rowan666•8d agoProlific Poster

Shoutout to the guy at the flea market who told me the moon landing was faked in a studio in Arizona

I was browsing old vinyl records at a flea market outside Austin about two months ago, and this older dude just walks up to me while I'm flipping through a stack. He points at a Neil Young album and says, 'You know they faked the moon landing in a soundstage near Tucson, right?' I laughed at first, but then he pulled out a phone with some side-by-side photos of shadows in Apollo pictures and desert rocks. We talked for like 20 minutes, and he had all these specific details about the lighting angles and the dust patterns. Part of me thinks he's just read too many blogs, but another part wonders why the shadows don't line up in some of those shots. Has anyone else run into someone who had a really detailed theory like that and made you second-guess?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_anthony8d ago

Those shadow comparison things can look suspicious at first glance, but they usually fall apart when you account for uneven ground and multiple light sources reflecting off the lunar surface. The Apollo astronauts also left retroreflectors on the moon that scientists still bounce lasers off today to measure its distance, which would be pretty hard to fake from a desert studio. Even if some photos look a little off to our eyes, the sheer volume of physical evidence from six landings makes the conspiracy theory way harder to swallow than the official story, right?

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margaret_bennett38d ago

Wonder if folks get too wound up over this whole thing. I mean, the retroreflectors are real enough, scientists use them all the time for lunar ranging experiments, that much is true. But does it really matter if we landed there or not at this point? Feels like a lot of energy spent on something that happened fifty years ago, and either way it doesn't change much about our day to day lives.