Moon Landing Conspiracies

After the Apollo missions ended in the seventies, why haven’t we ever been back? 

This was a subject that we were talking in my chemistry class for a bit, and the evidence has me convinced that there really was no so-called 'moon landing'. Call me naive, but I did a few related Google searches, and I am now 100% sure that the film (at least) of the 'first ever moon landing', was a hoax.

I have researched for this post for weeks, and I feel like I have learnt a LOT of useful information. I might start looking into conspiracy theories more often, because this investigation has been really interesting.

My idea is that the film was fake but they did actually visit the moon (I only believe it because of the evidence of the fact that if you go onto any moon map, there's the bleach white American flag situated on the surface). 

Maybe the film got destroyed and they had to make a replica? Either way, the Government is blatantly lying about it (or so I believe) and I'm certain that America faked the tape to win the ultimate Space Race.

The most convincing points that I came across were as follows;

The American flag was waving.

How can a loose piece of material wave in the wind on the moon, which has very little gravity, no atmosphere, and no wind force? Because I'm pretty sure that it isn't moving by itself.

Sibrel, as Wikipedia states, said that it may have been caused by indoor fans used to cool the astronauts, since their spacesuit cooling systems would have been too heavy on Earth.

Multiple light sources. 

So they're on the moon, and the sun is their main light source. It would be perfectly legible for the moon's atmosphere to bend the light into multiple directions, but where's the atmosphere to make this occur? The shadows should all be facing one direction, unless of course they're situated on an artificial lit film set..

I went to see what Wikipedia would say about my theory.

I honestly don't believe what the website says about this, because surely the sun's rays would outshine the alternative light sources? Even so, for my unbiased contradiction post, it says, "Shadows on the Moon are complicated by reflected light, uneven ground, wide-angle lens distortion, and lunar dust. There are several light sources: the Sun, sunlight reflected from the Earth, sunlight reflected from the Moon's surface, and sunlight reflected from the astronauts and the Lunar Module. Light from these sources is scattered by lunar dust in many directions, including into shadows. Shadows falling into craters and hills may appear longer, shorter and distorted. Furthermore, shadows display the properties of vanishing point perspective, leading them to converge to a point on the horizon."

By about this point of research, I had reached the conclusion that my excited astronaut post  - here - was now completely pointless.

Anyway, my next contradiction is based on the lack of stars.

Now, we all know that the stars shine above us, right? But clouds often hide them from our view. So, imagine you're wallowing around on a little satellite called the Moon, a cloudless sparse plain of dust and rock. But, alas, there are no stars.

My theory is that if the film is faked, which I'm pretty sure it is, then they just blacked the 'stars' out as they would be too difficult to replicate.

Wikipedia, naturally, contradicts this (because, despite my theories, I am trying to be unbiased) with, "All manned landings happened during the lunar daytime. Thus, the stars were outshone by the sun and by sunlight reflected off the Moon's surface. The astronauts' eyes were adapted to the sunlit landscape around them so that they could not see the relatively faint stars. Likewise, cameras were set for daylight exposure and could not detect the stars. Camera settings can turn a well-lit background to black when the foreground object is brightly lit, forcing the camera to increase shutter speed so that the foreground light does not wash-out the image. A demonstration of this effect is here. The effect is similar to not being able to see stars from a brightly lit car park at night—the stars only become visible when the lights are turned off. The astronauts could see stars with the naked eye only when they were in the shadow of the Moon."

The C rock.

An upturned prop, perhaps, with the company's logo? Because why would a letter of the human American alphabet be stamped onto a moon rock, thousands of miles away, of an uninhabited planet? 

Both NASA and Wikipedia argue that it is a coiled hair.

A perfectly symmetrical hair just laying on a moon rock?

Please.

The duplicate backdrop.

Call me naive, but I'm sure that these are the same backgrounds just with different materials pasted onto them? The more I compare them, the more convinced I am.

Again, I can't help but be biased and say that I don't agree with Wikipedia's reasoning here, but nevertheless they do say that, "Backgrounds were not identical, just similar. What appear as nearby hills in some photos are actually mountains many miles away. On Earth, objects that are further away will appear fainter and less detailed. On the Moon, there is no atmosphere or haze to obscure faraway objects, thus they appear clearer and nearer. Furthermore, there are very few objects (such as trees) to help judge distance."

Also, another point that I stumbled upon was the fact that The Lunar Modules weighed 17 tons and made no mark on the moon dust, yet footprints can easily be seen beside them. I'm immensely confused here - surely they would have kicked up some mark, if they were roaming around the moon's surface?

Also, watching a BBC (trusted #1 British news channel) documentary, one of the men mentioned the fact that the astronauts would have fried on their journey. Wikipedia, surprisingly, agrees, stating that the astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation from the Van Allen radiation belt and galactic ambient radiation. Even Dr. James Van Allen, the discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts, claimed that the radiation levels were too harmful for the Apollo missions.

The documentary that I watched featured a man explaining the previous statement to the journalist, and then saying that they could have survived if they'd taken out suits from a nearby business that made them. However, not a single suit was leased.

Why would this be, do you think?

As the Wikipedia article continues, the website states:

"All six lunar landings happened during the first Presidential administration of Richard Nixon and no leader of any other state has claimed to have landed astronauts on the Moon, even though the mechanical means of doing so should have become progressively much easier after almost 40 years of steady or even swift technological development."

This is a great point, because if there's any theoretical chance for another leap in science, wouldn't physicists be jumping at the possibility for development?

Contrarily, the website then states that so many witnesses of the Apollo take off that it couldn't have been a stunt.
Of all these people to work on the hoax behind the scenes on the computers and whatnot, Wikipedia argues that "surely at least one would have come forward. The alternative is that they were killed, and they couldn't kill that many people without getting caught out. The conspiracy would have to involve the more than 400,000 people who worked on the Apollo project for nearly ten years, the 12 men who walked on the Moon, the six others who flew with them as Command Module pilots, and another six astronauts who orbited the Moon.

HOWEVER, this does not mean that all 400,000 would know about the truth, and not even 100 of those exact people would have had direct communication with the moon landing. 
Wikipedia then lists the NASA personnel who did actually die within a few years of the so-called 'moon landing' - all 'accidental' of course. 

• Theodore Freeman (killed ejecting from T-38 which had suffered a bird strike, October 1964)
• Elliot See and Charlie Bassett (T-38 crash in bad weather, February 1966)
• Virgil Ivan "Gus" Grissom, Edward Higgins "Ed" White, and Roger B. Chaffee (Apollo 1 fire, January 1967)
• Edward "Ed" Givens (car accident, June 1967)
• Clifton "C. C." Williams (killed ejecting from T-38, October 1967)
• Michael J. "Mike" Adams (X-15 crash, November 1967. The only pilot killed during the X-15 flight test program. He was a test pilot, and had flown the X-15 above 50 miles.)
• Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr. (F-104 crash, December 1967, shortly after being selected as a pilot with the United States Air Force's (later cancelled) Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program.)
• Thomas Ronald Baron (North American Aviation employee died in an automobile collision with train, April 27, 1967, six days after testifying before Rep. Olin E. Teague's House Subcommittee on NASA Oversight hearing held at Cape Kennedy, Florida, concerning the Apollo 1 fire, after which he was fired). Baron was a quality control inspector who wrote a report critical of the Apollo program and was an outspoken critic after the Apollo 1 fire. Baron and his family were killed as their car was struck by a train at a train crossing. 
• Brian D. Welch, a leading official in NASA's Public Affairs Office and Director of Media Services, died a few months after appearing in the media to debunk the Fox pro-Moon hoax television show cited above. His obituary claims he died of a heart attack at the relatively young age of 42. Conspiracists find his age at death suspiciously young and would note that heart attacks can be induced, for example, through the stress of torture or through ingestion of certain chemicals.
• Valentin Bondarenko (ground training accident, March 1961)
• Grigori Nelyubov (suicide, February 1966)
• Vladimir Komarov (Soyuz 1 accident, April 1967)
• Yuri Gagarin (MiG-15 crash, March 1968)
• Pavel Belyayev (complications following surgery, January 1970)
• Georgi Dobrovolski, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev (Soyuz 11 accident, June 1971)

To name but a few.

To summarise my ideas, in Wikipedia terms, "Many conspiracy theories have been put forward. They either claim that the landings did not happen and that NASA employees (and sometimes others) have lied; or that the landings did happen but not in the way that has been told. Conspiracists have focused on perceived gaps or inconsistencies in the historical record of the missions. The foremost idea is that the whole manned landing program was a hoax from start to end. Some claim that the technology to send men to the Moon was lacking or that the Van Allen radiation belts, solar flares, solar wind, coronal mass ejections and cosmic rays made such a trip impossible"

Do you think that it was all a hoax?

Sources

BBC
Wikipedia
Listverse