Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?

This so-called documentary does a poor job at presenting various possible viewpoints and misuses or ignores the applications of physical and optical laws. FOX could have done so much more with this interesting topic. This film only serves to hurt the credibility whether FOX is capable of producing a documentary.

Disjointed sequences of very short interview clips with only a handful of people present their opinions and analyses. No independent engineers or optical experts were consulted about the physics-related theories presented to provide additional insight.

The film tries and fails miserably to inspire the viewer to ask more questions than the film tries to answer. The intelligent viewer may learn that without a rudimentary understanding of physics, gravity, and optics one can easily "prove" just about anything.

There is lots of nice NASA footage, but nothing that can't be found in other well-written documentaries.

This is nothing more than a way to get your money. Everything in the film has been completely disproven. The Fox Network produced the show and they don't care what you think. They assume you're a moron, and they want your cash. Better to spend it on a good SciFi film, which this isn't.

In my astronomy class, we watched this movie and then went through why all the theories are wrong. There is an entire website dedicated to why everything in this movie is wrong Everything in this movie is taken out of context for sensationalism.

Conspiracy-theory-nutjobs should spend less time researching the Illuminati, the reverse-vampires, the Zionists, the saucer-people, and the Freemasons and instead take an introductory physics course.

Poor Mitch Pileggi. This must have been his contractually obligated "turkey" that Hollywood makes its "stars" do, just to prove who's in charge.

So you think we faked the moon landing?

So you saw the flag flapping in the "breeze" on the airless moon. No you didn't. The flag had a rod through the top and a weight at the bottom corner so that it would look fully deployed. And the "flapping" you saw was due to the astronaut TWISTING THE FLAGPOLE INTO THE LUNAR SOIL for better placement. As soon as the twisting stopped, guess what? The flapping stopped too!

And try this one on for size, airboy: Ever drop some flour in the kitchen and notice a cloud of dust hovering over the floor? Well if the astronauts were REALLY on a soundstage with a flag that was REALLY flapping in the breeze, you'd see dust flying all around too. But you didn't, because there wasn't, BECAUSE THEY WERE ON THE (AIRLESS) MOON!

So you thought the lighting of the Astronauts was too perfect, as if it was a studio job. Well, the lighting and the shadows would be a little wonky, considering that there are THREE sources of light in the photos: The sun (natch), the Earth (much the same way the full moon illuminates the night sky), and the moon itself. That's right, all that moonlight that we see here on earth was shining right up into the astronauts' faces and giving their spacesuits a nice, soft-light look.

Oh, that's also the reason you don't see any stars in the moon photos. The surrounding moonlight was so bright, the shutter speeds on the cameras were set very fast. It would be like taking a picture out your living room window at night and expecting to see stars in the photo. Ain't gonna happen.

So you think that there should be a great big crater under the LEM. Well I hate to break this to you, but the LEM didn't land at full power. Most of its fuel load was spent in deceleration from orbit, and in hovering over the landing site. They only needed a fraction of its power to make a nice, soft, 1/6th gravity landing. They didn't even "land" under power. Each of the landing "feet" had a thin rod that would signal the astronauts that they were just over the surface. They would then cut the engine and drop the final 18 inches unpowered. ("Contact light! OK, Engine Stop!" Remember that from the Apollo mission tapes?)

And then there's the matter of the ascent stage, popping off the moon as if it was on a cable. See, once again you're taking what you've seen (launches on earth) and projecting them onto what you THINK you've seen. It takes a ridiculous amount of thrust to start moving up. So when rockets launch from earth, they are held down for a few seconds. It's the same as starting your car when you're parked on a hill. Hold your foot on the brake and give it a little gas so you don't roll back. Well, you don't need to do that on the moon with its one-sixth gravity and when all you're moving is an ascent stage. Throw the switch and ((woosh!)) you're off.

Oh, and the reason you don't see any flame from the ascent rocket is simple: real rocket fuel doesn't burn, it's hypergolic. In a nutshell, 2 chemicals that are otherwise inert come together and expand rapidly. If you focus and channel it the right way, you get thrust. (It's not easy to do, but it can be done. That's why the phrase "Rocket Scientist" has such a mystique in our society.) But it doesn't produce a visible flame. The dramatic, flaming liftoff of the Saturn 5 rocket from Cape Kennedy came from the fuel mixture of the first stage, which used kerosene. And that WILL produce one heckuva flame, unlike the Eagle's ascent rocket.

There's more, but I think I've proved the point. Every so-called "Fact" on the show is easily refuted when you happen to know more than the average X-Phile about real science.

It beggars belief as to why actor Mitch Pileggi, star of the X-Files and an apparently healthy and sane man, would lend his name to such hilariously uninformed trash as this.

The conspiracy theory that NASA faked all the Moon landings, has been trotted out for years by self-declared experts whose expertise often seems to cover a superhuman range of highly specialised fields - from Geology, Photography and Physics to Engineering.

One of them, Bill Kaysing - a king of conspiracies, claims amongst other things, that the reason why Astronauts who have been to the moon hang up on him and refuse to talk when he calls them incessantly, "proves" that they have something to hide.

He and others breathlessly point to everything from photos of unexpected shadows and reflections, to the 70s B-movie 'Capricorn One' (which tapped into the public's growing pre-XFiles interest in conspiracy-fantasy), to contradictions between NASA drawings and what THEY think would actually happen in space.

But by far the worst moment of this program comes during the unsavoury references to deceased astronauts, in a cheap attempt to link their tragic deaths to a wider NASA cover-up.

Before you ask yourself if any of this stuff proves we didn't go to the moon, ask yourself this: Is there anything that proves that we did?

Then consider, as one example, the hundreds of scientific staff from around the world, and from all walks of life, who for 30 years have had the pleasure of examining the many kilograms of moon materials that were collected and returned by the Apollo missions. These geological materials are well documented, and are so unique that there is no way they could be artificial.

Meanwhile, with it's dramatic and sinister voiceovers, multiple use of the words "could?" "might?" and "did?", and a complete lack of reasonable objectivity, this sort of crap will no doubt entertain a few more gullible souls, on a break from searching their bellybutton lint for microchips.