The Shadows Aren’t Right

If you look at the American flag in still pictures from the Apollo 11 mission, it appears to be flapping in the wind.But how can that be, since there's no wind on the moon?The simple answer is, it isn't flapping, Fienberg says.That's because it isn't an ordinary flag.If t...

The Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969 was one of the most astonishing achievements in human history. That day, an estimated 530 million TV viewers watched U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take their first steps on the moon . Afterward, the two men and ...

Yet just a few years later, some people claimed the "giant leap for mankind" had been faked.Conspiracy theories that the moon landing was actually a hoax that the U.S. government had staged to win the space race with the Soviets began to gain traction in the mid-1970s.Alt...

In one of the pictures from the moon landing, you can see Armstrong clearly reflected in Aldrin’s visor. Some skeptics have pointed out that Armstrong does not appear to be holding a camera, so someone else must be taking the picture. But that isn’t true.Armstrong couldn’...

Director Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey wowed audiences in 1968 for creating a realistic image of outer space.It was so compelling that some conspiracy theorists later wondered if the government had actually hired Kubrick to film th...

The only “evidence” that Kubrick filmed the moon landing has itself proved to be a hoax.Denial of America’s great progress in space exploration and belief in these myths is “more of an ideological thing—a political thing—than it is a scientific thing,” Fienberg notes.To t...