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Russian Official Calls for an Investigation into Apollo Moon Landings
by Aamna Mohdin, IFL Science:
A Russian official has called for an investigation into the validity of U.S. missions to the moon. Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for Russia’s Investigative Committee, suggests an international probe should be launched into the U.S. moon landings between 1969 and 1972 to provide ‘new insights’.
In a newspaper column for national daily Izvestia, which was translated by the Moscow Times, Markin doesn’t deny the U.S. landed on the moon, but wants an inquiry into the missing original 1969 Apollo 11 mission footage, as well as the lunar rocks, which the U.S. collected over several missions to the moon.
“We are not contending that they did not fly [to the moon], and simply made a film about it. But all of these scientific — or perhaps cultural — artifacts are part of the legacy of humanity, and their disappearance without a trace is our common loss. An investigation will reveal what happened,” Markin wrote, according to the Moscow Times translation.
Conspiracy theories that argue Apollo 11 moon landings were faked have been thoroughly debunked. Rick Noack, from the Washington Post, points out that NASA previously admitted to not only erasing the original footage, but 200,000 other tapes as well. All is not lost, however, as NASA has been able restore copies of the landing by using other sources, including CBS footage. NASA suggests this footage is of better quality than the original.
