In the early days of the Cold War, three men claim they were chosen by a powerful new government agency to undertake a historically perilous journey. They claim this well-funded operation was staffed with the best scientists and engineers using technology pioneered by the Nazis, and they created the most powerful machine ever built.
In July of 1969, they claim, they climbed aboard an enormous rocket assembled in a Florida swamp, and were sent hurtling at incredible speeds into the sky … all the way to the Moon! Two of them even claim they landed on the Moon, got out, and walked around!
And what prize did they bring back from this momentous journey? Well … they have a bunch of black and white photos of unidentifiable persons in bulky white spacemen costumes in a field of gravel (but curiously without any stars in the black sky) -- and several bags of gray, dusty rocks.
Put that way, the story of the Apollo program can sound pretty far-fetched.
But why should we believe the stories? What evidence is there, really, that the Apollo program landed men on the Moon and brought them back?
Phil Plait, an astronomer at Sonoma University in California, and the Web master of BadAstronomy.com, has his reasons.
If I were trying to fake this, I would put stars in the image," he said referring to the complaint made by hoax proponents that the Apollo photos lack stars. If this had been an oversight, he said, it's an amazingly stupid thing to have forgotten, considering the scope of the "hoax."
Not to mention that with the way cameras work, photographing stars under those conditions would have been nearly impossible.
"If you do know about physics and photographs, you can see these arguments are all ridiculous," Plait said.
So why do people even give an idea like this a second thought?
"I'm not exactly sure," said Plait, "Michael Shermer is a renowned skeptic… and he has a list of reasons (such as) we have an innate thing inside of our brain, we have a need to believe."
"But one thing he leaves off, is that some of these things are just believable. If you don't know much physics, these arguments might sound convincing."
Besides, Plait says the political realities of the time would have made a fraud of that scale almost impossible to pull off.
"We went to the moon to beat the Soviets. If the Soviets had suspected that we faked these missions in any way, they would have been screaming at the top of their lungs."
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