Bad: The show claims that 20% of Americans have doubts that we went to the Moon.

Bad: The program talks about the movie ``Capricorn 1'', an entertaining if ultimately silly movie about how NASA must fake a manned Mars expedition. The program says ``The Apollo footage [from the surface of the Moon] is strikingly similar to the scenes in ``Capricorn 1''.

Good: Is it just an amazing coincidence that the actual Moon images look like the movie, or is it evidence of conspiracy? Neither! The movie was filmed in 1978, many years after the last man walked on the Moon. The movie was made to look like the real thing! This statement by the program is particularly ludicrous, and indicates just how far the producers were willing to go to make a sensational program.

Bad: In the pictures taken of the lunar lander by the astronauts, the TV show continues, there is no blast crater. A rocket capable of landing on the Moon should have burned out a huge crater on the surface, yet there is nothing there.

Good: When someone driving a car pulls into a parking spot, do they do it at 100 kilometers per hour? Of course not. They slow down first, easing off the accelerator. The astronauts did the same thing. Sure, the rocket on the lander was capable of 10,000 pounds of thrust, but they had a throttle. They fired the rocket hard to deorbit and slow enough to land on the Moon, but they didn't need to thrust that hard as they approached the lunar surface; they throttled down to about 3000 pounds of thrust.

Bad: The next argument presented on the show deals with the lunar dust. As the lander descended, we clearly see dust getting blown away by the rocket. The exhaust should have blown all the dust away, yet we can clearly see the astronauts' footprints in the dust mere meters from the lander. Obviously, when NASA faked this they messed it up.

Good: Once again, the weird alien environment of the Moon comes to play. Imagine taking a bag of flour and dumping it onto your kitchen floor (kids: ask your folks first!). Now bend over the pile, take a deep breath, and blow into it as hard as you can. Poof! Flour goes everywhere. Why? Because the momentum of your breath goes into the flour, which makes it move. But note that the flour goes up, and sideways, and aloft into the air. If you blow hard enough, you might see little curlicues of air lifting the flour farther than your breath alone could have, and doing so to dust well outside of where your breath actually blew.

That's the heart of this problem. We are used to air helping us blow things around. The air itself is displaced by your breath, which pushed on more air, and so on. On the Earth, your breath might blow flour that was dozens of centimeters away, even though your actual breath didn't reach that far. On the Moon, there is no air. The only dust that gets blown around by the exhaust of the rocket (which, remember, isn't nearly as strong as the HBs claim) is the dust physically touched by the exhaust, or dust hit by other bits of flying dust. In the end, only the dust directly under or a bit around the rocket was blown out by the exhaust. The rest was left where it was. Ironically, the dust around the landing site was probably a bit thicker than before, since the dust blown out would have piled up there.

Bad: The next evidence also involves pictures. In all the pictures taken by the astronauts, the shadows are not black. Objects in shadow can be seen, sometimes fairly clearly, including a plaque on the side of the lander that can be read easily. If the Sun is the only source of light on the Moon, the HBs say, and there is no air to scatter that light, shadows should be utterly black.

Good: This is one of my favorite HB claims. They give you the answer in the claim itself: "...if the Sun is the only source of light..." It isn't. Initially, I thought the Earth was bright enough to fill in the shadows, but subsequently realized that cannot be the case. The Earth is a fraction of the brightness of the Sun, not nearly enough to fill in the shadows. So then what is that other light source?

The answer is: The Moon itself. Surprise! The lunar dust has a peculiar property: it tends to reflect light back in the direction from where it came. So if you were to stand on the Moon and shine a flashlight at the surface, you would see a very bright spot where the light hits the ground, but, oddly, someone standing a bit to the side would hardly see it at all. The light is preferentially reflected back toward the flashlight (and therefore you), and not the person on the side.

Now think about the sunlight. Let's say the sun is off to the right in a picture. It is illuminating the right side of the lander, and the left is in shadow. However, the sunlight falling beyond the lander on the left is being reflected back toward the Sun. That light hits the surface and reflects to the right and up, directly onto the shadowed part of the lander. In other words, the lunar surface is so bright that it easily lights up the shadows of vertical surfaces.

Bad: Another argument by the HBs deals with shadows. Several photos from the Moon are shown where objects on the lunar landscape have long shadows. If the Sun were the only light source, the program claims, the shadows should be parallel. The shadows are not parallel, and therefore the images are fake.

Good: This is an interesting claim on the part