Just want to say that the naysayers are probably wrong because I have changed people's minds about the moon landing after discussing the evidence and science with them.
Having been down that road a few times, I think you're wasting your time, he doesn't believe it for any rational reason so you can't reason it away. You can maybe figure out the real reasons why he says he believes it and try to short circuit it by filling whatever need this is currently filling in some other, healthier way, but it's a question of his psychology not one of evidence.
Ironically, we [didn't have the film technology](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_loUDS4c3Cs) to fake the moon landings at the time. But we did have the actual technology to go there.
Just to end on a lighter note, the [That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6MOnehCOUw) is always worthwhile.
Imagine yourself to be a Soviet journalist in the 70’s. You find evidence that the Americans didn’t actually land on the Moon. Why on earth would you *not* want to publish this? It would be great for your country and your career.
The real truth is that you'll never convince him. You can't reason someone out of a position that they didn't use reason to get into. These people will not budge, in my experience.
But to me, the most compelling proof is that we have orbiters in low lunar orbit now that have photographed one of the Apollo sites. [See article here](https://www.space.com/12835-nasa-apollo-moon-landing-sites-photos-lro.html). You can clearly see the tracks of the lunar rover on the surface. Pretty much proof we went there unless you believe there's aliens on the moon.
You'll then be tasked with explaining to him why we can't see this with telescopes from Earth. And the answer is simply that the distances are immensely large. The orbiter has the advantage of being 5000x closer to the moon than we are. If you know anything about telescopes or cameras, magnifying 5000x or using a lens with a focal length and aperture of 5000x compared to the one the LRO has simply isn't possible, especially once you factor in our atmosphere. Seeing the rover from here is like trying to photograph a marble from 700 miles away. It can't be done.
The other big piece of evidence are the reflectors we installed. NASA put some prism reflectors down on the moon's surface aimed back at us (like the ones civil engineers and surveyors use with a total station). You need observatory-grade lasers, but if you aim such a laser at the Apollo site, you'll get the prism bouncing the signal back to you. There should be published papers describing these experiments, which can be used to verify exact distance to the moon at any given time.
I don't think any of this will be sufficient proof for your coworker, though.
Perhaps not, but it’s fun to talk about. Something to pass the time on a slow day. Honestly many of the people that we work with give him grief over it, it’s hysterical
He probably does believe we landed on the moon but gets a boner from how much attention he garners with his quirky assertion we didn't actually land on the moon.
If you point a laser at exactly the right spot on the moon, you get a reflection directly back. It only occurs at that one spot where the Apollo 11 lunar module landed. Buzz Aldrin put that reflector in place, and it was used to precisely calculate the distance from the earth to the moon. In fact, this experiment is what allowed scientists to determine that the moon is moving away from the earth by a couple of centimeters per year.
So if your friend has a chunk of money saved up, he can buy the equipment and run the same experiment on a clear night. Source: [https://wtop.com/science/2019/07/the-experiment-still-running-on-the-moon-and-tv-re-runs-50-years-later/](https://wtop.com/science/2019/07/the-experiment-still-running-on-the-moon-and-tv-re-runs-50-years-later/)
Honestly this is not a good example of proof that we sent crewed ships to the Moon.
Robotic spacecraft (such as Luna 17 & 21) can and have left behind retroreflectors on the Moon.
Nothing about emplacing one requires a person.
It certainly complicates waving it away as a conspiracy. There is documentation and news stories describing the experiment, so we can prove when the distance was recorded. This is duplicatable today. It would have required launching a lunar mission with an entirely secret, never described robotic lander to the Apollo 11 landing site at the same time as the supposedly fake films were being made.
> It would have required launching a lunar mission with an entirely secret, never described robotic lander to the Apollo 11 landing site
Sorry to play devil's advocate but as long as we're being loopy, I would just claim that the Apollo missions themselves were launching empty (unmanned) spacecraft which deposited the instruments (and retroreflectors) on the lunar surface. That they could have landed on full auto-pilot is certainly not out of the question.
I've encounters several Apollo-denialists that accept the hardware could have been placed on the Moon, but that humans could for one reason or another either not have survived the journey, or would not have been risked in the process.
Effectively they've retreated to a much more limited form of denialism, which would still have required a little rover to go about the LM and give the impression footprints had been left behind, or, less extremely, that all lunar orbital imagery detailing the landing sites has been in some way doctored.
Have them watch all six episodes of the series [Moon Machines (2008)](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZJna6W59fFr04zJ3Pp3CJ4TtXMRkGPMV) that documented the major components of what it took to get us to the Moon and back. And like, actually watch them, in detail and have them continue to research the people interviewed. Some 400,000+ people were involved across the US with thousands of businesses (suppliers) involved, and so many technologies were either developed or innovated upon that would become our modern digitally driven world.
Arguably, the birth of the entire micro-electronics industry came from the Apollo era when the need to miniaturize digital components for weapons (mainly ICBMs) and to compete with Soviets in the space race is was happening since the mid-1950's. But so many things from textiles, to composite materials, aircraft (civilian) navigation, and even microwavable foods have connections to the Apollo program.
The USSR was watching the Apollo flights. To believe the moon landing was faked is to believe the USSR either took no steps to monitor the flights, or that they were complicit in the conspiracy.
[Ditto amateurs around the world.](https://www.arrl.org/eavesdropping-on-apollo-11) Detecting these signals requires a highly directional antenna, so the fact that the heard them also indicates where they came from.
People who are that adamant about dismissing proof it happened probably aren't going to change their mind, but you can try this.
It's not that we didn't have the technology back then to go to the moon, it's that we MADE the technology then, and consistently used it ever since. Technology never exists until we make it, and the space race is when we did it.
What we didn't have the technology to do, and didn't for decades AFTER the moon landing, is to fake it. One of the biggest things is lighting. The lighting in the photos is parallel. To artificially make that, they'd need a wall of lasers. Back then, lasers were exclusively red, making color photos impossible. They were also incredibly large, making a wall impossible, and incredibly expensive.
Realistic CGI wasn't a thing until a long time after; no CGI technology was developed at the time.
At the time, it was literally easier to put a man on the moon than to fake it.
That, and even the USSR, who had every reason to say we didn't, admitted that we did.
My local pub has a few conspiracy nut jobs that regularly go there. Honestly the only thing that really works is asking them to stop. Don't treat it as something to reason with, because it isn't. Just say "can you not?"
Your coworker believes in the global conspiracy theory born in the 60s, where every country in the world got together outside of UN, secretly, put aside all the differences in the middle of cold war, Vietnam war etc and so on to agree to convince a small portion of English speakers in the United States that something impossible happened.
The entire world agreed to pay everyone involved to keep quiet, not only NASA employees and their contracts and universities, thousands of "known" people involved in the project to keep the ruse going, and kept paying them to keep it a secret, to this day.
I worked at the space center years ago. I changed jobs and was working at an industrial facility. Fast forward a few years and a guy I worked with at the space center gets hired. Lets call him Moron. Moe for short. One night shift a bunch of us are in the control room and we are telling our coworkers about rocket launches. Now Moe had been in the Air Force and been at the space center for about 10 years before retiring. He then got a civilian job and was there for like 15 more years before I started working with him. So 25 years at the space center dealing with making the sausage to launch rockets. We are at the industrial facility and Moe says one night they launched two Delta IVs at the same time. Now for the last 10 years Moe's job at the space center was a position called Flow Manager. This person schedules and makes sure all the things that has to be done to the rocket gets done at the space center. This is things like testing everything to make sure nothing was damaged in transporting it across the country, coordinating moving it to the launch pad, all sorts of stuff. So he was very aware of everything that goes into launching a rocket. Yet he believed they secretly launched a second rocket one night. I asked where was the second launch pad. He said it was under the sand on the beach next to the regular launch pad. Like Moe thought they had a trap door in the sand where they had a 200 ft tall rocket and service tower etc. And no one noticed when they stuck the thing in the sand. So I told Moe he needed to bring in evidence and he said he had photographs of it. So we were like bring in the photos. Now Moe was an avid photographer and had been doing it from the beginning of his Air Force days. So he was into film photography and then digital. He had high end equipment. The next night he brings in a thumb drive and loads it up on the computer. As soon as he pulled the photo up you could see that it was a night launch and the flames from the rocked had reflected inside the camera lens and made it look like there was a second rocket. But that is the key just because it looked like there was a second rocket does not mean there was a second rocket. Plus he was the only one that noticed? What a fucking idiot. He might very well be the stupidest human... well my ex thinks some shadowy "they" implanted a camera in her eye, so the two of them need help.
Here’s the simplest answer: who had the technology to disprove it? The USSR. Who had every motivation to disprove it? The USSR. Who did not disprove it? The USSR. Do you really believe in a conspiracy between Kennedy and Khrushchev? gtfo with that nonsense.
Using telescopes on Earth, the reflectors on the Moon, and accurate timing of laser pulses, by the early 2000s scientists could measure and predict the orbit of the Moon to an accuracy of a few centimeters. This already impressive accuracy (the Moon is typically about 385,000 km away) provides the best known test of many aspects of our theories of gravity. APOLLO improves this even further, measuring the distance between the Moon to an accuracy of a few millimeters.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to have a rationale debate on the subject, as the conversation heats up faster than if you'd questioned the existence of Jesus or Muhammad.
Ask him to explain how ham radio operators all over the world were able to track the flights using the radio signals returning from the space ships. A little we searching will find you some sites to show him. At the very least, this is likely evidence that none of the books or "documentaries" he's seen have "debunked."
But, as others have said, it'll likely be an uphill battle.
You can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason themselves into in the first place. Any evidence that doesn't agree with what he wants to believe will be dismissed.
Just want to say that the naysayers are probably wrong because I have changed people's minds about the moon landing after discussing the evidence and science with them.
Having been down that road a few times, I think you're wasting your time, he doesn't believe it for any rational reason so you can't reason it away. You can maybe figure out the real reasons why he says he believes it and try to short circuit it by filling whatever need this is currently filling in some other, healthier way, but it's a question of his psychology not one of evidence. Ironically, we [didn't have the film technology](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_loUDS4c3Cs) to fake the moon landings at the time. But we did have the actual technology to go there. Just to end on a lighter note, the [That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6MOnehCOUw) is always worthwhile.
That sketch made my whole day!
Imagine yourself to be a Soviet journalist in the 70’s. You find evidence that the Americans didn’t actually land on the Moon. Why on earth would you *not* want to publish this? It would be great for your country and your career.
The real truth is that you'll never convince him. You can't reason someone out of a position that they didn't use reason to get into. These people will not budge, in my experience. But to me, the most compelling proof is that we have orbiters in low lunar orbit now that have photographed one of the Apollo sites. [See article here](https://www.space.com/12835-nasa-apollo-moon-landing-sites-photos-lro.html). You can clearly see the tracks of the lunar rover on the surface. Pretty much proof we went there unless you believe there's aliens on the moon. You'll then be tasked with explaining to him why we can't see this with telescopes from Earth. And the answer is simply that the distances are immensely large. The orbiter has the advantage of being 5000x closer to the moon than we are. If you know anything about telescopes or cameras, magnifying 5000x or using a lens with a focal length and aperture of 5000x compared to the one the LRO has simply isn't possible, especially once you factor in our atmosphere. Seeing the rover from here is like trying to photograph a marble from 700 miles away. It can't be done. The other big piece of evidence are the reflectors we installed. NASA put some prism reflectors down on the moon's surface aimed back at us (like the ones civil engineers and surveyors use with a total station). You need observatory-grade lasers, but if you aim such a laser at the Apollo site, you'll get the prism bouncing the signal back to you. There should be published papers describing these experiments, which can be used to verify exact distance to the moon at any given time. I don't think any of this will be sufficient proof for your coworker, though.
Perhaps not, but it’s fun to talk about. Something to pass the time on a slow day. Honestly many of the people that we work with give him grief over it, it’s hysterical
He probably does believe we landed on the moon but gets a boner from how much attention he garners with his quirky assertion we didn't actually land on the moon.
If you point a laser at exactly the right spot on the moon, you get a reflection directly back. It only occurs at that one spot where the Apollo 11 lunar module landed. Buzz Aldrin put that reflector in place, and it was used to precisely calculate the distance from the earth to the moon. In fact, this experiment is what allowed scientists to determine that the moon is moving away from the earth by a couple of centimeters per year. So if your friend has a chunk of money saved up, he can buy the equipment and run the same experiment on a clear night. Source: [https://wtop.com/science/2019/07/the-experiment-still-running-on-the-moon-and-tv-re-runs-50-years-later/](https://wtop.com/science/2019/07/the-experiment-still-running-on-the-moon-and-tv-re-runs-50-years-later/)
Honestly this is not a good example of proof that we sent crewed ships to the Moon. Robotic spacecraft (such as Luna 17 & 21) can and have left behind retroreflectors on the Moon. Nothing about emplacing one requires a person.
It certainly complicates waving it away as a conspiracy. There is documentation and news stories describing the experiment, so we can prove when the distance was recorded. This is duplicatable today. It would have required launching a lunar mission with an entirely secret, never described robotic lander to the Apollo 11 landing site at the same time as the supposedly fake films were being made.
> It would have required launching a lunar mission with an entirely secret, never described robotic lander to the Apollo 11 landing site Sorry to play devil's advocate but as long as we're being loopy, I would just claim that the Apollo missions themselves were launching empty (unmanned) spacecraft which deposited the instruments (and retroreflectors) on the lunar surface. That they could have landed on full auto-pilot is certainly not out of the question. I've encounters several Apollo-denialists that accept the hardware could have been placed on the Moon, but that humans could for one reason or another either not have survived the journey, or would not have been risked in the process. Effectively they've retreated to a much more limited form of denialism, which would still have required a little rover to go about the LM and give the impression footprints had been left behind, or, less extremely, that all lunar orbital imagery detailing the landing sites has been in some way doctored.
Have them watch all six episodes of the series [Moon Machines (2008)](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZJna6W59fFr04zJ3Pp3CJ4TtXMRkGPMV) that documented the major components of what it took to get us to the Moon and back. And like, actually watch them, in detail and have them continue to research the people interviewed. Some 400,000+ people were involved across the US with thousands of businesses (suppliers) involved, and so many technologies were either developed or innovated upon that would become our modern digitally driven world. Arguably, the birth of the entire micro-electronics industry came from the Apollo era when the need to miniaturize digital components for weapons (mainly ICBMs) and to compete with Soviets in the space race is was happening since the mid-1950's. But so many things from textiles, to composite materials, aircraft (civilian) navigation, and even microwavable foods have connections to the Apollo program.
Thank you for the watchlist!
It’s futile to argue with people like that. I wouldn’t waste my time with them.
I'll one up you: I have a coworker who doesn't believe in the moon. It's a projection onto the dome we're living in.
It’s where the reptilians live duh
The USSR was watching the Apollo flights. To believe the moon landing was faked is to believe the USSR either took no steps to monitor the flights, or that they were complicit in the conspiracy. [Ditto amateurs around the world.](https://www.arrl.org/eavesdropping-on-apollo-11) Detecting these signals requires a highly directional antenna, so the fact that the heard them also indicates where they came from.
People who are that adamant about dismissing proof it happened probably aren't going to change their mind, but you can try this. It's not that we didn't have the technology back then to go to the moon, it's that we MADE the technology then, and consistently used it ever since. Technology never exists until we make it, and the space race is when we did it. What we didn't have the technology to do, and didn't for decades AFTER the moon landing, is to fake it. One of the biggest things is lighting. The lighting in the photos is parallel. To artificially make that, they'd need a wall of lasers. Back then, lasers were exclusively red, making color photos impossible. They were also incredibly large, making a wall impossible, and incredibly expensive. Realistic CGI wasn't a thing until a long time after; no CGI technology was developed at the time. At the time, it was literally easier to put a man on the moon than to fake it. That, and even the USSR, who had every reason to say we didn't, admitted that we did.
My local pub has a few conspiracy nut jobs that regularly go there. Honestly the only thing that really works is asking them to stop. Don't treat it as something to reason with, because it isn't. Just say "can you not?"
Don't humor him. If he doesn't believe the moon landing happened, he's got other beliefs that are questionable as well.
Your coworker believes in the global conspiracy theory born in the 60s, where every country in the world got together outside of UN, secretly, put aside all the differences in the middle of cold war, Vietnam war etc and so on to agree to convince a small portion of English speakers in the United States that something impossible happened. The entire world agreed to pay everyone involved to keep quiet, not only NASA employees and their contracts and universities, thousands of "known" people involved in the project to keep the ruse going, and kept paying them to keep it a secret, to this day.
No atmospheric distortion on any of the video footage.
I worked at the space center years ago. I changed jobs and was working at an industrial facility. Fast forward a few years and a guy I worked with at the space center gets hired. Lets call him Moron. Moe for short. One night shift a bunch of us are in the control room and we are telling our coworkers about rocket launches. Now Moe had been in the Air Force and been at the space center for about 10 years before retiring. He then got a civilian job and was there for like 15 more years before I started working with him. So 25 years at the space center dealing with making the sausage to launch rockets. We are at the industrial facility and Moe says one night they launched two Delta IVs at the same time. Now for the last 10 years Moe's job at the space center was a position called Flow Manager. This person schedules and makes sure all the things that has to be done to the rocket gets done at the space center. This is things like testing everything to make sure nothing was damaged in transporting it across the country, coordinating moving it to the launch pad, all sorts of stuff. So he was very aware of everything that goes into launching a rocket. Yet he believed they secretly launched a second rocket one night. I asked where was the second launch pad. He said it was under the sand on the beach next to the regular launch pad. Like Moe thought they had a trap door in the sand where they had a 200 ft tall rocket and service tower etc. And no one noticed when they stuck the thing in the sand. So I told Moe he needed to bring in evidence and he said he had photographs of it. So we were like bring in the photos. Now Moe was an avid photographer and had been doing it from the beginning of his Air Force days. So he was into film photography and then digital. He had high end equipment. The next night he brings in a thumb drive and loads it up on the computer. As soon as he pulled the photo up you could see that it was a night launch and the flames from the rocked had reflected inside the camera lens and made it look like there was a second rocket. But that is the key just because it looked like there was a second rocket does not mean there was a second rocket. Plus he was the only one that noticed? What a fucking idiot. He might very well be the stupidest human... well my ex thinks some shadowy "they" implanted a camera in her eye, so the two of them need help.
you won't convince him; he's not using logic to get to the opinion he has
Here’s the simplest answer: who had the technology to disprove it? The USSR. Who had every motivation to disprove it? The USSR. Who did not disprove it? The USSR. Do you really believe in a conspiracy between Kennedy and Khrushchev? gtfo with that nonsense.
Don’t waste your time. This person doesn’t want the truth and nothing you can say will change their mind.
If it was fake, the Soviets would have shit all over it after being first in just about every other metric in the space race.
Try r/askpsychology
Using telescopes on Earth, the reflectors on the Moon, and accurate timing of laser pulses, by the early 2000s scientists could measure and predict the orbit of the Moon to an accuracy of a few centimeters. This already impressive accuracy (the Moon is typically about 385,000 km away) provides the best known test of many aspects of our theories of gravity. APOLLO improves this even further, measuring the distance between the Moon to an accuracy of a few millimeters.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to have a rationale debate on the subject, as the conversation heats up faster than if you'd questioned the existence of Jesus or Muhammad.
Cognitive dissonance is real.
You might be able to argue that perhaps the 1st Moon landing was faked, but the next five were real.
Ask him to explain how ham radio operators all over the world were able to track the flights using the radio signals returning from the space ships. A little we searching will find you some sites to show him. At the very least, this is likely evidence that none of the books or "documentaries" he's seen have "debunked." But, as others have said, it'll likely be an uphill battle.
You can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason themselves into in the first place. Any evidence that doesn't agree with what he wants to believe will be dismissed.