Moon Landing Hoax?

While watching a recent National Geographic Channel special about conspiracy theories that the Apollo moon landings were faked, I was struck by two things: First, there was the young man who had devoted his life to debunking said theories. To prove that the moon photos could not have been faked (where are the stars? why aren't the shadows parallel?), he proceeded to do just exactly that—fake them. In the desert, he staged a fake moon landing, taking pictures of a man in a spacesuit. Putting aside the fact that his pictures were taken on the surface of the Earth, not the Moon—thereby making it a dubious comparison at best—the photos he produced looked remarkably similar to the Apollo photos, inadvertently proving how easily the fraud could have been pulled off.
Second, while the debunkers were surprisingly straightforward and lacking the snotty arrogance one usually sees when dealing with those who parrot the government line, it was inevitable that one of the debunkers finally got around to calling the conspiracy theorists "cultural vandals" (you just knew name-calling was eventually going to enter this debate). The idea, of course, is that only those who hate their country would dare question the statements and actions of its government. However, after Pear Harbor, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, the KAL 007 cover-up, the POW/MIA cover-up, 9/11 and any other government misdeed or cover-up, you'll forgive some of us if we aren't so easily convinced anymore.
For the record, I believe we did land on the Moon. What we found there, however, is a discussion for another day . . .