Oh no, not you too ptato. Had an intense debate with a good friend of mine about this exact subject. To each his own I suppose.
Sorry RPE! I am totally open to you convincing me that we went, please debate away. I just think there is 'reasonable doubt' that we didn't go. I just really don't think we had the technology at the time. (Maybe we do now? But if we do, why haven't we gone back?)
I won't even bother with the lame arguments like flags waving, or non-parallel lighting, space rocks with prop letters on them, or missing thruster craters. Here's why I 'think' we may not have gone:
We were getting clobbered by the Russians in the space race. Clobbered! They were beating us to everything (first man in space, first women in space, first man in orbit, first spacewalk - the Cosmonauts had five times as many logged space hours as our Astronauts). But then, all of a sudden, we’re the ones walking on the moon?
The moon is 250,000 miles away, right? Well, if you don’t count the trips to the moon, as far as I know (correct me if I am wrong), the furthest from earth any human has ever gone is 400 miles (low earth orbit). To go beyond 400 miles, you’d have to travel through the Van Allen Radiation Belts. The one time the space shuttle did go 400 miles, they got too close to the Van Allen belts and reported ‘seeing stars’ and being blinded due to the radiation and they had to lower their altitude. But the Apollo astronauts seemed to have zipped right through the belts with no problem. When interviewed, the Apollo astronauts had no idea of these belts. It’s been a while since I have seen the interview, but when told about the reported symptoms of the belts, I remember one astronaut changed his story and said “Oh yeah, I might have experienced some stars and impaired vision”.
Why no visible stars from the moon’s surface? Why the inconsistency amongst astronauts in testimony about visible stars?
Have you seen that video of the Apolo 11 crew clearly staging and filming themselves as if they were halfway to the moon when they were clearly still in Earth’s orbit? They used the circular window on the craft to make the earth look smaller than it was. This doesn’t mean with certainty they did not go to the moon but it sure shows they faked being halfway to the moon when they were not.
I don’t know. I’d like to think we went but, as I said, I am not entirely convinced.