Whether the footage is real is the least interesting question about the Moon. This newspaper asks what is up there now, who is paying for it, and why Mercury has none.
Start at the top. This is the order the desk would hand these to someone who has never read the paper — not the order they ran.
Every lunar-surface magazine has a logged aperture and shutter speed. We computed the faintest object each frame could have registered. Seven exposures are long enough that a star should be there. None of the seven has one.
The withdrawal slips for Aisle 14 account for all 45,880 reels received. One slip empties the bays where the register puts the tracking-network series and sends them to a satellite programme two buildings away, on a form adopted for ordering pencils.
Kicked regolith leaves the boot in a clean parabola and lands. It cannot billow, because there is no air to billow in. We hired an effects supervisor to reproduce ninety seconds of it with 1969 tools. Her costing has one line.
A retired engineer spent nine years cataloguing every long-period event in the public lunar archive. We pulled forty entries at random. Four were wrong, and he corrected them while we watched, and asked us to print that.
A body captured into Earth orbit for eleven months returned a spectrum matching titanium-dioxide paint over aluminium. Two independent back-integrations put it beside Earth in November 1969. Neither team will call it certain: 89 per cent, and 76.
She signed out 2,196 allocations in thirty-one years and never published the one that mattered: a 0.4-gram metallic inclusion, layered and drawn, which three laboratories now agree was worked cold rather than cast or melted.
The processing contract lapsed eleven days before the network did, so the last 168 hours went to tape and stayed there. We paid a seismologist who was not told what the tapes were to read them. Nine long-period events came back.
Three receiving stations outside the American network recorded the voice downlink themselves in July 1969. We have two of the three sets and measured 611 exchanges. The round-trip delay is there throughout, and it tracks the range.
Our correspondent watched a graduate student range the Hadley array and count what came back. The nine returns fix the distance to eleven millimetres. Forty minutes later a Soviet rover's reflector answered just as well.
We test what you believe and print the result either way. These are the claims on this beat that did not survive the test — printed on the same page as the ones that did.
None of the three had been told what the trajectory was for. Their answers land within 0.6 millisieverts of each other. A sweep of 900 assumption sets, published entire, produced no configuration that endangers a crew.