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"The Lie on the Moon" — The Apollo Program and the World's Most Stubborn Conspiracy Theory · Lost Civilizations: Ancient Aliens & Forgotten History

0:01
Beverly Hills, September 9th, 2002.
0:05
A 72-year-old man has been lured
0:07
into a hotel lobby on Rodeo Drive.
0:10
He thinks he's about to be filmed for
0:12
a Japanese children's TV program about space.
0:16
He isn't.
0:18
A younger man steps into his path holding
0:20
a Bible, with a camera crew right behind him.
0:23
He demands the older man swear on the
0:25
Bible that he actually walked on the Moon.
0:28
The older man tries to walk away.
0:30
The man with the Bible follows him, grabs
0:33
onto him, and calls him "a coward, a
0:35
liar, and a thief."
0:38
The older man is Buzz Aldrin.
0:42
He is the second person in human history
0:44
to set foot on a celestial body other
0:47
than Earth, July 20th, 1969.
0:50
About 20 minutes after Neil Armstrong. The man
0:53
with the Bible is Bart Sibrel, a filmmaker
0:58
and one of the most prominent voices behind
1:00
the theory that the United States never actually
1:03
went to the Moon.
1:05
Aldrin, 72 years old at the time, ended
1:08
up punching him in the jaw.
1:11
The Beverly Hills police looked into it and
1:14
no charges were ever filed.
1:16
The district attorney's office concluded that Sibrel provoked
1:19
the incident.
1:21
That image, a 72-year-old moonwalker who
1:24
finally can't take it anymore and threw a
1:27
punch, has become one of the most-shared
1:29
clips in the history of the conspiracy theory.
1:32
For some, it's proof of a guilty conscience finally
1:36
cracking.
1:37
For others, it's simply an old man who's tired
1:39
of being called a systematic traitor to his
1:42
country in front of a camera he never
1:44
agreed to stand in front of.
1:46
And that is what this episode is about.
1:49
Not settling who is right, but understanding why
1:52
so many people, in so many countries, in
1:55
so many languages, still, after more than half
1:58
a century, believe that one of the best
2:01
documented technological moments in history was a set.
2:08
You'd think
2:27
moon-landing skepticism was a relic of the
2:30
1970s, slowly dying off, along with the last
2:34
analog TV sets. It isn't.
2:37
In late October 2025, actress and reality star
2:40
Kim Kardashian publicly said she didn't believe
2:45
that the U.S. landed on the Moon.
2:47
She was referencing, incorrectly, as it turns out,
2:50
a Buzz Aldrin quote taken out of context
2:53
from a 2015 interview.
2:57
NASA's acting administrator responded publicly within days,
3:02
and British physicists from the Institute of Physics
3:06
stated that every single argument that NASA faked
3:10
the landings has been debunked.
3:12
And it's not an isolated case.
3:15
A large share of the Russian population, by
3:18
some polls, up to two-thirds, doesn't believe
3:20
Americans went to the Moon.
3:22
That is not a small, fringe segment.
3:25
That's a majority in one of the world's
3:28
most spacefaring nations.
3:32
Why does this particular theory hold on so well,
3:36
when so many other conspiracy theories from the same
3:38
era, UFO bases under Antarctica, flat-earth arguments
3:43
about NASA's logo, remain fringe phenomena?
3:48
Part of the answer is how perfectly the
3:51
Apollo program fits our deepest instinctive suspicions:
3:55
a government that lies during wartime, a science too
4:00
complex for ordinary people to check for themselves,
4:03
and a set of photographs that, honestly,
4:07
look a little too perfect for a trip
4:09
to another world.
4:11
That's the suspicion that we are going to
4:13
dig into today, not with mockery, but with
4:16
source criticism.
4:21
Let's start with what we actually knew before
4:27
anyone started doubting it.
4:30
The Apollo program was launched by John F.
4:33
Kennedy in 1961, as a direct response to
4:38
the Soviet Union's early lead in the space
4:40
race.
4:41
Sputnik in 1957, Yuri Gagarin as the first
4:46
human in space in 1961.
4:49
Kennedy's promise to put a man on the
4:51
Moon "before this decade is
4:54
out" was as much a Cold War political
4:59
maneuver as it was a scientific project.
5:04
The road there wasn't without tragedy.
5:08
On January 27, 1967, a fire broke
5:16
out in the command module during a ground
5:19
test of Apollo 1.
5:21
Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee
5:26
died within seconds.
5:28
The cabin was pressurized with pure oxygen and
5:32
a spark from faulty wiring was all
5:35
it took.
5:36
NASA's own investigation board found concrete technical failures:
5:41
flammable material in the cabin, a hatch that
5:44
couldn't be opened fast enough, and a defective
5:48
electrical installation.
5:50
It was a scandal that led to a
5:52
complete redesign of the spacecraft.
5:54
Two and a half years later, on July
5:57
16, 1969, the Saturn V rocket, still one
6:02
of the most powerful rocket humanity has ever
6:05
built and successfully flown, lifted off from
6:08
Cape Kennedy with Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and
6:12
Michael Collins on board.
6:14
Four days later, on July 20, the lunar
6:17
module "Eagle" touched down in the Sea of
6:21
Tranquility.
6:23
Armstrong stepped onto the surface at 02:56
6:30
UTC on July 21 and spoke the now
6:35
famous words: "That's one small step for man,
6:39
one giant leap for mankind."
6:43
Five more crewed landings followed, Apollo 12
6:47
to 17, with the exception of the ill
6:52
-fated Apollo 13 mission, which never landed but
6:56
returned home safely after an explosion in the service
6:59
module.
7:00
In total, the astronauts brought back 382 kilograms of
7:05
lunar rock and soil.
7:08
That's the established narrative.
7:10
It's documented across thousands of NASA archives, independently
7:14
confirmed by physicists around the world, and,
7:18
as we'll see later in this episode,
7:20
by data from spacecraft built by four other
7:22
nations besides the United States.
7:32
Skepticism about Apollo didn't start as a
7:35
grassroots movement.
7:37
It started with one man and a self
7:39
-published pamphlet.
7:42
Bill Kaysing worked as a technical writer at
7:45
Rocketdyne, the company that built the F-1
7:48
engines for the Saturn V rocket, from 1956
7:53
to 1963.
7:55
In 1976, he published the book "We Never
8:01
Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar
8:05
Swindle."
8:06
Its central claim was that he had seen
8:09
an internal study calculating the probability of a
8:12
successful crewed moon landing at 0.0017 percent. That
8:23
number has been repeated for decades, in nearly
8:27
every source I reviewed for this episode, from
8:31
French to Spanish to Russian productions, but there
8:34
is a problem.
8:37
No such study has ever been found by
8:40
any researcher, anywhere.
8:44
Kaysing left Rocketdyne before Apollo's technical design was
8:47
even finished, and he had no engineering background.
8:51
He was a writer, not an engineer.
8:55
NASA's own internal calculations from the same period
8:58
showed, if anything, roughly an 87 percent
9:05
probability of at least one successful moon landing
9:11
before the end of the 1960s.
9:14
Kaysing's book laid the groundwork.
9:17
In 2001, Fox aired the widely watched special,
9:23
"Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" which was
9:28
dubbed and rebroadcast in countless countries, including
9:34
the Portuguese and Spanish versions I reviewed
9:38
in this research material for the episode.
9:41
It's worth noting that several of the "independent"
9:46
international documentaries I analyzed are, in fact, translations
9:51
from the same 2001 American Fox program.
9:56
Not independent investigations, but the same source retold
10:00
in multiple languages.
10:04
This is where the first rule of our
10:07
source hierarchy becomes relevant.
10:10
A story repeated in five languages is not
10:13
automatically five times more true.
10:16
It might just be the same story, translated five
10:19
times.
10:25
Now, let's give the conspiracy theory the fair
10:29
treatment.
10:30
No strawmen, the strongest, most frequently repeated
10:34
arguments, presented the way they're actually
10:38
made.
10:39
We start with the flag.
10:42
The most iconic "evidence" of all: the American
10:45
flag planted by Armstrong and Aldrin, appears to
10:48
ripple and move in the video footage.
10:51
The Moon has essentially no atmosphere, and therefore
10:56
no wind.
10:57
So how can a flag move unless it
11:00
was filmed on a soundstage with a
11:03
fan just out of frame?
11:05
Second, the missing stars.
11:09
None of the thousands of photos taken on
11:12
the lunar surface show a single star against
11:16
the black sky.
11:16
Even though the astronauts themselves described being able
11:22
to see stars with the naked eye.
11:24
For skeptics, the logic is simple.
11:27
If you are on the Moon at night
11:29
with no atmosphere to obscure the light, the
11:32
sky should be full of stars.
11:36
That empty, black void
11:38
around them looks more like a painted studio
11:41
ceiling.
11:43
Third, the shadows.
11:46
In several photos, shadows from different objects appear
11:50
to point in seemingly different directions.
11:54
Not parallel, as you would expect with one
11:58
light source, the Sun.
12:00
The conclusion, according to critics, is that
12:02
there must have been multiple artificial light sources at
12:06
play, like a film set.
12:10
The Van Allen radiation belts.
12:13
Between Earth and the Moon lie two belts
12:16
of intensely trapped electromagnetic particles, discovered by the
12:22
physicist James Van Allen in 1958.
12:26
According to several of the sources in my
12:29
research, including Bart Sibrel's documentary "A Funny Thing
12:33
Happened on the Way to the Moon" — a
12:36
human body passing through these belts without massive
12:39
lead shielding would have been killed or severely
12:43
injured by the radiation.
12:46
The spacesuits and capsule walls of the
12:49
era were, according to this theory, far too
12:52
thin.
12:54
Lastly, there is the missing crater.
12:57
The lunar module's descent engine should, according to
13:02
the laws of physics, have generated a powerful
13:05
downward blast at landing, enough to create
13:08
a visible crater, or at least a clear
13:11
depression in the lunar dust beneath the engine
13:15
nozzle.
13:17
In the photographs, there is no crater, just
13:21
a flat, undisturbed surface right beneath the lunar
13:25
module's feet, as if it had simply been
13:29
placed there rather than landed.
13:31
That is the core.
13:34
The four or five claims that recur in
13:38
practically all 30 sources in my material, regardless
13:43
of language or country of production: the flag, the
13:49
stars, the shadows, the radiation, and the crater,
13:54
these are the shared international currency of moon
13:58
-landing skepticism.
14:06
But if you follow the trail further down
14:09
the rabbit hole, the story quickly gets more
14:12
colorful and more speculative.
14:15
Bart Sibrel, the man from our cold open,
14:18
claims to have found unreleased NASA footage showing
14:23
astronauts filming a fake "window trick" in low
14:26
-Earth orbit to simulate being "halfway to the
14:31
Moon" —
14:32
with a round window, a darkened cabin, and
14:36
a model of Earth.
14:38
He has confronted several Apollo astronauts directly with
14:44
these claims on camera.
14:47
From the same source material, a series of
14:49
even more dramatic threads emerge:
14:52
An anonymous security officer allegedly confessed on his
14:57
deathbed to having witnessed the fake landing being filmed
15:03
on a U.S. Air Force base in
15:04
1968.
15:07
The story that astronaut Gus Grissom, the one
15:11
from the Apollo 1 fire, was actually murdered
15:14
because he intended to expose problems in the
15:17
program to Congress.
15:19
A safety inspector named Thomas Ronald Baron, who
15:23
testified critically about safety deficiencies in the Apollo
15:29
program before Congress and died in a
15:31
car accident a week later — portrayed in several of
15:35
our sources as a silencing assassination.
15:41
And then there is Stanley Kubrick's theory that
15:44
the director who made "2001: A Space Odyssey"
15:48
that same year was secretly hired to film
15:52
the fake moon landings using the era's most advanced
15:56
special effects.
15:58
And he left hidden confessions embedded in his
16:03
later film "The Shining."
16:07
At the most extreme end of the material
16:10
I reviewed is a Russian video categorized as
16:14
"sensationalist" in my research.
16:19
The moon-landing theory melds together with
16:23
entirely different conspiracy threads: that NASA was founded
16:27
by former Nazi SS scientists brought over
16:32
through Operation Paperclip, that Armstrong and Aldrin were
16:37
high-ranking Freemasons who performed a secret ritual
16:41
on the Moon, and that the real motive
16:44
behind the hoax was concealing the truth about
16:48
extraterrestrial life.
16:50
It's worth noting how differently these threads carry
16:56
weight.
16:58
Some, like Sibrel's confrontations, are documented on video
17:02
and can be checked directly.
17:03
Others, like anonymous deathbed confessions and murder theories
17:09
with no forensic documentation, rest on loose, unverifiable
17:15
anecdote.
17:17
And the most extreme versions with Freemasons and
17:19
Nazis are essentially conspiracy-theory collages using the
17:24
moon landing as glue for entirely
17:26
separate narratives.
17:32
So what does the physics say, and what
17:37
do the independent data say?
17:40
If we start with the flag, according to
17:42
NASA and several space centers, including the UK's National
17:48
Space Centre, the flag moves because the astronauts
17:51
themselves twisted the flagpole back and forth to
17:56
get it into the ground, not because of
17:58
wind.
18:01
Without air resistance to dampen the motion, the
18:05
fabric keeps swinging longer than it would on
18:10
Earth.
18:12
The flag also had a horizontal extension rod
18:15
that couldn't always be fully extended, which created
18:21
permanent creases that look like movement
18:25
in still photos.
18:28
Importantly, in all the continuous footage, the flag
18:32
sits perfectly still whenever the astronauts aren't
18:36
touching it.
18:38
If we look at the missing stars, the
18:40
cameras were set for short exposure times because
18:43
the primary job was photographing the intensely sunlit
18:48
surface and the astronauts themselves, not the night
18:52
sky.
18:53
At short shutter speeds, film simply doesn't register
18:58
the faint light from distant stars.
19:00
the same way an ordinary camera photographing a night
19:04
sky without a long exposure won't pick up stars
19:06
either.
19:08
The same holds true for astronauts on the
19:11
International Space Station today.
19:13
Their photos don't show stars either.
19:18
If we look at the shadows, what look
19:21
like non-parallel shadows is a perspective effect —
19:26
the same phenomenon that makes railroad tracks appear to
19:31
converge on the horizon, even though they're
19:36
actually parallel.
19:38
Combined with the fact that the lunar surface
19:40
is uneven, full of hills and depressions that the shadows
19:46
follow. Shadows from the same light source can
19:50
easily appear to point in different directions when
19:53
photographed from ground level.
19:56
Then we have the Van Allen belts.
19:59
Here NASA has concrete measurement data.
20:01
Every Apollo astronaut wore a personal radiation dosimeter
20:07
for the entire mission.
20:09
The recorded doses ranged between 0.16 and
20:14
1.14 rad for the whole round trip,
20:21
far below the threshold where radiation becomes
20:24
harmful,
20:25
which is in the hundreds of rads —
20:27
and roughly on par with a person today
20:31
would get from a single CT scan.
20:34
The key is that the Saturn V rocket
20:38
flew through the finish zones of the build
20:42
at a very high speed, only about an
20:44
hour in total.
20:47
And that the spacecraft's metal hull itself provided
20:51
shielding, James Van Allen, the man who discovered
20:55
the belts and had them named after him,
20:58
personally called the claim of lethal radiation "
21:02
nonsense."
21:04
The missing crater.
21:07
The lunar module's descent engine operated at relatively
21:13
low thrust and was designed to reduce speed
21:17
gradually, not to slam down with full power.
21:20
In the final phase of landing, while the
21:23
engine was still firing,
21:26
The module hovered just a few meters above
21:29
the surface with a relatively gentle push.
21:34
Nowhere near strong enough to dig a crater into
21:39
the compacted lunar soil, which incidentally is far
21:44
firmer than loose sand.
21:46
And then there is the evidence the conspiracy
21:50
theory simply can't argue its way around.
21:55
In 2009, NASA sent the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
22:00
into orbit around the Moon.
22:03
From altitudes as low as 20 kilometers,
22:06
it has photographed every single Apollo landing site
22:11
in sharp detail.
22:13
The lower sections of the lunar modules, still
22:18
standing there, rover tire tracks, and astronaut footprints
22:24
crisscrossing the surface in patterns that precisely match
22:28
the original mission logs.
22:31
But NASA isn't the only one who seems
22:34
to have seen it.
22:38
India's Chandrayaan-1 probe, Japan's Kaguya, and
22:46
China's Chang'e missions have all independently photographed
22:51
parts of the lunar surface, including areas near
22:54
the Apollo landing sites, built and launched by
22:58
nations that had zero political interest in confirming
23:01
an American hoax story.
23:03
Even more tangible: at three of the Apollo landing
23:09
sites, astronauts left behind small mirror panels called
23:13
laser retroreflectors.
23:16
They're still there.
23:18
They still work.
23:21
Scientists around the world at observatories in the
23:29
U.S., France, and elsewhere continue firing lasers
23:33
at them and measuring how long the light
23:37
takes to bounce back, calculating the Earth
23:40
-Moon distance to within millimeters.
23:44
They were placed there by people standing on
23:47
the surface — not robots, as some of
23:51
my sources claim.
23:52
The Soviet Lunokhod rovers had their own,
23:59
separate retroreflectors.
24:02
Finally, the 382 kilograms of lunar rock and
24:09
soil the astronauts brought home have been analyzed
24:13
by hundreds of independent laboratories in the decades
24:18
since, including labs in countries with zero incentive
24:22
to confirm the American story.
24:26
The isotopic composition doesn't match any known material
24:30
from Earth. And a statistical analysis published in
24:34
the scientific journal PLOS ONE concluded that a
24:40
hoax of this scale would have required more
24:43
than 400,000 people in on the secret, without
24:47
a single documented leak in over 55 years.
24:53
Last but not least, in 2008, the American
24:58
TV show MythBusters put several of the classic
25:03
claims under the microscope in a dedicated episode.
25:07
The flag, the shadows, the missing stars, the
25:11
reflected light.
25:13
Using physical experiments, not just arguments, they concluded
25:18
that every claim they tested could
25:22
be explained by ordinary physics.
25:30
Let's be honest about what we have here.
25:35
The five classic "pieces of evidence" — the flag,
25:42
the missing stars, the shadows, the radiation belts,
25:45
and the crater, are all well-documented physical
25:49
phenomena with concrete, checkable explanations backed by NASA's
25:55
own measurement data and independent international research.
25:59
These belong in the well-documented category.
26:05
The independent spacecraft imagery from four nations and
26:11
the still-functioning retroreflectors are likewise well-documented
26:16
evidence that there is, in fact, human-made
26:19
equipment sitting on the lunar surface.
26:23
Not because NASA says so, but because countries
26:26
that have no interest in confirming the American
26:30
story photographed it by themselves.
26:34
Bill Kaysing's 0.0017% figure is weakly
26:41
substantiated.
26:43
The source does not exist, and the number
26:45
is directly contradicted by NASA's own contemporary survival
26:50
calculations.
26:52
Bart Sibrel's confrontations with astronauts are documented on
26:56
video and can be watched directly.
26:58
But his interpretation of what the footage proves remains
27:04
speculative, since the underlying claims about hidden NASA
27:09
footage has never been independently verified by any
27:13
third party.
27:18
The anonymous deathbed confessions, the murder theories about
27:22
Grissom and Baron, and the Kubrick theory are speculative
27:27
to weakly substantiated —
27:30
they rest on anecdote with no forensic
27:36
or documentary support, and in several cases like
27:41
circulating "Kubrick confession," has since been directly exposed
27:46
as staged mockumentaries.
27:52
The Nazis, the Freemasons, and the UFO add
27:56
-ons to the theory belong at the most
27:59
extreme, least source-critical end
28:05
of the spectrum can still be classified as
28:07
weakly substantiated at best.
28:10
And what about Thomas Ronald Baron's
28:15
fatal accident?
28:19
Here we should be honest that there is
28:24
a real documented element.
28:26
Baron really did testify critically about safety
28:30
deficiencies before Congress shortly before the Apollo 1 fire, and
28:38
he really did die shortly afterward in a car
28:41
accident.
28:42
The connection between those two events, and whether
28:49
the accident was anything other than an accident,
28:54
is not definitively settled in the publicly available
28:59
material.
29:00
we place that in the unresolved
29:02
category: not disproven, but not
29:07
proven either.
29:15
So where does that leave us?
29:21
The physical and technical core of the moon
29:23
landing conspiracy theory, the flag, the missing stars,
29:27
the shadows, the radiation, and the crater, have
29:30
been thoroughly investigated, tested, and explained by independent
29:33
physicists, TV shows like MythBusters, and not least
29:37
by NASA's own archived measurement data.
29:42
And the evidence that people were really there
29:47
is no longer just American: it comes
29:51
from India, Japan, and China, from nations
29:55
with absolutely no reason to confirm an
29:58
American story if it were false.
30:02
But it would be dishonest to pretend that
30:05
the whole theory is just about physics.
30:08
It's also about something more human: a deep,
30:12
understandable distrust of authorities that have historically lied,
30:19
Vietnam, Watergate, later revelations about surveillance.
30:24
It's about how hard it is for a layperson
30:28
to tell the difference between a poorly explained
30:33
detail and an actual deception.
30:37
And it's about how satisfying it is, on a
30:40
human level, to believe that a small group
30:45
can uncover what hundreds of thousands are supposedly
30:49
hiding.
30:51
Bart Sibrel still believes his theory.
30:54
Buzz Aldrin, who passed away in 2024, as
30:59
one of the last living Apollo astronauts,
31:02
never grew tired of defending what he'd seen
31:06
with his own eyes, from the surface
31:11
of the Moon.
31:13
And somewhere in between stands the rest of
31:16
us, with access to more data than
31:19
ever before, and a choice about what to
31:23
believe.
31:24
When the history and the physics are actually
31:27
available to all of us. That's where I want
31:31
to leave you today. Not with proof. With
31:34
a question about what it actually takes before
31:39
we call something true.
31:44
And speaking of names that are hard to get
31:47
it right, my own included.
31:49
My name is René, and I know that
31:51
to an American ear, it can look like it
31:57
should rhyme with something it doesn't.
32:05
If you have been quietly
32:07
pronouncing it "Reen" or "Wren"
32:17
the whole episode, don't worry, you are in
32:20
good company, and I promise I won't
32:22
hold it against you.
32:24
Thank you for listening, and see you in
32:26
the next episode.