The Great Moon Hoax

Here is the very first letter I ever sent to Fortean Times, way back in December 1996. It was in response to an article by David S. Percy in the ever-popular "NASA faked the Moon Landings" genre. There are many variations on this theme, and this particular article majored on the fact that the NASA photographs show evidence of multiple light sources (as you would find in a studio) rather than a single light source from the Sun. The following letter was intended as a subtle satire, but it was obviously too subtle for FT because they didn't print it.

Your recent article on the fake "Moon landings" reminded me of something a NASA whistle-blower once told me. I think this is worth relating because it may assist in understanding the motives behind such a bizarre deception. The Moon, if we are to believe the so-called "authorities", is nothing but an inert lump of rock which produces no light of its own. What a preposterous notion! If it were true, then a night with a full Moon would be just as dark as a night with no Moon at all. This is patently not the case, which proves that the Moon does indeed generate its own light. The Moon is not an inert lump of rock, but an artificial construct placed in Earth orbit for who knows what sinister government purpose. For hundreds of years we have been fed a glib cover story based on "non-zero reflectivity of the lunar surface" and such like meaningless technobabble. NASA faked the so-called "Apollo" pictures in a bungled attempt to create supporting evidence for the Moon's alleged surface reflectivity. Fortunately, one of the early NASA whistle-blowers invented the term "moonshine" as a synonym of "nonsense" to draw attention to this deception.