User:Moby-Dick4000/Apollo 20 hoax

The Apollo 20 hoax is a story told in a series of wikipedia:YouTube videos of a phony manned lunar mission whose purpose was to retrieve ancient alien artifacts from the moon. Thierry Speth, a French video artist, claimed to be the perpetrator of the hoax on 9 July 2007 on Need2Know.eu, an Internet public bulletin board. However, no news organization has ever attempted to verify Speth's claim.

The Hoax

In April, 2007 a series of videos began appearing on YouTube under the username retiredafb telling the story of Apollo 20. The videos drew tens of thousands of views shortly after their appearance. Then on 25 March 2007, Italian ufologist Luca Scantanburlo interviewed somebody who identified himself as William Rutledge who claimed to be the commander of the Apollo 20 crew. Rutledge also claimed to be the account owner of retiredafb. However, Scantanburlo never met Rutledge in person because he conducted the interview over Yahoo! Messenger .

During the interview, Rutledge claimed Apollo 20 was a top-secret mission launched in mid August of 1976 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara, California and conducted jointly by the United States and the former Soviet Union. He said the other mission members were American Leona Snyder (an apparently fictitious person) and former Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov, the first human being to walk in space. The purported lunar landing site of the mission was near Delporte crater on the far side of the moon. Rutledge said the videos show that he and Leonov discovered the remains of an ancient lunar civilization. He also said they brought back artifacts to earth for study, including a hibernating female alien.

Four months later, video artist Speth claimed responsibility for the hoax and explained that the entire story was fabricated.

YouTube videos

The hoaxer began posting the videos, which have drawn over 200,000 views, on April Fool's Day, a hint that the story was nothing more than an elaborate prank. He/she has since moved most of the videos to Revver.com under the same username (retiredafb). However, others are scattered throughout YouTube posted by several account users, thereby making it difficult to determine the true identity of the hoaxer. Each continues to draw thousands of views.

Despite the realistic appearance of the videos, amateurs have easily debunked them on YouTube and elsewhere on the internet.

The videos are short, each only lasting a couple of minutes. If viewed in their intended sequence, they tell a partial story of the mission, starting with astronauts boarding Apollo 20 and ending with the extraordinary "discoveries" on the moon. They include the following images:

• Ruins of an alien spacecraft
• Ruins of an alien city
• The body of a hibernating female alien
• Apollo 20 flight plans and mission patches
• The launch of Apollo 20
• William Rutledge walking on the moon

The truth behind the hoax

Like many hoaxes, this story is a mixture of facts and fiction. The starting point for it are photos that Apollo 15 astronauts took while in lunar orbit. The photos show what look like a cigar-shaped object resting in a crater. The hoaxer used these photos to create the image of pock-marked alien spacecraft on the moon. The NASA photos are real. However, NASA never claimed they include images of alien spacecraft. The object in question is nothing more than a natural part of the lunar terrain.

In truth, Apollo 20 was a mission that never got off the ground -- literally. It was one of three lunar missions NASA cancelled due to lack of funding along with Apollos 18 and 19. The last NASA lunar mission was Apollo 17, launched in 1972. The next Apollo mission was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project coordinated by the United States and the former Soviet Union in 1975. However, its mission was to remain in low earth orbit and to dock with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft, something it accomplished successfully. Some mistakenly refer to that mission as Apollo 18.

Some of the stages for the Saturn V rockets intended for NASA’s last three lunar missions had already been constructed at the time of cancellation. According to the hoaxer's story, these were all used on lunar missions for Apollos 18, 19 and 20. In reality NASA used one of these to launch Skylab into orbit in 1973. The others are on display at the John F. Kennedy Space Center near Cape Canaveral, Florida, the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas and the United States Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.