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NASA faked the moon landings during the Cold War to win the space race against the Soviet Union. The US was losing to the Soviets in every milestone until they launched the Apollo program. The moon landing was seen as a way to claim space superiority. There are conspiracy theories that the moon landing was faked, with one suggesting that Stanley Kubrick filmed it. Some arguments include discrepancies in photographs and the absence of stars in the pictures. However, these theories are easily debunked. NASA faked the moon landings, Apollo 11 never happened, human never set foot on the moon, heard all this before? Conspiracy theories surrounding the moon landings have been persistent since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first small steps on the lunar surface. It's been 50 years and the questions are still out there. This is Eyes Wide Open and you're here with Ashwini and Darshini. Join us as we revisit a defining moment of the 20th century which was the greatest achievement of mankind that many people believe never happened at all. I think we can all agree the significant moments in history are always turned into fables sooner or later and on that note let's lean in that direction and talk about the moon landing story that has become a little harder to believe in recent times. I think many people would be surprised to know that the real reason Apollo 11 was planned was due to a cold war between America and the Soviet Union. For anybody not super familiar with history, the war went on between 1947 to 1991. It was a pretty long war. So you're saying that it was solely done to prove who was better than the other one and not for a scientific purpose? Yeah, this wasn't done for scientific purposes or for the betterment of mankind. It was to win a space race which was part of the cold war. The idea is basically that whoever could conquer space would have significant power advantages over their enemies. In 1955, the US announced that they would put satellites in space and after their announcement, Russia announced that they would also be setting up satellites in space. So I guess it was a whole concept of calling dibs. Russia surprised everyone by launching the first satellite into space which was called the Sputnik in 1957. Nobody was expecting that to happen and it surprised pretty much everybody. They were the first ones to put a man in space. They also were the first ones to put an animal in space. They also got to the moon first. Not man in the moon's way, but Russia got to the moon first by launching a probe with a camera on it that they launched and it impacted into the moon. That was Luna 2 in 1959. The first one, Luna 1, failed its impactor mission but it set a different record because that became the first man-made object to escape the earth-moon system in January of 1959 just before they launched the Luna 2 mission. So Russia was winning the space race initially? Yes, and the United States were just losing the space race to Russia. They lost every major milestone and the Russians beat them to it. The first animal, the first man, the first space station that got to the moon. They did everything first right and then came the Apollo program. So President Kennedy was like, no, we're not losing the space race and we're going to get a man to the moon. He was going to claim the moon for the United States and he said it would be done in this decade. So before 1970, that was the goal. And this goal seemed a little absurd at that time. They were barely able to get a satellite to space. They were really struggling to keep up with the Russians and now they were going to send actual people to another celestial object. People were like, this is crazy, but yeah, let's do it. And that's like one of the things I was thinking about. How cool it must have been to be alive during that period. How exciting it must have been. I can only imagine the excitement and anticipation. Everybody sitting here with this anxious breathing, like, are they going to make it? Are they going to land? Is something going to go wrong? Considering the level of technology they had at that time, it's absolutely amazing that they even attempted any of this. It was quite a big leap. I understand what you're saying because they had computers, but not like that we have now. It's mind-blowing that they were able to solve some of these problems and send people to space with all the technology that they had. We live in the age of the next cell phone is going to be so much better than the last cell phone. But imagine like nobody has been to space before and they were sending people there. Nobody knew what was going to happen or what was out there. I mean, it's a completely alien environment. Let's get back to history, right? The Americans declared that they won the space race on July 20th, 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the surface of the moon with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin becoming the first ever humans to walk on the moon or did they? That ends the historical stuff. Now, let's talk about some conspiracies. In 1976, Bill Kaysing published a book titled, We Never Went to the Moon, America's 30 Billion Dollar Swindle. There has been a lot of stuff like this over the years. And the reason I'm mentioning this is one particular is that Kaysing was a former US Navy officer and worked at Roktedyne where he was the head of the technical publication unit. And this is the company that built the engines used on the rockets that were used in the Apollo program that sent the people to the moon. So this guy seems to have a little bit of credibility behind him. Unfortunately, we didn't have the time to read his entire book. But we just want to throw this out there because he has ties with the military. He was in the Navy and was a technical writer for people who made the Roktedyne engines. And that does make it interesting. If anybody listening has read this book or is familiar with it, let us know what you think about it. But in the book, if you couldn't tell from the obvious title, he argues that the moon landing was faked and that it would have been actually easier to fake the moon landing than to actually go there with people. If they fake it, do you think it was fear driven? And what was the need to spend so much if it was faked? I don't even know if fear is the right word. But if it's like if you don't have airplanes and you're opening this, you are in trouble. You're not winning that war. I think that's the idea is that if the Soviets can get above the United States from space and bomb them through a satellite, they could just take out anyone they want at any time they want. I think that is the fear running through everybody's head at the time. So they wanted to get up there and not just match them, but beat them. They wanted space superiority. Otherwise, the fear was that they would be invaded and taken over. That is why they had to. It was an imperative for them. And maybe that's why they had to spend so much money on this project. One of the conspiracies which we already sort of been talking about, which doesn't prove anything is the Soviets beat them every step of the way and the US were always behind them. They were completely superior to the US space program, but the moon landing program was cancelled by the Soviets. They could not get into work. They could not land on the moon. So the theory, if the Soviets couldn't do it and they were so far ahead of them, then out of the blue, how did the United States manage to pull it off? How did they come up and were ahead of them quickly? It still doesn't make any sense. The US didn't exactly have the technology to do that because nobody did it. And the Soviets failed too. So instead, to win the space race and to win the Cold War, the US faked the moon landing to achieve that goal without actually having to achieve it because it was basically an impossible goal. But it's kind of a circumstantial argument. There is no actual proof behind it. It's just a fun conspiracy. But that does make a certain amount of sense to me. Well, that sounds very convenient. What do you think is easier? Sending men to the moon or filming it in a studio somewhere? The popular theory is that Stanley Kubrick was the one who shot it. The government presented him with an offer and he took it after some debate. I don't know if it was supposed to be in London or not. But apparently, he did the moon landing like a secret government contract. Let's get to this later. Most of the conspiracies are based on photographic evidence. And some of these are really, really interesting. But they are also, unfortunately, really easy to debunk. One of them, for example, is that the camera used to take the pictures on the moon had a glass plate with crosshairs on it which are kind of in a grid. In the moon photos, we can see these crosses everywhere. Some of the pictures where they were scanned or reproduced in other media like newspapers and magazines, the crosshairs would look like they're going behind objects. That proves that this was somehow fake photographs. But if we look at the original pictures, we can clearly see the crosshairs are actually still there. But I don't know how this would prove that they were fake anyways. If NASA was faking pictures of the moon, why would they have the crosshairs go behind the objects? That one doesn't make sense to me. The next famous conspiracy on our list would be about the no stars. So there are no stars in any of the photographs of the moon, except maybe one. I didn't really notice it until someone pointed it out. It actually looks really weird. Like, you see these people over the moon, and it's such a completely black background, and there are no stars, then there should be a lot of stars visible up there. The explanation for one is that because of the moon's quality to reflect light, they had to set the photos in a daytime setting, and because of the daytime setting, it became less sensitive to smaller sources of light like the stars. So we can see the moon, but we can't see the stars. So that was the explanation for that one. That does make a certain amount of sense. Yes. It's similar to when we go out during the day, we look up and we see the blue sky. The stars are still there. We just can't see it because there are no bright enough, this is the brightness of the sky. That's how the cameras were set to be able to take these photographs. I'm not a photography expert, but in this case, it does make sense, even though it is really weird to see no stars up there. But there does seem to be a plausible explanation for it. You can make a really compelling argument if framed in a proper way, that the moon landings were fake. This is why I really like this topic, because if you're willing to say what if, then we will realize that there are actually really interesting arguments out there, and the moon landings are fake. Also, another argument to support that the moon landing was fake would be, that the shadow in those pictures don't seem to make a whole lot of sense. We could actually make a compelling argument on it by saying that the shadows would only occur if there are multiple light sources. So in a studio where they make a movie or take photographs, they're going to have multiple light sources proving that these are fake photographs. But at the end of the day, it's explainable when consider the fact that there are multiple light sources on the moon as well, like the sun, the moon itself, and the earth, that reflects a lot of light when we look at the geometry of the surface, the way it works, the fact that the horizon looks different than on the earth, the fact that there is no landmarks like trees and buildings that we would typically see in a photograph, and so much more that goes into it. This is a really interesting one. If they were really on the moon, who was filming Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon for the first time? Somebody was holding the camera. Who was it? I was like, whoa, I never thought of that. Because we have a film of Neil Armstrong taking his first steps on the moon. Yeah, from the outside of the landing craft. Yes. If you look at some of those pictures, it doesn't look like the camera was mounted on something, but it looks like someone is holding the camera. But unfortunately, it was mounted on lunar land. The next theory that I came across was that they couldn't have taken the pictures of the moon as the radiation there in space would have fogged the film and made it impossible to take these photos. And I've got a lot of arguments about this based on specific models of camera. And the explanation was that the film was housed in metal containers, and this was something they would have planned for. It seems plausible to me that they could figure out how to send somebody to the moon, that they could also figure out how to shield the film from the radiation. So the one really is interesting, but at the end of the day, it's hard to say that they didn't land on the moon which does that. The next conspiracy theory we have here is the flag. This is probably the most discussed conspiracy theory when it comes to the moon. Being faked, I would say. When the flag was planned, it waves around like in the wind. When we look at the picture, that's what it looks like. The flag was mounted on a pole, like an L-shaped upside-down pole, because there is no wind on the moon to make the flag flap back and forth and raise it up. The explanation is that the flag was creased from being folded to get it there. And flapping was just due to the flag being handled. But that did look like it was waving and our imagination went wild. Like a lot of these theories, when you stop and think about that, they are going to perfectly replicate a moon landing. Would they be neglecting these small details? I don't think so. They are going to be extra careful with every minute detail if they are faking a moon landing. It's a tough sell that they would be missing something that big. I think that if they had a massive budget and they had the will to make it happen, because of the cold war and everything, I think that's it. Possibly they faked it. I think that is a possibility. I have not necessarily ruled it out, but all the stuff we have talked about till now, none of it proves that the moon landing was actually fake. Although there are a lot of interesting arguments, none of it is proof enough that it was fake. I could see both sides of the argument. There are a lot of conspiracies. We just touch on some of these prominent ones. Yes, there are like tons of them out there and we can go on and on about them. Now let's get to Stanley Kubrick. One of his big movies was 2001, A Space Odyssey. It was under development around the same time that they were doing the Apollo program. It came out about the time that they landed on the moon. The movie was released in 1968. So the part of this movie just takes place on the moon. Kubrick couldn't just tell the people that he had one of the moon landing movies. He was the director of the charge of faking the moon landing on behalf of NASA is the argument we are trying to look at here. In the film, The Shining, which is based on a novel by Stephen King that came out a year or two before the movie was made. Through the movie, he is trying to confess that the moon landings are fake using symbolism. The hotel itself is supposed to symbolize America. One of the main arguments here is that Kubrick changed a lot of stuff from the novel and the things he changed from the novel are the things that he used to tell us the moon landings are fake. The moon landing conspiracy has been extensively debunked by experts, scientists and historians while the idea of grand scale hoax may be intriguing, the overwhelming evidence points to the historic achievement of Apollo 11 and subsequent missions. It is important to critically evaluate information and rely on credible sources of distinguish between the fact and fiction. And there you have it, a journey through the moon landing conspiracy theory. We have explored the evidence, heard from experts and dwelled into psychology behind these captivating ideas. As always, the truth is often more complex than it seems. And examining these theories can shed light on our shared history As always, the truth is often more complex than it seems. And examining these theories can shed light on our shared history and the power of human curiosity that wraps up another episode of Eyes Wide Open. We hope you enjoyed our exploration of the moon landing conspiracy. Join us next time as we delve into more fascinating topics. Remember, the truth is out there, waiting to be discovered. This is Darshini and Ashwini signing off.