe that it all took place on a sound stage. Although people believe that the moon landing was fake, faking the moon landing in 1969 would have been much harder than just going to the moon in the first place. Also, a lot of people believe that Stanley Cooper shot a guy jumping around a stage in an astronaut suit and just played it back for all of the people to blindly believe. That statement is false, but given the filmmaking technology at the time, faking the moon landing wouldn’t have been physically possible.

“Look at these shadows! Look how bright it is, this was obviously shot in a studio” – a quote from an unknown conspiracy theorist. Contrary to popular belief, creating that lighting would have been absolutely impossible. Mark Schubin is a forensic motion picture analyst who used image forensics to study the NASA moon landing and he noted that in the pictures and in the videos of the moon landing that the light source that we see in the footage are parallel sun rays with no diffusion. If you take a look at the photos from the Apollo mission, you can see that all the shadows are parallel because the light source is about 93 million miles away. If you ever attempt to recreate the photo using studio lighting, then the shadows diverge. Back in the 60’s, the only way to create that effect would be to build a wall of laser lights (millions) so close together that they’d be like pixels on a TV screen, but lasers back then were big and costly so rigging that many of that size would have required an apparatus that most likely would have cost more than the entire Apollo project. In those days the only lasers that were practically available were red which means the color photos that we have from the moon landing would have been impossible. Today, we have computer graphics that we could use to recreate the moon landing. 1969 computer graphics didn’t exist like they do today. Given the parallel light rays and the detailed colored photos, we don’t know of any way they could have faked the moon landing with the technology they had at the time.

“What if that’s what they want you to believe? What if NASA secretly created computer graphics and just kept it from us for about 40 years?” If that were the case, then an astronomical amount of people would have had to keep that secret like the over 400,000 NASA employees. Scientists from Australia, Spain, and England said they independently picked up the moon landing from space. Even the Russians, our space race rivals who had every reason to prove us wrong, said that they picked up the moon landing. “Where is the tangible proof that we went to the moon? There isn’t any.”
Actually, there is proof that we went to the moon – when the astronauts went to the moon they had laid out a reflective material called “Retroreflectors”. So today, when an observatory aims a high powered laser at them, it bounces back. “Wait it still could have been faked! All you would have to do is secretly create computer graphics decades ahead of its time, convince multiple governments to lie on our behalf and then somehow get retroreflectors to the moon without going there!” Honestly, it would just be easier to put a man on the moon.