How High the Moon? Or the Greatest Deception of Them All…


Emanuel E. Garcia | NEXUS Magazine – TRANSCEND Media Service

“Fake news” is nothing new. In less glamorous times, perhaps, it was known as subterfuge, lying, deceit, deception, advertising or public relations. One of the advantages of aging is that one may look back and, in so looking back, events which, at the time of perception, seemed perfectly plausible, can be peered at more closely and, can, in fact, be seen for what they really were.

Thus Pearl Harbor, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident’ that launched the Vietnamese debacle, and, more recently, the ostensible discover of Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ — all of these events, considered in the reflective hindsight of reason, have been exposed.

We now know that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was, at the very least, a provocation; that the unleashing of nuclear weapons upon Japan was strategically unnecessary; that the Gulf of Tonkin events were a lie and, of course, that Colin Powell’s ‘proof’ to the United Nations that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction was false.

Lies of course have consequences and governments employ them to serve various interests of State: all governments lie, needless to say, to serve themselves. Indeed a complete catalogue of governmental deceptions would be virtually immeasurable: it may be far more fruitful to ask when these entities actually tell the truth. And even then, one should be sceptical: for truth, like Scripture, may be a devil’s tool as well: “for oftentimes to win us to our harm the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betrays in deepest consequence” as Banquo tells Macbeth (Act I, Scene 3).

In casting my eye over the vast array of State deceptions during my own lifetime, from JFK’s assassination by a lone rifleman to the implosion of World Trade Tower 7 from office fires on 9/11, I had never thought to question the Apollo moon missions. These achievements, after all, represented humankind at its best: the striving for and reaching a goal that had hitherto been thought impossible.

The landing of a man on our moon was, we were told, something that transcended nationalism: although carried out by the United States, it unified all of our fragile species for several glorious years.


Apollo 11 lunar sky



I write therefore not to persuade but to invite my readers, however few, to question, to bear with me as I raise my own questions. There are so many improbabilities in the sequences that led to the Apollo moon landings that I can hardly do them justice: others have delineated and described them well, and they include the absence of a stepwise testing protocol, numerous photographic anomalies, and the lack of any independent verification of NASA’s claims. Rather than attempt to manage this morass I will instead direct you to a compact handful of works which I believe are worth investigating (appended), but in passing I will  mention a few of the anomalies that caught my reflective eye: the absence of dust on the landing pads of the lunar module, the lack of a crater underneath the LEM (Lunar Excursion Module) which would have been formed by the rockets thrusting for descent, and the repetition of identical background images in ostensibly different lunar locations.

Apollo 11 Lunar Excursion Module footpad: not a speck of dust!

Furthermore, as a reasonably thoughtful person, I will ask you to consider the following major issues.

  1. Why hasn’t NASA or anyone else for that matter returned a human being to the lunar surface since 1972?
  2. Could the astronauts’ space suits have protected them from the severe fluctuation of temperatures on the lunar surface (a 500 degree Fahrenheit swing from above boiling point in the sun to far below freezing in the shade)? Could they have protected them sufficiently from cosmic radiation and the dangers of micrometeorites?
  3. Could the photographic film in the famous Hasselblad cameras used to take the iconic lunar photos have survived the radiation of space?
  4. Could the Command Module’s heat-shield have effectively prevented the craft from melting during re-entry into the atmosphere of Earth at speeds of 40,000 kmh?
  5. Why are there no recent photos in fine resolution of the relics of the Apollo missions left on the lunar surface?
  6. Where are the stars?

NASA’s Right of Return

Given the wonderfully successful lunar landings of twelve astronauts during the Apollo missions, one would expect that returning to the moon would be a cinch for the agency that orchestrated the accomplishments in an era of relatively low computational technology.




NASA is having so much trouble getting ‘back’ to the moon simply because they never got there in the first place, and the obstacles posed by sending and returning a human being into deep space beyond low earth orbit have not yet been overcome.

Space Suits: the International Latex Corporation

For astronauts to survive on the lunar surface during their extravehicular forays, they needed to be encased in spacesuits that would offer protection from severe temperatures, the radiation of space, and the danger posed by micrometeorites which would have been fatal if they created even a miniscule tear in the fabric of the suits.

Were their spacesuits and life support systems capable of these objectives? NASA of course claims yes, as they would, and the ILC contends that their suits did all that was required, though others have raised doubts, particularly with respect to radiation. I for one am flabbergasted to have seen the Apollo astronauts frolicking on the ostensible lunar surface with such abandon, knowing that a gash or tear into their garments would mean virtually instant death.

Dave McGowan has his own take on what he dubs the ‘magic suits’:


Astronaut Alan Bean in the magic spacsuit during Apollo 12

You be the judge.

The Magic Kodak Film

Apollo astronauts were outfitted with a modified Hasselblad 500 EL camera. It had no viewfinder and it housed a 70 mm thin emulsion Kodak film. It had no radiation protection.

How can film subjected to cosmic and galactic radiation on the lunar surface be unaffected, when radiation at 240 miles above the earth resulted in fogging or clouding?

Re-entering the Atmosphere at 40,000 km/h: the Command Module Heat Shield

The angle of the Command Module upon re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere had to be perfect for the craft’s ablative thermal shield to absorb the immense heat and allow the vehicle eventually to splash down safely into the ocean. Curiously enough, for its new Orion program, NASA is having problems reproducing Apollo’s success in protecting the spacecraft during re-entry. As Phil Kouts writes:

“The importance of a totally reliable and effective heat shield cannot be overstated. The availability of a proper heat shield was absolutely critical for the safe return of all the Apollo crews. NASA’s admission that the agency cannot now recreate the thermal shield of a return module is absolutely astounding. Such an admission could only be compared to an inconceivable statement that, for example, American military officials admit that after using armoured steel in their tanks during WWII, some 40 years later they don’t have the technology at hand to develop armoured steel, and have great difficulty in reproducing such steel despite the previous experience during the war. The GAO report concludes: ‘With respect to Orion’s thermal protection system, facilities available from the Apollo era for testing large-scale heat shields no longer exist.’ (GAO, 2008 p.14)”

Apollo 11 Command Module: could the upper part of the structure survive the heat of re-entry?

Unless the Command Module were encased in its entirety by a thermally resistant shell that could withstand the searing heat of re-entry – up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit – it would simply have melted as it was engulfed by the flames engendered by its penetration of the atmosphere. Bear in mind that re-entry from low earth orbit, as accomplished by the Space Shuttle, is a different matter altogether, with significantly lower speeds and temperatures.

Independent Photographic Evidence of the Lunar Landings

In John Noble Wilford’s book We Reach the Moon (1973), he writes that that the Lunar Orbiters of the 1960s which preceded the Apollo missions were equipped with a high resolution lens (Eastman Kodak) that could pick out details “as small as the top of a card table.”

If that was the case, why then haven’t succeeding orbiters like Selene and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter achieved resolution fine enough to show clearly evidence of the landings?

And to carry this point further, if earth-orbiting satellites at very high distances can achieve very fine detail, e.g., enough to show individual cars, etc., why don’t the lunar photographic satellites, closer to their target and moving more slowly, achieve at least the same?

The Stars That Didn’t Shine in the Night

Like the famous dog that didn’t bark in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story Silver Blaze, during the Apollo missions stars apparently didn’t shine. In a lunar sky that had no distorting atmosphere Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would have been provided with a dazzling and spectacular display the likes of which no one had ever seen before, a peering into the vast bright twinkling immensity of the universe. At the Apollo 11 press conference, the three astronauts were asked specifically about stars by reporter Patrick Moore. The incredulous answer from Michael Collins is: “I don’t remember seeing any.”

A Hubble Space Telescope image of the stellar sky: imagine the view from the moon!

A View of the cosmos from the International Space Station:

In the Apollo 11 photographs there are no stars at all, but merely black space, which may be explained by limitations of camera exposure settings. What is decidedly not explained, however, is the absence of a genuine human reaction to the unparalleled vision of the world of deep space beyond atmospheric constraints either on the journey to and from the moon, or from the lunar surface itself.


Nor did NASA have the foresight to ask them while they or any of the astronauts on the following missions cavorted on the moon’s surface, to adjust their cameras with an exposure setting that would show the world that indescribable sky filled with an infinite number of magnificently shining points of light.

Apollo 11 view of the lunar sky: sadly without stars.

Instead of setting up a telescope on the moon that would give us a glimpse into the far reaches of the universe, they played a little golf.


I will conclude with two quotations from John F. Kennedy.

We are all familiar with his pronouncement that the US would seek to put a man on the moon before the decade (1960s) was out. At a speech in Rice Stadium, on 12 September 1962, he said:




However in his address to the UN General Assembly on 20 September 1963, not long before he was murdered, he has this remarkable thing to say:



JFK at the United Nations General Assembly, 1963

Two months later Kennedy would be killed, and with him the hopes for an early peace in Vietnam and a new era of international cooperation with the Soviet Union[i] . But the American quest for the moon went on and NASA independently achieved in a few scant years what it somehow is unable to achieve today, after decades of technological and computational advances.

Or so it seemed.

Recommended viewing and reading:

If you’re interested in delving a little further into the mystery, allow me to recommend the following for you to read or to view. You’ll have to use a discerning mind and not to expect perfection from these sceptics and critics, but I believe that the weight of the improbabilities will be so immense that you too will be inexorably led to the same disillusioning conclusion I have reached.

Moon Landing Questioners: A Brief and Selective Compilation

For what I think are the most well-reasoned and definitive articles, which rely solely on NASA’s own documents, see Phil Kouts:


A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, starting at 32:21. It will and should blow you away.




Ralph Rene’s NASA Mooned America! provides much material to deliberate upon.

 Jarrah White’s Moonfaker series on YouTube is fairly comprehensive, and long, and somewhat irksome in certain aspects of presentation, but it addresses many significant issues. His website is


The website offers a series of articles by a variety of scientists and other experts on many problematic aspects of the moon missions and is highly recommended.



[i] Thanks to Dave Ratcliffe for the following:




Dr. Emanuel E. Garcia is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, an American poet, novelist and physician who now resides in New Zealand. He may be contacted at



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2 Responses to “How High the Moon? Or the Greatest Deception of Them All…”

  1. Gary Corseri says:

    Emanuel– I read this thru, delighted and informed, and only halted a few times to make some unworthy comment (that may, in fact, spur others to delight and inform themselves); viz.,


    I REFLECT: “I increasingly appreciate hearing about the ‘advantages of aging’”!

    YOU WRITE: “I write therefore not to persuade but to invite my readers, however few, to question, to bear with me as I raise my own questions.”

    I REFLECT: “Exactly the right approach. Humbly invite skepticism….”


    I REFLECT: “A splendid point! How could they not have gasped?!”

    YOU WRITE, QUOTING J.F.K.: “Finally, in a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity – in the field of space – there is room for new cooperation….”

    I REFLECT: “I don’t recall seeing this quote before! Extraordinary! Another reason Deep State killed him!”

    Eman–you make me want to look at an unpolluted night sky, count a million stars, and think myself lucky!



  2. Edward Curtin says:

    Emanuel Garcia is a brave man for writing this piece and encouraging readers to do their own homework. There are many well-known writers who agree with him but who have yet to make their agreement public for fear of being labeled ridiculous. I believe he is right and that the last laugh will be on his critics.