Apollo 20: the lost Apollo flight #shorts #history

I completely forgot about Apollo 20 until this guy yelled at me about it in a comment the other day. And oh my god, if you haven't heard this story, oh, I love it. It is so dumb. So, the story goes that on Apollo 15 in 1971, the crew saw something on the far side of the moon that looked like a ship, either an alien ship or some kind of futuristic thing that had crashed in a giant crater on the far side. So in 1976, NASA and the Soviet space program launch a joint mission to recover that alien ship. And this is theoretically the 16 millimeter onboard film from that mission. And we can see in the mission patch right here that it's a recovery mission of this downed alien ship. The best part though is that once they do successfully recover the ship and get the alien out of it, it's very much just a human with Q-tips on their face. This whole thing comes from a French artist named Terry Spefth. He created this fictional memoir of the commander of this mission, a guy named William Rutledge, and he released all the footage saying that it was an April Fool's joke. He created the hoax, but somehow this is perpetuated as like a real Apollo 20. And listen, I know critical thinking is a dying art, but I want to think critically about a couple things in here, okay? Let's first look at a comparison of flying over the moon. We've got real Apollo footage. This is the 16 mm footage. This is what the fake footage purports to be. And the faked footage on the bottom. I don't know about you guys, but one of them looks fake as all get out. Then if we start looking at details in the command module, it doesn't really look right. There's missing details. There's things that just like look close, but if you know what you're looking for, it doesn't really look right. Also, this is not what the staging looks like from a Saturn 5 because we have footage of it. Even this detail of the card identifying a new film reel is not what it actually looks like. I've seen the argument that the mission launched at night so that the rocket wouldn't be visible to people. Well, guess what? Apollo 17 also launched at night and you can't hide a 363 foot rocket. The real Apollo 20 was just a canceled lunar landing. Apollo's 18, 19, and 20 were canceled in the early 1970s. Although arguably there was an Apollo 18 mission. The Apollo half of Apollo Soyuse in 1975 was technically Apollo 18, but didn't really use that designation. That's it. It's a fun one. Wanted to share, but also please engage your critical thinking muscle and don't believe every crazy theory you read on the internet.