The phantom story of the top-secret Apollo 20 mission...
If the theory of aliens silently watching Apollo 11 borders on the ridiculous, you should know that there is a fringe of UFO conspiracy theorists that has decided to go far beyond the stratosphere of logic, landing in the pure, unspoiled realm of fantasy archaeology. We are talking about the infamous, grotesque legend of Apollo 20. According to this elaborate conspiracy theory, born and thriving in the internet age thanks to skillfully faked viral videos, NASA did not cancel the last three missions of the program because of mundane budget cuts at all. On the contrary, it supposedly prepared and launched Apollo 20 in secret in 1976, in a phantom secret collaboration with the Soviet Union, with a goal worthy of an Arthur C. Clarke novel: to reach the lunar south pole (or, according to other versions, the far side of the Moon) to explore the wreck of a colossal cigar-shaped alien spaceship, allegedly photographed years earlier by Apollo 15. This story, however fascinating as a Hollywood screenplay, collapses instantly as soon as you apply the most basic laws of physics, of astronomical visibility and of space ergonomics. The first insurmountable logical hurdle of this theory concerns the very nature of the launch vehicle. A Saturn V rocket is not a fighter jet that can take off stealthily in the dead of night from an isolated runway. It is a leviathan standing 110 meters tall and weighing three thousand tons, whose five F-1 engines generate, at ignition, more than 34 million newtons of thrust. A Saturn V launch produces a low-frequency shock wave recorded by seismographs hundreds of kilometers away, a deafening roar that rattles windows in three counties and a fireball visible to the naked eye from much of the northeastern Caribbean. Hiding the launch of such a controlled apocalypse from American citizens, Soviet spy satellites and thousands of professional and amateur astronomers around the globe is physically, politically and historically impossible. Moreover, the dull and boring accounting reality reminds us that the three gigantic Saturn V rockets originally intended for the Apollo 18, 19 and 20 missions never disappeared into some secret hangar for occult missions: one was modified to launch the Skylab space station in 1973, and the stages of the others are literally on public display, where tourists can visit and touch them, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Johnson Space Center in Texas and the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Alabama. You cannot secretly launch into space a rocket that is currently parked in a museum!
On this point, in an attempt to get around the awkward problem of a launch visible to half the country and beyond, some conspiracy fringes have even suggested, arguing among themselves about which ice cap, that NASA transported and launched the gigantic Saturn V in great secrecy from the North Pole or the South Pole. This fanciful geographical loophole crashes against the most basic laws of orbital mechanics. Launching a rocket to the Moon from the Earth's poles is ballistic suicide. The Earth rotates, and launching a vehicle from a base near the equator, like the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, lets you exploit the planet's rotational speed like a natural slingshot, giving the rocket a "free" eastward boost of over 1,400 km/h. At the poles, this rotational speed is zero, which would force the rocket to burn an immensely greater amount of fuel just to reach orbit. But the real obstacle, the physically insurmountable one, is orbital inclination. The Moon orbits in a plane very close to Earth's equator, tilted relative to it by about 5°. A launch from the poles would put the vehicle into a polar orbit, that is, perpendicular to the equator. To correct its course and line up with the Moon's orbital plane, the spacecraft would have to perform a "plane change" (plane change) of almost 90 degrees in space. In astrodynamic terms, such a change of trajectory requires an amount of Delta-v (change in velocity, proportional to the propellant actually consumed) so frightening and disproportionate that the tanks of three Saturn Vs combined would not be enough. The Kennedy Space Center was chosen precisely because its latitude in Florida provided the optimal mathematical compromise between the Earth's rotational boost and the ballistic alignment needed to intercept our satellite.
The phantom alien spaceship that crashed on the lunar surface millennia ago, the landing site of the top-secret Apollo 20 mission. Fake picture by Mr. Thierry Speth
The "Mona Lisa" alien recovered by the phantom Apollo 20 mission. Fake dummy by Mr. Thierry Speth
But the absolute height of unintentional comedy, the detail that turns this theory from a simple hoax into a masterpiece of the absurd, is the alleged "alien autopsy" that the astronauts themselves supposedly performed on the spot. The conspiracy videos show the alleged Apollo 20 crew inspecting and examining the body of a female alien creature (colorfully nicknamed "Mona Lisa"), recovered from the wreckage of the ancient spaceship and brought inside the Lunar Module! To understand the physical impossibility of such an operation, you only need to look at the floor plans of the LM. The LM Ascent Stage, the only pressurized and habitable part in which the astronauts lived, was a frighteningly small cabin. Its total pressurized volume was just 6.7 m³, but subtracting the space taken up by the large ascent engine cover right in the middle of the floor, the control panels and the life support systems, the actual living space for the crew was comparable to an oversized phone booth or an average broom closet. When two grown men, wearing bulky A7L pressure suits covered in abrasive lunar dust, were inside this cubicle, there was literally no physical room to turn around without bumping into each other. To sleep, the astronauts had to string two hammocks crosswise, one above the other , a few centimeters from their noses. The idea that in such a claustrophobic environment, in only 1/6 gravity, designed with weights calculated to the gram and without any table, two pilots could have dragged in a life-size extraterrestrial corpse, pulled out surgical instruments and performed a complex anatomical examination is, from an engineering and medical point of view, simply hilarious. Added to this spatial impossibility is an obvious (though evidently not to everyone) and catastrophic health consideration: dissecting an unknown extraterrestrial biological entity inside a sealed life-support cabin, without the slightest equipment for biosafety containment and isolation, would have exposed the astronauts to an absolutely lethal and uncontrollable risk of contamination by alien pathogens. Moreover, in the cramped lunar module there would not even have been room to lay the body down without triggering, cutting off or breaking the spacecraft's vital circuits, not to mention the logistical impossibility of cramming such an extra biological mass into an ascent vehicle whose propellant had been calculated to the deciliter to return to orbit only the weight of two human beings and a few dozen kilos of rocks.
The truth behind Apollo 20 is now public knowledge and has been widely documented: it is a colossal artistic hoax created in 2007 by a French sculptor and video maker named Thierry Speth. Using the pseudonym William Rutledge, Speth mixed genuine NASA archive footage with modeling-clay sculptures, fake cockpits built in his basement and some crude computer graphics, creating a "mockumentary" (fake documentary) that then slipped out of his control, becoming dogma for the most gullible conspiracy theorists. Believing in Apollo 20 today means ignoring not only the impossibility of hiding the roar of a Saturn V or the strict rules of orbital mechanics, but above all refusing to calculate the volume of a spacecraft cabin, preferring a mediocre amateur sci-fi film to the magnificent, documented and titanic engineering reality of the human exploration of the Moon.
