Proof Positive
Five Reasons to Believe We've Been to the Moon

Reason #1 -- Moon Rocks
Apollo astronauts didn't return empty-handed. They brought 841 pounds of the Moon back with them. Apollo Moon samples range in size from sand and pebbles to basketball-sized rocks. Moon rocks are completely different from rocks native to Earth. Their mineral content is unique and they show distinctive signs of exposure to the solar wind, cosmic rays and meteoroid impacts. To a trained geologist there's no mistaking a Moon rock. But you don't have to take the word of an expert. There are museums in the United States where you can inspect Moon rocks for yourself and see the distinctive meteoroid impact pits that pepper nearly all rocks from the Moon. It's rock-hard evidence that the Apollo program really did happen!

Scientists from dozens of countries, many that were Cold War "enemies" of the United States, have analyzed Apollo Moon rocks. Every single researcher agrees that the Apollo Moon rocks are genuine.

Reason #2 -- Witnesses
The most famous participants in the Apollo program are the twelve astronauts who walked on the Moon. Nine of them are still alive today; they are powerful witnesses to the reality of the Apollo program. And they're not the only ones. Approximately 360,000 scientists, engineers, civil servants and contractors worked on the Apollo program. They designed the rockets, sewed the space suits, cut the pay checks, guarded the doors, swept the floors and much more. These hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life can testify that the Apollo program was real.

Can you imagine a government conspiracy involving nearly 400,000 people without even one whistle blower revealing the truth?

Reason #3 -- The Paper Trail
The Apollo program left an awesome paper trail, including blueprints, spec sheets, memoranda, budgets -- you name it! Every nut and bolt on a Saturn V rocket, every clasp in an astronaut's space suit, every welding joint, every pressure valve... you get the idea ... all these things were meticulously documented. "For the Saturn V rocket alone there is more than 2000 linear feet of documentation stored in the National Archives outside of Atlanta." says Roger Launius, NASA's chief historian. That's nearly the same length as seven football fields laid end-to-end.

For a physical scientist, the unique composition of Moon rocks might be the most persuasive evidence that humans visited the Moon and returned. But for a research historian, the staggering number of self-consistent original documents testifies powerfully to the reality of Apollo.

Reason #4 -- More Witnesses
Tens of thousands of people personally (not on TV -- they were there in person) saw the Apollo Saturn V rockets blast off for the Moon. Watching the departure of those behemoths -- the largest rockets ever built -- was an unforgettable experience for the spectators. The rockets were even visible in space. "At the time of the Apollo 8 mission I was heading a team at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's satellite tracking station on top of Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii," recalls astronomer David Le Conte, "We took lots of photographs of the trans-lunar burn, clearly showing the spacecraft turning and heading out of Earth's orbit. These photographs were widely published, for example in Time and Life magazines. On subsequent nights (and for subsequent Apollo flights, including Apollo 11, when I was Manager of the Mount Hopkins, Arizona, station) we photographed the receding spacecraft and their waste dumps as far we could with our equipment."

"I can only think that the (conspiracy) theorists are relatively young. Nobody who experienced the Apollo Program first hand could ever doubt its achievements." -- Le Conte

Reason #5 -- Things Left Behind on the Moon
Apollo astronauts left something behind on the Moon that we can see from Earth -- small mirrors called "corner cube retroreflector arrays." The first retroreflector was positioned on the Moon in 1969 by the Apollo 11 astronauts so that it would point toward Earth and be able to reflect pulses of laser light fired from our planet. Because the retroreflectors require no power, they are still operating normally more than 30 years after Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. Scientists from around the world regularly bounce laser pulses from these distant reflectors to learn more about tides, the Moon's rotation, Einstein's theory of relativity, and much more.

The Soviet Union and France also deposited a retroreflector on the Moon using an unmanned spacecraft, Lunakhod 2. That device was not placed on the lunar surface as carefully as the Apollo astronauts were able to situate their retroreflectors. As a result, the Lunakhod 2 mirror produces a weaker laser echo than the smaller Apollo reflectors -- devices that benefited from the personal attention of humans on the Moon.