There are unicorns on the moon. That’s what the New York Sun newspaper published on August 25, 1835. There were six articles released, each with even wilder allegations. “The Great Moon Hoax” gained popularity among newspaper readers because of the unbelievable unearthing of supposed life on the moon. The mastermind behind the articles was a reporter named Richard Locke who based the articles off of the best selling books written by Thomas Dick. These books composed by Dick, argue the idea that the moon had 4.2 billion inhabitants, with logical math to back up his claims. Though, Thomas Dick was wrong about the concept of life on the moon, he was not the first to argue there were other beings in our solar system. “The Great Moon Hoax” is not the only conspiracy about the moon. Bill Kaysing was another man who came up with an idea that many people still believe in today. Kaysing persuaded many people that the U.S. government never did send humans to the moon. Rather the footage of astronauts on the moon was a deception and the recording was actually filmed in a Hollywood studio, not on the moon. One person in particular who followed in the footsteps of Bill Kaysing was a man named JP Sears. In a youtube video made in September of 2018 Sears gives 13 Reasons Why the Moon Landing Was Fake filled with distorted claims. When there is real evidence of the United States landing on the moon, the theory claiming the moon landing was fake is both false and misleading.

“[T]here’s no wind on the moon, Einstein” (1:28).

JP Sears makes many claims throughout his youtube video, one of which being specifically about the pictures with the American flag looking as if it is flapping in the wind. Around one and a half minutes into the video, JP Sears states one of his first claims, “[T]here’s no wind on the moon, Einstein.” Mockingly, JP Sears calls the viewer Einstein, which is a childish insult that someone would say sarcastically that would imply the person is the opposite of Einstein. Though it may look like the astronauts are planting the flag into the moon’s surface as it flaps in the wind, this is false. The flag was designed to have a horizontal pole through it so that the pictures taken would look more appealing. According to an ABC News article, the task of designing a flag was given to a small team of engineers at the Johnson Space Center. Instead of having a saggy-looking flag NASA wanted a flag that would look as though it was waving in the wind in all the pictures taken. According to Richard Fienberg, the American Astronomical Society’s Press Officer, “The Apollo 11 astronauts had trouble extending the rod all the way, and in still pictures, this creates a ripple effect that the flag, you can see it only moves while the astronauts are grinding it into the moon’s surface.” The flags can even be seen on lunar satellite pictures. The Apollo 12, 16, and 17 flags are all still standing, but the Apollo 11 flag has fallen over.

“No stars in any of the photos taken from the moon” (2:05).

A popular reason many people believe the moon landing was filmed in a studio is that there are no stars in the photos taken by the astronauts. Sarcastically, JP Sears tries to explain the reason he thinks there are no stars in any of the pictures taken on the moon: “Now were the stars just blotched out by the intense inner-city street lights that are on the moon or are there just no stars visible from the pretend moon inside of a Hollywood sound stage.” There is a perfectly good explanation for this. The thing is that everything in the pictures is so much brighter than the stars. As explained on History.com, the stars were too dark that they blended in with the background of black compared to the sun reflecting off the bright white space suits and the moon’s surface. On their trip to the moon, the Apollo astronauts used a film camera to capture each other walking on the moon’s surface. The cameras were set to focus on the Apollo crew, not the distant stars, which is why they don’t appear in many of the pictures. The Planetary Society clarifies that exposures from the cameras were short and short exposures don’t capture stars. To summarize, the stars are there, but they are just too faint to show up on film.

“[I]t would be impossible to land on the moon’s surface without kicking up a dust storm” (2:01).

Scientists had first believed that the moon’s surface would be covered in a thick layer of dust and the spacecraft would have sunk when it tried to land. Luckily for the astronauts, the scientists were wrong. JP Sears tries to convince the viewer that because no dust storm kicked up or craters made by the spacecraft after landing on the moon that infers the moon landing was shot in a studio. He claims that “it would be impossible to land on the moon’s surface without kicking up a dust storm.” When the space shuttle did not sink into a pile of dust, scientists were baffled. Robert Kofahl and Kelly Segraves, authors of The Creation Explanation: A Scientific Alternative to Evolution, notes “there is a noticeable silence on this matter in current discussions of moon data.” A planetary physicist at the University of Central Florida on the NASA website confirmed that dust along with gravel and rocks do shoot up into the air when a vehicle lands on the moon’s surface: “When a vehicle lands on the Moon, it shoots out a lot of ejecta at high velocity, including dust as well as lager gravel and rocks”. During the moon landings, the dust and gravel even created a thin lunar atmosphere which decreased the astronauts’ visibility. The Apollo 17 mission commander Eugene Cernan talked about the matter of dust during lunar landings and described it as “one of the most aggravating restricting facets of lunar surface exploration is the dust.” Cernan complained about the dust sticking on everything it came in contact with. JP Sears’ claim of no dust storm upon landing is false as many other claims in his video.

“Now even getting to the moon alive would be impossible because of the Van Allen radiation belt” (3:25).

In 1958, Dr. James Van Allen discovered high-energy particle clouds not more than 25,000 miles from Earth. For a long time afterward, the radiation belts have been seen as possibly deadly to astronauts who spend too much time with them. JP Sears even goes as far as saying it was impossible to get to the moon because of the Van Allen radiation belts: “Now even getting to the moon alive would be impossible because of the Van Allen radiation belt. No one could survive the trip through this intense radiation belt that surrounds the Earth.” He goes on to compare an astronaut going through the Van Allen belts to a cat being put through a microwave. The US Occupational Safety and Health Agency warns that a lethal dosage of radiation would be 300 Rads in one hour. Fortunately for the Apollo astronauts per The Wire, a NASA space task group was assigned the task of figuring out the safest possible route for the crew to avoid the most dangerous parts of the Van Allen belts. The Apollo crews all carried dosimeters on their spacecraft to make sure they were at a safe dosage level. Over the 6 day trip, the crew’s total dosage was 2 Rads. 

“[Stanley Kubrick] was hired by the government to direct a film inside a Hollywood sound stage” (4:02).

The 2001 movie, Space Odyssey was directed by Stanley Kubrick and caused Kubrick to become wrapped up in this conspiracy theory. Those who believe the moon landing was fake believe that Kubrick put hidden messages in his film The Shining to try to tell the American public that he was hired to stage the moon landings. In his youtube video, Sears explains the situation he believes Kubrick is in: “[Stanley Kubrick] was hired by the government to direct a film inside a Hollywood sound stage and he could never tell the truth because if he did they would kill him and he knew it that’s why in his 1980 movie The Shining he revealed the truth through a trail of secret messages.” During the movie, Danny Torrance wears a knit sweater with an Apollo 11 rocket on it. Resultantly many moon hoax believers use this as evidence that Stanley Kubrick is leaving hidden messages in the movie. The truth behind the jumper did come out. The thing is the jumper was chosen because it looked to be handmade, not to connect the Apollo missions. According to Leon Vitali, “Stanley wanted something that looked handmade, and Milena (Canonero the costume designer on ‘The Shining’) arrived on the set one day and said, ‘How about this?’ It was just the sort of thing that a kid that age would have liked.” Even Stanley Kubrick’s daughter, Vivian Kubrick posted in a 2016 Facebook post called the idea of her father staging the moon landing “manifestly a grotesque lie.”

President John F. Kennedy once said, “[The U.S.] should commit itself to achieve the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.” The U.S. made it to the moon and that brought the nation a sense of pride. It proved how powerful the country could be if it put its mind to a goal. JFK gave the country a goal and the country achieved it in the set amount of time with little prior knowledge in the area. So when people refuse to believe the country accomplished this great feat it tears down the nation’s pride. Oliver Morton, author of The Moon: A History for the Future puts it best, “The point of moon-hoax theory is to show how powerful the American government was in terms of making people believe things that weren’t true.” The moon hoax theory has led to unnecessary distrust in our government. With the amount of evidence there is that the moon landing happened, people should not be believing the fake news they read on the internet. Fact-checking sources is always a good way to make sure the information is correct. “The reality is, the internet has made it possible for people to say whatever the hell they like to a broader number of people than ever before,” Roger Launius, a former chief historian of NASA, “And the truth is, Americans love conspiracy theories. Every time something big happens, somebody has a counter explanation.”

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