Was it all a hoax?In the words Neil Armstrong chiselled into history, it was one small step for a man. But were the Moon landings really mankind's greatest scientific leap or the most fantastic hoax ever pulled? The thrilling TV pictures, so faint and grey that we might have been peering at a ghost moving through a thick fog, certainly showed a bulky shape in a spacesuit backing down a ladder, stretching out a leg, tentatively putting one booted foot on to the surface.
The surface of where, though? The Moon or an elaborate mock-up in a movie studio somewhere in a remote corner of an Earthly desert?
As the world prepares to celebrate the 40th anniversary of that July day in 1969 when the Apollo 11 mission completed the first manned Moon landing allegedly the doubts live on. The conspiracy theorists, the lunatics, call them what you like, insist that Armstrong and his fellow astronauts, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, never got further than a few orbits of the Earth.
They claim what the world was watching as it goggled at its TVs was all a fake, filmed months in advance and broadcast as if it were real and happening live. The landing. The footprints in the dust. Those phantom figures bunny-hopping around in a barren landscape. They were all part of the scam.
A loopy idea? Consider this:
In 1979, when the first suggestions began to emerge that NASA might have been up to some dirty tricks, six per cent of Americans thought the Moon landing was a hoax. In 1999, the number had risen to 11 per cent.
When they counted again recently, they discovered no fewer than 22 per cent believed that the Apollo 11 Moon landing never happened.
That's more than 60 million suspicious Americans. And many more millions worldwide. The internet now teems with claims and allegations.
Mankind was conned, they argue, and there are good reasons for suspicion. First, the motive.
Ever since President John F Kennedy pledged at the start of the 60s that man would travel to the Moon and back within a decade, the Americans were desperate to beat the Russians in the space race.
That summer of 1969, Moscow was only a month from launching its own manned Moon shot.
Washington, burdened with the Vietnam war and civil unrest, benefited from a popular distraction to take attention away from its problems.
And then, the practicalities.
Technology then was positively primitive. The computer developed for the Apollo programme had only a tiny fraction of the power in a home PC today. The satnav that guides your car is many times more sophisticated than the machine which, so we are assured, steered a mission 250,000 miles to a few square yards of the Sea of Tranquility and back.
Even recently, when President George W Bush announced the USA's ambition to return to the Moon, he was told it would take 11 years to put the engineering together.
It's embarrassing now for NASA to realise that, as a four-decade anniversary approaches, a rapidly-growing body of public opinion is convinced the greatest moment was a fake.
At NASA headquarters in Washington, the men in suits even have a code for them. HBs the Hoax Believers. Area 51, the HBs argue, is the most likely spot where he put down his foot. Its a top-secret military installation in the Nevada desert, also known as Groom Lake, or Dreamland.
It would be the ideal place to hide a shed big enough to house an area of make-believe Moon.
NASA had raised $40billion of funding to go to the Moon. Plenty for a high-class production and, HBs say, enough to pay off a large number of people.
Of course, NASA has its photographic proof. Thousands of pictures, in fact. They were taken on Moon missions between 1969 and 1972, showing men and their machines, against a backdrop that had become very familiar to a public growing almost bored with the adventure by the end.
The HBs, though, kept picking over every detail. They began to notice strange tricks of the light.
How, for example, could an astronaut (below) be walking through a shadow, or have the sun at his back, and yet be brightly lit from the front, showing off all those bits of his spacesuit, especially the Stars and Stripes flag, in technicolour?
If you were posing this in a studio, with so-called in-fill lights blazing from every angle, you couldn't have produced a better result. The response from NASA? Well, you have to understand that on the Moon light can behave in odd ways. (Source: Sunday Mirror)
