Do a majority of people believe the moon landings were faked?

Question

A recent breakfast TV slot on the UK's ITV pitted a cosmologist against a believer that the Apollo moon landings were faked.

I don't think the cosmologist did a good job of showing what sorts of evidence we have today that this is nonsense (to be fair it can be hard to oppose madcap conspiracy theories). For actual evidence this site has a good summary.

The programme conducted a live poll that showed the majority of viewers bothering to respond agreed with the conspiracy theorist. This is clearly one of those useless polls subject to ridiculous levels of response bias and, as such, worthless.

But the show also claimed that proper polls showed similar results:

But despite the live view of this remarkable human achievement, many non believers do exist: a survey found that a staggering 52% of Brits think the Moon landings from 1969-72 were faked, with an astonishing 73% of 25-34 year olds thinking it was all a hoax.

No references are given. Was this a quality poll done by a respected polling firm with a sensible question and properly randomised methods? Do other high quality polls exist showing that Apollo deniers are now in a majority? Are we doomed to suffer a new age of unreason?

Answer 1

In the US, Moon-landing deniers were at:

• 6% in 1995, a Time/CNN poll, reported on by Gallup in 1999.
• 6% in 1999, a Gallup poll, also reported on by Gallup.
• 7% in 2013, a Public Policy Polling poll, (reported by LiveScience without technical details).

This proportion seems steady along the years.

In the UK, however, in 2009, Engineering & Technology Magazine reported:

One in four of the British people don’t believe in the Apollo 11 Moon landing, according to a new survey for E&T.

They gave no further details into the methodology.

Conclusion

Because the UK and US share similar media cultures, I doubt the methodology of the poll from Atomik that reported the figure of 52% of moon-landing-deniers in UK in 2016.

Answer 2

No references are given.

The reference should be this 19 July 2016 Mirror article:

Despite being televised live in 1969, over half (52%) of adults believe that the Apollo 11 moon landing was a hoax.

The survey quizzed more than 1003 UK adults aged 18+ in partnership with Atomik Research.

Those aged 25-34 are the most sceptical, with 73% believing we didn’t land on the moon, compared to 38% of those aged 55+, who were actually alive for the event.

The article does not disclose any further details about methodology.

There was a May 2018 Russian survey that details more methodology. 2000 Russians age 18 and over were surveyed by random telephoning of land and mobile lines.

24% agreed with the statement "Американские астронавты в прошлом веке совершили высадку на Луну" [American astronauts in the last century made a landing on the moon.]

57% agreed with "Никакой высадки людей на Луну не было. В 1969 году Правительство США фальсифицировало документальные материалы экспедиции на Луну" [No people landed on the moon. In 1969, the US Government falsified the documentary materials of the expedition to the moon.]

and 19% said "Затрудняюсь ответить" [difficult to answer]

The Russia poll seems to divide the population into levels of truthfulness, with only 46% of the truthful people thinking no people landed on the moon, but it would be better if someone fluent in Russian explained this.