When a director asked an American astronaut: I swear to you on the Bible… have you ever set foot on the moon?

In the NASA program, Earth’s only moon was visited over the years by a total of 12 astronauts. However, the American media reports that opinion polls in recent years show that up to 6 percent of Americans still believe that the astronauts of the 1969 Apollo 11 mission never landed on the moon. This figure was 30 percent, according to a poll conducted in July 1970.

Conspiracy theorists, including engineers and others from various professions, insist that despite the massive amount of evidence, samples of moon dust and rocks, and the television footage that was watched by about 600 million people on Earth at the time, it was all just an elaborate cinematic trick, filmed at the Air Force testing range at the famous Area 51 in Nevada, or in a Hollywood movie theater by a famous director named Stanley Kubrick.

After Neil Armstrong, who took the first step, Edwin Aldrin stepped onto the surface of the moon, while Mike Collins, the third astronaut in Apollo 11, did not stand on the surface of the moon, because he remained in the command module while his two companions performed that legendary walk on the moon.

A funny incident occurred in September 2002, when Bart Sibrel, the creator of several documentaries that assert that the moon landing never happened, confronted astronaut Edwin Aldrin in Beverly Hills. The diehard skeptic approached the astronaut, thrust a Bible at him and demanded that he swear that he was not lying about walking on the moon. He did this before calling him a “liar and a coward.”

Aldrin, then 72, became enraged and punched Siberell in the face. The blow only served to fuel conspiracy theorists’ insistence that the 1969 incident was “the greatest fraud of the century,” as author Norman Mailer once called it.

Neil Armstrong had previously stated in refutation of the Apollo 11 skeptics, saying: “It was easier to do that trip than to fake it,” and if the trip to the moon was assumed not to have happened, about 400,000 people would have to be involved in the conspiracy.

Up to 400,000 people over many years were involved in the development of the Apollo program, and this moon landing program consumed about 4 percent of the US federal budget, a huge figure comparable to US defense spending today.

American author Bill Kaysing is described as the founder of the “moon conspiracy” theory. The man, who worked for a period of time at “NASA”, wrote a book on the subject in 1974 called “We Never Went to the Moon”, adding the phrase: “A $30 billion American fraud.”

He was so enthusiastic about denying that American astronauts had landed on the moon that he printed the book at his own expense in 1976, and later this book was reprinted several times.

For Kaysing, all astronauts who claimed to have visited the moon were liars, and anyone who told the truth was killed!

The founder of the conspiracy theory uses in his book many of what he describes as “contradictions” to refute the idea of ​​landing on the moon, pointing out that the level of technical development at the American space agency NASA in the late sixties did not allow for the implementation of such a complex operation, and the success of such an adventure tended to be zero.

Keesing also noted the absence of any trace of a crater supposedly created by the lunar vehicle’s jet engines on the surface, and also observed the “fluttering of the American flag” in the images taken in space, and pointed out many issues that many skeptics still repeat, such as the absence of stars in the images.

Later, the “arguments” of denying the Apollo 11 mission were repeated by many skeptical figures, while the widow of director Stanley Kubrick poured “oil on the fire” by stating, between seriousness and joking, in 2003, that her husband actually filmed the moon landing scenes in Hollywood!

Senior Soviet cosmonauts do not take the “moon conspiracy theory” seriously. Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first human to walk in outer space, said more than 12 years ago: “Only completely ignorant people can seriously believe that the Americans did not go to the moon.”

Source: RT