Quote Originally Posted by udsuna
Because, they felt like they HAD to land before the end of that decade. To mainain the credibility of a (granted, now dead) president. Not to mention make sure they do it before the Russians. That's your motive, the cold war, a motive that sparked espionage suicide missions (espionage has only one punishment- execution). And the means... well, that's obvious. Opportunity- this was their LAST reasonably safe chance.
As has been said earlier... why wouldn't the Russians call the US out on it, if the race to the moon was so important that the US would go to such lengths to fake the landing?

But, I digress, the point is that, with our technology, any observatory should EASILY see the lunar landing sites. We can look at most of the others. See the lander base and all. But not that first.
Could you provide an example of a website with photos of the other sites? Are your sources referring to individual missions, or to the programme as a whole?

But the first... that's where I am suspicious. I mean, seriously, why can't we just turn a telescope over there? We have satalites that can read a license plate. We should be able to see the footprints left behind.
The spy satellites which are rumoured to be so accurate are all in very low orbits, part of the reason they can see comparatively small things is because they are quite close, relatively speaking. Besides which, conspiracy theorists often have a habit of disbelieving evidence opposing their view. Even if NASA did aim a ground-based telescope at the landing site and took photos of it, I think many of the people concerned would continue to believe the landing was faked anyway. After all, they didn't believe any of the other photos or video NASA took, did they?