Some things to consider:
- The Soviet Union didn't contest the landings despite the fact that they would have loved to humiliate their arch enemy. Soviet radio astronomers could confirm that to their chagrin the transmission was indeed coming from the moon.
- Amateur radio operators (private citizens) were able to independently check it as well:
www.arrl.org/eavesdropping-on-apollo-11Other lines of evidence (both direct and indirect):
- Lunar rock brought back and studied by geologists worldwide (evidence doesn't get more tangible than that)
- primary photographic evidence (thousands of Hasselblad EL photographs, predating CGI and photoshop)
- primary video evidence (featuring dust that falls at one sixth of Earth's gravity as expected*)
- secondary photographic evidence from LRO taking pictures of the Apollo 11 landing site from lunar orbit in 2012
- retroreflectors left on the lunar surface (used to this day for lunar laser ranging)
- testimony of thousands of people who worked on the Apollo project, engineers, human calculators, mathematicians, private contractors.
All of this evidence is publicly available and has been studied by scientists from all over the world for the last 50 years (geologists have learnt a lot about the joint origin of Earth and Moon from the lunar samples for example). Look it all up yourself if you don't believe me. Or if you're simply intrigued. Because science IS interesting!
*There's even a cute paper about this very topic, it's called:
Hsiang-Wen Hsu, Mihály Horányi; Ballistic motion of dust particles in the Lunar Roving Vehicle dust trails. Am. J. Phys. 1 May 2012; 80 (5): 452–456.
doi.org/10.1119/1.3699957 (you can download it for free from another website without a paywall)
The summary reads:
> We have analyzed the motion of the dust clouds lofted by the Lunar Roving Vehicle of the Apollo 16 mission. Adopting a simple 2D geometry, we found that the dust followed ballistic trajectories under the influence of the lunar gravity. The gravitational constant of the moon derived from the dust trajectory is within 10% of the expected value. The images used in our analysis are available online for use as supplementary material in physics education.
And since this is newtonian mechanics, everybody can in principle check at home whether or not the laws of motion used to derive this result hold up. Newton did it in 1687. And everybody with a high-school level of education (and some determination to get into it) can independently redo the analysis these authors did with the public video footage of the lunar rover. Projectile motion and a basic understanding of atmospheric drag (ruling out the possibility that this footage was shot in an atmosphere because you would otherwise be able to see that deceleration of dust particles in the x-direction) are the only bits of physics you really need to understand for this paper.
