What Happened on the Moon

What Happened on the Moon is a documentary film by David Percy in which he claims NASA Moon Landing photographs are a hoax. The film argues that the photographic evidence of the landing could have been faked, that sending a man to the Moon was extremely difficult if not impossible with existing technology and the presence of the Van Allen radiation belts, and that a conspiracy existed between the United States and the Soviet Union to convince their populations of the validity of the space programs.

The mainstream scientific and technical communities regard the moon landings as historical events; they argue that the issues raised by Percy and other believers in Apollo Moon Landing hoax accusations have been satisfactorily answered. A 1999 Gallup poll indicates that some 89% of Americans (what Gallup describes as an "overwhelming majority") believe the Apollo landings happened as reported while 6% believe that 'the US government staged or faked the landings'.

Introduction
The documentary centers its argument on questioning NASA’s ability to send a man to the Moon and bring him back to Earth safely.

The program consists of three parts. The first part offers an analysis about the still photographs and the TV coverage of the landings. The second part studies the hazards involved in space travel due to cosmic radiation, and the third part explains the problems that NASA faced with the rockets and their associated technology.

After every claim made by Percy, a NASA official is asked to rebut the claims. The NASA official is often reluctant to answer, claiming that NASA does not need to prove historical facts.

Part One
Percy contends that comparisons of the Apollo landing photographs against the actual video footage broadcast to the public demonstrate that they were taken at completely different times. He suggests that carefully examining the photographic backgrounds reveals that the photographs of all Apollo missions follow a repetitive pattern, that all the background mountains are exactly the same shape in missions that were presumed to have occurred in completely different lunar locations.
Percy claims that the movement of the astronauts in reduced gravitation was simulated by reducing the speed of the film by 50%, and that the astronauts' leaps were performed by lifting them with cables. According to Percy the video footage sometimes shows that the life support back packs have pins from which the astronauts were lifted by the cables.
There are also interviews with an expert from Hasselblad, who (according to NASA) manufactured the camera used on the Apollo 11 mission.

Part Two
The film also talks about the technological difficulties faced by space travel through the radiation belts. According to Percy the Van Allen radiation belts are lethal and astronauts must be protected from them. Percy claims that the necessary radiation protection would make the spacecraft so heavy that using a rocket would become an impossibility. Interviews in the film with some astronauts who claim they went to the moon reflects that they did not know they had to cross the Van Allen Belts.

The film also claims that the US military attempted to force a tunnel through the radiation belts by exploding a megaton nuclear weapon 248 miles from Earth, but that the result of this operation had the opposite effect - the explosion intensified the radiation levels of the belts and created a third belt below the natural belts with 100 times their radiation, exacerbating the problem.

Part Three
The third part of the film claims that the USSR and the United States began to secretly cooperate on this hoax after victory in the Second World War. German scientists went to both the Russian and the American space programs but, while the Americans got Wernher von Braun, the Russians (according to Percy) got the most talented scientists. The film claims that the Soviets cooperated in the simulation of the broadcasts from the Moon, by providing repeaters sent during their unmanned missions. These repeaters would receive the signals from NASA and would send them back to Earth to fool anyone attempting to listen in.

There is also a claim in the film that the capsule that was supposed to carry Yuri Gagarin on the world's first manned space mission was empty and that Gagarin remained on Earth for the duration of the trip.

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