"Because China and the United States took the images in the same region, it's natural the two pictures look alike," Ouyang told a news agency on Monday. And as if to shoot down any remaining element of doubt, he went on to point out differences between the two images, namely the appearance of new craters in the Chinese one.
It's all very reminiscent of the conspiracy theories that surrounded Neil Armstrong's famous lunar landing in 1969. At the time people pointed out that an absence of stars in the background and the apparent flapping of the US flag (where there was supposed to be no wind) all suggested a very elaborate hoax.
If people can believe that the lunar landings were faked, then surely it would be child's play to fake a few photos of the moon. A ground-based or Earth-orbiting telescope could take detailed shots of the moon's surface, or if you wanted to make it more believable, then just dig up some old archive images of the far side of the moon taken by US or Russian probes - and add a few craters in Photoshop.
But faking a whole mission is not that easy, says Mike Hapgood, a space scientist at Rutherford Appleton Laboratories in Didcot, Oxfordshire: "The risk of getting caught is enormous." There are so many ways to track objects in space, particularly for US agencies such as Nasa and Norad.
However, if they did, they certainly didn't come charging to China's rescue by confirming the mission. According to Tim Fenton, spokesman for RAF Fylingdales, which tracks satellites and space junk in the Earth's orbit, China did indeed launch a probe into deep space in the general direction of the moon. Unfortunately, he says, the inability of Fylingdales to see beyond an altitude of 3,000 miles means that they can't confirm that it reached its destination.