Apollo 11 landed on the moon over 40 years ago. Yet many people still claim -- some quite stridently -- that it never happened. They insist that it was all a hoax.
These people go by numerous terms: conspiracy theorist; Apollo hoax theorist; hoax believer, etc. I have coined the admittedly pejorative terms "hoaxhead" and "hoax monger", but they don't seem to have caught on. A few use the term "hoaxtard", but that sounds like a word used by seventh graders. "Conspiracy theorist" is accurate but too general. "Hoax believer" (HB) is a somewhat ambiguous term (does one believe in the hoax, or that it was a hoax?) but it seems to be the most common term so that's the one I'll use.
The sheer inanity of the "logic" behind their arguments is difficult to appreciate. It begins with their basic structure. They resemble in one very important way those made by creationists and many other pseudo-scientists: their "evidence" is entirely negative. The so-called "arguments for creationism" (or intelligent design) consist entirely of attacks on perceived weaknesses in the theory of evolution. Similarly, no HB has ever produced any affirmative evidence from someone who directly planned or perpetrated the alleged hoax. They don't even seem to try. They merely point to so-called "anomalies" in the official record (particularly photographs) that, they say, prove no landing ever happened.
Like the creationists, the HBs attempt to create a false dichotomy: if even a small part of the standard theory or record is wrong, then all of it must be wrong. They hope to win purely by default.
The Apollo program attracted an intense public following, and this made it the topic of many books, magazines and films by non-NASA authors. As an agency of the US federal government, NASA's materials are in the public domain, encouraging their use in derived works by outside parties. Two of the more remarkable third-party projects on the Apollo program are the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal and Apollo Flight Journal. These started as personal projects by highly motivated individuals, attracted a following and turned into collaborative works. Although NASA does not control the editorial content of these works, they now sponsor their distribution on the Internet. They also provided very high quality digital scans of the original 70mm, 35mm and 16mm photographic images taken during the Apollo missions.
The Apollo record even includes certain documents that were originally classified CONFIDENTIAL, including transcripts of private crew conversations, medical data, and rocket performance reports. These all seem to have been declassified without any redactions.
The Apollo project is thus one of the most thoroughly documented events in history. The extensive record establishes the reality of the Apollo program beyond reasonable doubt, but ironically it fuels the Hoax Believers' purely negative strategy of attacking the record instead of presenting affirmative evidence for their case.
HBs are especially fond of the Apollo image archive. They try mightily to prove that this or that Apollo picture was faked or at least doctored. So far, they have succeeded only in finding artifacts accidentally added during scanning or copying and intentional changes to correct composition or exposure errors in the original picture.  These changes invariably disappear or are readily explained by merely going back to the originals. But in true HB fashion they claim this proves someone is trying to cover up the evidence! One simply can't win with them. In any event, the HBs have never demonstrated an actual case of anyone within NASA modifying an Apollo picture with an intent to deceive. However, this cannot be said about the HBs.
Yet even were the HBs to succeed in showing that some particular picture was created or modified with an intent to deceive, that's as far as it would go. That still wouldn't prove that no one ever landed on the moon. 
They avoid this at all costs because the HBs simply don't have such a story. Just as there are "young earth" creationists and "old earth" creationists, 