After President John F. Kennedy announced to Congress in May 1961 that the US should 'commit itself, before this decade is out, to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth,' the race to the moon began. The Cold War was at its height, and NASA was one of the leading weapons in the battle. But it was the Soviet Union who made all the early advances. They launched the first man into space in 1961, and the first woman two years later. They were also the first to orbit the earth.

The US had their successes, too, when, less than a year after Kennedy's speech, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth. Triumph turned to tragedy in January 1967, however, when Apollo 1 exploded in flames during testing, killing three astronauts on board. The many flaws that had lead to the fire meant that a complete design overhaul was required. Many at NASA felt that the end of the decade deadline would prove unfeasible.

IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

It was the need to fulfil Kennedy's promise which Californian author Bill Kaysing believes sparked the NASA conspiracy. Between 1956 and 1963, Kaysing worked as a technical writer for a company involved in the Apollo missions. During this time, Kaysing claims, NASA carried out a feasibility study which found they had only a 0.0017 per cent chance of landing a man on the moon and returning him to earth. Kaysing believes it was impossible for NASA to go from 0.0017 to 100 per cent by 1969. Some people believe Kaysing has a point. The technology used to fly Apollo 11 to the moon was extremely primitive compared with today's standards. In fact, the on-board computer had less memory than a modern washing machine.

STAGED PERFORMANCE

In his book, We Never Went to the Moon, Kaysing claims that NASA and the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) worked together on faking the Apollo 11 moon landing. An empty Saturn V rocket was launched but fell back to earth when it was out of the public gaze. NASA also allegedly created a lunar landscape in an underground cavern at a remote Nevada site. Meanwhile, the astronauts and Mission Control were taking part in a meticulously staged performance designed to fool the public and especially the Russians, into believing they had landed on the moon. Fake photographs and film were taken and the astronauts' return to earth was staged by dropping a dummy space capsule from an army plane into the ocean.

Kaysing goes on to suggest that the astronauts were brain washed to guarantee their co-operation with the hoax. Another American author, Ralph Rene, also believes that astronauts could not have made it to the moon. In his book, NASA Mooned America!, Rene claims that the Apollo spacecraft would have needed to be at least two metres thick to prevent cosmic radiation from cooking the astronauts inside. The hoax theorists believe that when NASA realised they did not have the technology to take men safely to the moon by the end of the 1960s, they resorted to faking the lunar landings. This ensured that they would score a propaganda coup against the Soviets and keep the dollars rolling in for funding their real space projects.

JOINT CONSPIRACY

Another hoax theory claims that the Americans and Soviets secretly developed their space technology together. NASA faked the Apollo photographs because they and the Soviets were building bases on the moon to use as a staging post for a full blown base on Mars.

This theory was triggered by a spoof documentary called Alternative Three, made by Anglia TV's Science Report series. Originally scheduled for All Fool's day, the programme was actually broadcast on 20 June 1977. It caused a deluge of response from worried viewers, in many ways comparable to the public panic following Orson Welles' famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast of 1936. The documentary declared that the world was heading for ecological armegeddon. Subsequently, a team of international scientists and government advisors came up with three alternatives to save the human race. The first alternative was to detonate controlled nuclear warheads in the atmosphere to allow pollution to disperse into space. The second alternative was to build huge subterranean bunkers to house the rich, intelligent and powerful elite of the world. But Alternative Three was the chosen plan.

ALTERNATIVE THREE

In this scenario, humans would colonise the nearest planet capable of sustaining life-Mars. According to the programme, a joint American and Soviet space probe had already been sent to explore the far side of the moon in the late 1950s. A joint lunar base would be built as a launching post for a proper Martian base. Once the Mars bases were in place, the rich and powerful would abandon Earth for Mars, leaving the rest of humanity to fend for themselves on a doomed earth. As unlikely as all this may see, many viewers were taken in by the documentary, despite the fact that it was advertised in many newspapers as a spoof. It also had a cast list of actors at the end of the programme and a copyright notice reading 1 April 1977. The programme was not shown in the US, which fuelled conspiracy theories that the 'truth' was being kept from them. Suspicions grew when people claimed that copies of the book Alternative Three were hard to find, and that they were being withheld by the government.