Did NASA really go to the Moon? In this video Billy Carson says yes: the Apollo crews landed, and the most-shared "hoax proofs" are cropped, edited or staged material. His twist is the second half of his title, "yes we went to the moon and yes we lied about it": he argues that some footage was obscured because the missions found structures on the Moon that the public was never told about.
The topic matters because the moon landing hoax claim is one of the most widely shared conspiracy theories online, and the same doctored images resurface every year. The video is unusual in that it argues from inside the alternative-research community against its own weakest material, telling viewers to check the original source before sharing anything. That part of the argument lines up with the historical record; the anomaly claims that follow are Carson's own reading, and the mainstream response is set out below.
What the video covers
The episode is a "Forbidden Rant" in which Carson reads through his 2019 blog post of the same name image by image.
The cropped training photo (from about 3:10)
The first viral image shows two Apollo astronauts on grey ground without helmets, presented as proof of a Hollywood set. Carson shows the original, which he says is a public NASA photograph of a crew walkthrough behind a Florida facility. In the viral version the buildings and cars were cropped out and the ground recoloured to look like lunar soil. His verdict on the people spreading it: "they exchanged lies for likes and views."
The Van Allen radiation belts (from about 5:40)
Carson walks through the discovery of the belts by James Van Allen's University of Iowa group using Explorer 1, Explorer 3 (launched March 26, 1958), Explorer 4 (July 26, 1958) and Pioneer 3 (December 6, 1958). His point is that the belts are real but were not a barrier. In his account, a lethal dose required days of unprotected exposure, the Apollo spacecraft crossed the belts in a few hours, and mission planners plotted a course through the weakest region.
The Apollo program in numbers (from about 9:20)
He summarises the program: the first crewed Apollo flight in 1968, the first landing in 1969 and the last in 1972; six of the final seven missions landed, and 12 astronauts walked on the Moon. He notes that the Command Module is on public display and that he has seen one in person. He then credits the human "computers" whose hand calculations underpinned Mercury and early Apollo trajectories, pointing viewers to the film Hidden Figures, and explains lunar orbit rendezvous: a Saturn V sending the command and service module (CSM) and lunar module (LM) toward the Moon, one astronaut staying in orbit while two descended.
The boot print (from about 14:30)
The second viral image pairs a smooth-soled Apollo boot with a ridged lunar footprint. Carson explains the extravehicular overshoe, a separate outer boot with a ridged sole that slipped over the suit's own boot and was only put on before a moonwalk. As he puts it, "you can't wear these 20 pound boots inside of a capsule for three days." He cites the museum description of a training pair made for astronaut James B. Irwin by the International Latex Corporation.
The fake Kubrick interview (from about 18:00)
A widely shared clip claims to show director Stanley Kubrick confessing that he faked the landings. Carson says the full version, released later in 2015, shows an actor reading lines and being coached by the interviewer, who addresses him by a different name.
Why he says "we lied" (from about 21:40)
Here the video turns. Carson argues that the reason for the secrecy was artificial anomalies on the Moon that, in his view, should not be there. He briefly shows Mars images he considers out of place, from Pathfinder, Victoria crater and the Spirit rover, including shapes he reads as statues and ankh symbols, and he says space-agency images are sometimes blurred to hide them.
The dome in the Apollo ascent footage (from about 31:50)
His centrepiece is a frame from archival Apollo 11 footage filmed as the LM ascent stage returned to the CSM. Carson says that reducing the contrast in photo software reveals a large dome with internal objects he estimates at up to a mile high. He links this to a wider reading: that the Moon and Mars were damaged in an ancient interplanetary war, and that the Apollo flights were partly recovery missions for technology.
Private space and Clementine (from about 38:40)
Carson argues that the shift to private launch companies keeps data out of reach of Freedom of Information requests. He then reviews Clementine, the 1994 joint mission of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (renamed the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization in 1993) and NASA, launched January 25, 1994, from Vandenberg Air Force Base, which mapped the Moon from polar orbit for about two months before a thruster malfunction on May 7 ended its planned asteroid flyby. Pointing to the song "Oh My Darling, Clementine" and its line "lost and gone forever," he suggests the failure was a cover story. He closes with a lunar feature he says resembles the Sphinx and urges viewers to "come up with your own conclusion."
Key takeaways
- Carson accepts that Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon and calls the most-shared hoax images doctored.
- The helmet-less "studio" photo is a cropped NASA training image, in his account.
- The smooth boot and the ridged footprint come from two different pieces of equipment: the suit boot and the lunar overshoe.
- The viral Kubrick confession is a staged video featuring an actor.
- His claim that structures were found on the Moon, and that footage was obscured to hide them, is his own interpretation and is not supported by later lunar mapping.
Billy Carson's reading
Carson's position has two layers. The first is a media-literacy argument: much of what circulates about the Moon is fake news built from cropped or edited images, and anyone sharing it should trace the original source. He presents his blog as a set of source links precisely so viewers can check his work.
The second layer is his claim that something was found. In his reading, the pre-Apollo orbiters returned images of anomalies, the Apollo crews were partly sent to retrieve material, and later official imagery was blurred or withheld. He ties this to a theme that runs through his work: that ancient accounts, which he finds in the Mahabharata, the Sumerian tablets, the story of Atlantis and a source he calls the Terra Papers, describe a war that reached the Moon and Mars. Readers can compare that idea with the Atlantis article and Carson's Anunnaki connection, and with the secret space program claims set against real classified projects. His closing line frames why he holds the view: "money is only a byproduct of knowledge."
What mainstream scholarship says
On the landings themselves, the evidence is broad and independent. Apollo 11, 14 and 15 left retroreflector arrays that observatories in Texas, New Mexico and France still bounce lasers off to measure the Earth–Moon distance; newer lunar laser projects build on that work. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, in orbit since 2009, has photographed all six landing sites, showing descent stages, experiment packages and the paths astronauts walked, and the same orbiter's cameras track much smaller changes on the surface. India's Chandrayaan-2 has also imaged Apollo sites. The missions were tracked by observatories outside NASA, including Jodrell Bank in England, and monitored by the Soviet Union, which had every reason to expose a fake. The six landings returned 382 kg of rock and soil that laboratories around the world have studied for decades. On the Van Allen belts, Apollo trajectories were angled to skirt the densest part of the inner belt rather than pass through a literal opening, and crew dosimeters recorded mission totals of roughly one rad or less.
On the anomalies, researchers point out that contrast-stretching a compressed or copied video frame produces artefacts such as blocks, halos and banding, and that the human eye readily sees faces and objects in random terrain, a tendency called pareidolia, discussed in the Face on Mars article. The Moon has since been mapped at far higher resolution by spacecraft from the United States, Japan, India and China, and none has shown domes or mile-high structures. Clementine's roughly 1.8 million images were released publicly, and accounts of the mission say it was named after the song because it was designed to be "lost and gone forever" once its work was done. Assyriologists and Sanskrit scholars do not read the Sumerian texts or the Mahabharata as describing a war on the Moon or Mars, and the Terra Papers is a 1990s book, not an ancient text. Genuine Apollo samples are US government property; the moon rock sold to collectors is meteorite material.
Watch, read and go deeper
The original blog post this episode reads from is Yes, we went to the Moon and yes, we lied about it, which carries the source links Carson refers to. The audio version is on the 4biddenknowledge Podcast episode page, and more of Carson's long-form talks stream on the 4biddenknowledge Podcast on 4BK TV. For the ancient-war theme behind his reading, the Anunnaki topic hub gathers the Sumerian material, and the secret space program article linked above separates documented classified projects from the claims.
Frequently asked questions
Did the Apollo astronauts really land on the Moon?
Yes. Six Apollo missions landed between 1969 and 1972, and 12 astronauts walked on the surface. The evidence includes retroreflectors still used for laser ranging, orbital photographs of every landing site, independent tracking and 382 kg of returned samples. Billy Carson agrees that the landings happened.
Why is the astronaut's boot smooth but the footprint ridged?
The suit had its own smooth inner boot, and astronauts pulled a separate lunar overshoe with a ridged sole over it before going outside. The viral comparison places a photo of the inner boot beside a print made by the overshoe.
How did Apollo get through the Van Allen belts?
The spacecraft crossed the belts in a few hours on trajectories angled to avoid their most intense region, and the hull and equipment gave some shielding. Recorded crew doses were low, roughly one rad or less per mission.
Is the Stanley Kubrick moon landing confession real?
No. The clip is a staged video featuring an actor, and the full version shows him being coached on his lines. Kubrick died in 1999, years before it was made.
Sources mentioned
In the video Carson cites his own blog post Yes, We Went to the Moon and Yes, We Lied About It; James Van Allen's work with Explorer 1, Explorer 3, Explorer 4 and Pioneer 3; NASA's Apollo program materials and photo archive; the museum record of the International Latex Corporation lunar overshoe made for James B. Irwin; the film Hidden Figures; archival Apollo 11 ascent footage; images from Mars Pathfinder, the Spirit rover and Victoria crater on NASA's JPL Photojournal; the Clementine mission record; the Mahabharata; the Sumerian tablets; Plato's account of Atlantis; and the Terra Papers. Standard references include Margot Lee Shetterly's book Hidden Figures, Andrew Chaikin's A Man on the Moon, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera image releases of the Apollo landing sites and the published results of the lunar laser ranging experiment.
