Keeping Quiet: How Big Was the Moon Conspiracy?

Moon truthers, or anti-hoaxers, often "settle" the whole matter with a quip about how "thousands and thousands of people would have had to keep the Moon hoax a secret." The Moon hoax would definitely not have required thousands of people to keep such a major secret.

A movie from the 1970s, Capricorn One, shows exactly how simple it could be to stage a Moon conspiracy. In the movie, three Astronauts, a single NASA scientist, a camera crew, and some government agents are the only people required to stage a fake landing on Mars. Everyone else, including the President of the United States, thought that the Mars landing was real. That includes all of the people who built the space equipment, all of the people at mission control, and just about everyone who worked on the entire thing. Why, then, do anti-Moon hoaxers insist that thousands of people kept this great secret?

To put a spin on things - thousands of people can actually keep a secret. The Manhattan Project - the project that supplied the United States with the first atomic bomb during World War II - managed to keep the bomb a secret. Thousands of people had been working on that bomb, and none of them spilled the beans about the project. Of course, as with the Apollo program, few of them probably knew of the larger picture. Many people in both projects were simply peons. Nobody told them anything, and they were just happy to receive their modest government paychecks every few weeks.

Most hoax projects require very few people. In fact, the Moon landing photos could have been faked right under the noses of NASA onlookers during the so-called "practice" missions in the desert. How? Simple image editing techniques. A lot of the stuff found in Photoshop was around in the 1960s. After all, the good people on the Photoshop team didn't invent the notion of "changing hues" or "cropping." Sure, it took longer back then, but a rainbow of possibilities existed in expensive editing studios. One or two image editors could have made hundreds of photos.

 

The above photo was taken during the Viking missions. The convincing blue sky that I added took about 30 seconds in Photoshop, and all I has to do was a little bit of hue editing. Therefore, this color of sky may have existed in the original photo, and the uncanny resemblance to some remote spot in Arizona may be more than just a resemblance. This sort of image editing was around during the 1960s, although that 30 second time frame might have been more like eight hours. Of course, the photo editors would have been working on numerous exposures during that eight hour period. One can easily see how only a few people would have been involved in each stage of any space hoax.

The Apollo missions really did take off. That much is certain; but, the Saturn V rocket didn't necessarily have to go to the Moon. The spacecraft might simply have orbited the Earth until re-entry time. During that time period, a select group of scientists would have played back tapes of the Moon landing. Far-off satellites or Lunar probes may have been used to relay signals back to Earth, giving radio monitors around the world the proof that they were looking for. As for seeing the crew orbiting the Earth and spotting the hoax, well, finding an object in Earth orbit has been compared to finding a small boat lost in the Atlantic Ocean. Tracking devices help Astronauts locate objects in Earth Orbit, but telescopes do not have any such luxury. Anyway, the take-off of the Saturn V would have been enough to please almost everyone involved with the project. No conspiracy would have been necessary amongst the vast amount of NASA employees and contractors. The only people who would have known of such a conspiracy, again, would have been the Astronauts, film crews, and a select team of science advisers who helped to 'make it seem real' for the rest of the world.

  

To demonstrate how easy this photo tampering stuff is, I took a NASA moon photo and quickly changed some of the hues in Photoshop. I didn't bother to edit the Astronaut in the photo, because that would have consumed too many minutes of my time. The entire process took only about a minute, and as you can see, it now looks like the Astronaut is standing on a sand dune somewhere in Nevada. This sort of tampering only took one or two people, even back in the 1960s. The way that I did this job is actually more like how it would have been done in the 1960s, because the Astronaut would have been cut out of the shot with a fine blade; then, the subsequent hue tampering would have taken place. The Astronaut would then have been re-added, and very small bits of paint would have been used to "airbrush" out any inconsistencies. If the Moon hoax was actually staged in the desert, then the Astronauts would have soiled themselves with "Moon-colored" soot. This way, no tampering with the photos of the Astronauts would have been necessary, and they could have simply been placed in a hue-altered shot.

In the end, if we accept a Moon hoax, we must accept two additional postulates: 1) NASA fooled the public at large, and 2) NASA fooled itself. What does number 2 mean? Well, it's quite simple - NASA had to fool 99% of the people working for NASA that the United States actually did send people to the Moon. The Saturn V's launch wasn't just for public consumption, it justified the years of work put in by NASA scientists and engineers. It is much easier to control a handful of conspirators than a stadium full. Those few 1-2% of NASA that actually knew about a Moon hoax conspiracy could easily have been dealt with.

Again, you ask, how could we fool so many scientists around the world that the US went to the Moon? Surely, you say, the scientists that monitored the launch would have found something out of place.Well, on this point, many details could be divulged; but, that seems unnecessary. NASA spent a long time researching the process required to land a man on the moon; so, obviously, they knew how to fake a moon landing in great detail. Even if the moon landings were real, even if the hoax isn't true - you have to admit, NASA would still know how to fake a landing on the Moon. Furthermore, you would have to admit, they would probably do a fine, fine job of faking one. 

Okay, so how many people would it realistically take to fake the Moon landings? Probably no more than a hundred. This number would include the Astronauts, film crew, leading scientists, and government agents assigned to the cover up. If there was a conspiracy, then it wasn't much bigger than that. Such a huge conspiracy necessarily must involve as few people as possible, and in the case of the Moon landings, a low number would have been entirely possible. It's as as simple as this: few people needed to be in-the-know. Mission control could easily have been fed false data, and the film footage of the landings may have just been that - a Hollywood-style film.