What are conspiracy theories?
Conspiracy theories are basically those beliefs which suggest that major events are under the influential thumbs of an elite few working in secrecy. Most of the time, conspiracy theories lack any backing by evidence and nonetheless work wonders as vehicles to mislead people into confusion and distrust. What is important is that one should learn to spot and question conspiracy theories since they factor into decision-making.
Great Moon Hoax
There have been tons of conspiracies and fake news about the Moon. One of the first hoaxes was in 1835. The “Great Moon Hoax” was a series of articles in The New York Sun claiming that a well-known astronomer had discovered life on the Moon. The articles were supposed to be humorous, but they nevertheless show how easily false information can become widespread.
Did we fake Moon?
Many theories are spread online with popular moon conspiracy videos on TikTok predominantly garnering millions of views, getting thousands of likes, but, in spite of ample evidence and scientific proof negating these beliefs, even to this day, masses of people consider that the 1969 moon landings never took place, and that mankind has not stepped, let alone one giant leap, on the lunar surface.
One Giant Lie…?
It took 400,000 Nasa employees and contractors to put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in 1969 – but only one man to spread the idea that it was all a hoax. His name was Bill Kaysing.
It began as a hunch, an intuition, before it coalesced into true conviction-the Americans lacked the technical know-how to make it to the moon (or, for that matter, to the moon and back).
Kaysing had, in his own way, been involved in the American spaceplane: employed during the years 1956-63 by Rocketdyne, a contractor for the Saturn V rocket engines. In 1976, he published the pamphlet We Never Went To The Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, which sought to substantiate his claims with grainy photocopies and ludicrous so-called “theories.”
Somehow, he managed to put forth a number of arguments that remain alive today in Hollywood movies and Fox News documentaries, in Reddit forums, and in YouTube channels.
Though there exists overwhelming evidence including 382 kilograms of moon rocks brought back from 6 missions, backing from Russia, Japan, and China, and photos taken recently by Nasa of the locations where the astronauts landed-the hoax theory has been flourishing since 1969 among 9/11 truthers, anti-vaxxers, chemtrailers, flat-Earthers, Holocaust deniers, and Sandy Hook conspiracists.
Faking the moon landings long ago ceased being a point of contention for this crowd; it is now simply a given.
Doubters include podcast kingpin Joe Rogan, YouTuber Shane Dawson, and ultimately a sociology professor in New Jersey who got exposed last year for telling his students the landings were fake.
While Kaysing was relying on photocopied samizdat to wake the world up, today conspirators have the functions of r/moonhoax as documentation to show how NASA was “so lazy” to use the same moon rover for Apollo 15, 16, and 17; or how “they have been trolling us for years”; or bring up the fact there is “one thing I can’t get my head around …”
“The truth is the internet is there for people to articulate anything really to a broader number of people than has ever been possible,” says Roger Launius, a former chief historian of Nasa. “And the truth is, Americans love conspiracy theories. Every time something big happens, somebody has a counter-explanation.”
It turns out that conspiracy theories are also sweet to the people of Britain. Last year, the daytime TV show This Morning made its way into the controversy by bringing a guest who posited that no one can walk on the moon because it is made of light.
“In the past, you saw the moon landings and there was no way to check any of it. Now, in the age of technology, a lot of young people are now investigating for themselves beyond simply accepting the information they’re given,” claimed Martin Kenny. Recently, a YouGov poll revealed that one out of six of the British populace agreed with the statement: “The moon landings were staged.”
Four percent held the view that the hoax theory was “definitely true,” 12% thought it “probably true,” with a further 9% responding with don’t knows. Moon hoaxism was more prevalent among the young: 21 % of 24- to 35-year-olds agreed that moon landings were staged compared with 13% of over-55s.
Kaysing’s Original Queries fuelling density: no stars visible in the pictures; absence of blast crater under landing module; the other is related to the manner in which shadows fall.
Those knowledgeable ones burn up much of their hours trying to explain such “anomalies” (these are, respectively, due to camera-exposure times, the way thrust works in a vacuum, and the reflective qualities of moondust). However, till his death in 2005, Kaysing kept up the claim that the whole thing was a fraud shot in a TV studio.
He told Wired in 1994, “It is well documented that NASA was often badly managed and had poor quality control. But as of 1969, we could suddenly perform manned flight upon manned flight? With complete success? It just goes against all statistical odds.”
Truly, here he was correct. By the time of the Soviet launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957 (followed by the launch of Sputnik 2, carrying the dog Laika, one month later), the US space program was practically nonexistent. NASA was only founded in 1958 and in May 1961 managed to launch Alan Shepard into space – however, when John F. Kennedy announced that the US “should commit itself to achieve the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” it sounded like a tall order.
By the mid-1960s, NASA accounted for over 4% of the US federal budget; thus far the Soviets were racking up further achievements – the first woman in space in 1963, the first extravehicular activity or spacewalk in 1965; meanwhile, the USA continued to have serious set-backs, including the Apollo 1 fire that killed all three astronauts on the launch pad.
If you’ve been to the Science Museum in London, you’ll know the lunar module was essentially made out of tinfoil. Apollo 8 had orbited the moon in 1968, but, as Armstrong said, correcting course and landing on the moon was “far and away the most complex part of the flight”.
He gave walking on the surface 1 out of 10 for difficulty (notwithstanding the trouble he had with the TV cable wraparound around his feet) “But I thought the lunar descent was probably a 13”.
Until you consider the difficulty of maintaining the ruse with the full support of the world for 50 years, and have no NASA employee slip up at any point during that time. Then you could imagine that 2019 special effects were available to NASA in 1969, and not one of the 600 million TV viewers saw anything wrong.
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a fairly good indication of what Hollywood special effects could muster back then – and those were pretty shonky. It was genuinely easier to film on location.
Passing by the Sunday Sport front page headline “World war two bomber found on moon” from 1988, the moon-hoax theory entered the 21st century in 2001 when Fox aired a documentary called Did We Land on the Moon? Hosted by X-Files actor Mitch Pileggi, it rehashed Kaysing’s arguments for a new audience.
Launius, who was working at NASA at the time, recalls much heads-banging against consoles. “For many years, we simply ignored these things. They did not deserve to be given a hearing. But when Fox News put out that so-called documentary, saying point-blank, ‘We haven’t landed on the moon’ – that raised the ante. We started to get all sorts of questions.”
Almost all the reports were from parents and teachers, not from conspiracy theorists. “People were saying: ‘My kid saw this, how do I respond?’ So, with some trepidation, Nasa put up a webpage and sent out some materials to teachers.”
One of the controversial things discussed in the Fox News documentary concerned a poll that claimed some 20% of Americans believed the moon landing was faked. Launius says that polls tend to put that number around 4% or 5%, but in his estimation, the wording of question can also be manipulated into achieving flashier results.
“Every time there’s a hearing in a serious periodical-even an offhand comment in a movie-it just seeds this stuff.” He cites a scene in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) in which a schoolteacher tells that character, played by Matthew McConaughey, that the moon landings were hoaxes in order to win the propaganda war against the Soviet Union. “It’s a throwaway in the film. But it really did churn up a big response.”
Oliver Morton, author of The Moon: A History for the Future, thinks the hoax has proved resilient not so much because it is believable but because for a few it makes sense. For some, a lot of hard proof existed for the implausible and impossible (Apollo 11), but a lot of public relations power was lacked by those publicly claiming to be working for the impossible moon hoax. “The point of Apollo was to show how powerful the American government was in terms of actually doing things.
The point of the moon-hoax theory is to show how powerful the American government was in terms of making people believe things that weren’t true.” But the hoax narrative could legitimately exert its power only once the Apollo program had somewhere to be discredited-it’s really a little bit ironic that there were simply no more Apollo missions slated after the end of 1972. “As the American mind turns back to paranoia in the 1970s, it becomes more pleasing to believe in this,” he says.
James Bond surely must bear some of the blame. Sean Connery stormed into Nasa with the aegis of a Las Vegas casino in Diamonds Are Forever (1971). Chasing after him was an escapade across a film set made to look like the moon concerned with earthbound astronauts. But here, it was more like a visual joke just to have justification for a moon buggy chase across Nevada.
By the time of Peter Hyams’ Kaysingian conspiracy thriller Capricorn One (1978), the notion that the government was pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes was taken much less lightly. It dealt with the Mars project gone wrong, wherein the authorities choose to fake the mission and kill the astronauts with one being played by OJ Simpson in order not to allow them to tell the truth. By the post-Watergate period, the notion that the government could perpetrate such a big lie was far more believable.
Apollo marked a very storied crossroads between the optimism of the ’60s and the disillusionments of the ’70s. The saying became very common, “We can put a man on the moon so why can’t we do X?” As Morton says, “Yes, the government can set itself an extraordinary goal and go on to achieve it, but that doesn’t mean it can win the war in Vietnam, or clean up the inner cities, or cure cancer or any of the things that Americans might have actually wanted more.”
The belief that the government is not that powerful but acts out a play to act as if it is really powerful can connect to how that attitude feeds into moon hoax.
Moon-hoax theories tend to be about what didn’t happen rather than what did. Conspiracists are divided on whether the earlier Apollo, Mercury, Gemini and Atlas missions were also fakes, whether Laika or Yuri Gagarin made it into space, and what Kubrick’s role was. But while anger has motivated these first-generation lunar conspiracists, they are more likely to be engaged with boredom these days. The line between conspiracy and entertainment is really blurred.
Still, while it’s vexing for Aldrin and others involved – he resulted in punching moon conspiracist Bart Sibrel in 2002- the idea is harmless in that sense. One would consider it less harmful than misinformation about vaccinations or mass murders. Morton points out that it will be one of the few conspiracy theories not through the lens of Jewry.
It also does not appear to be one of those theories into which Donald Trump, consummate product of news-as-entertainment, subscribes. Clearly, the dynamics of the modern internet have not helped: look up Apollo videos on YouTube and sooner or later your autoplay queue fills up with moon-hoax documentaries.
Yet, there isn’t much evidence showing how moon conspiracies have practically become famous as the misleading tools like anti-vaxxing propagandas by Russian dissinformation agents.
Then again, the USSR did have the means to unmask the Americans back at that time; it bugged the serves. “We were there at Soviet military base 32103,” the Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov recently recalled. “I swear to God we sat there with our fingers crossed. We hoped the guys would make it. We wanted this to happen. We knew those who were on board and they knew us, too.”
The hoax theory keeps increasingly becoming a “one of the things that happens as time recedes and these events are lost,” mourns Launius: “We’ve seen it with the second world war and the Holocaust. A lot of witnesses are moving-on from the scene, making it easy for people to deny that it took place. Who’d be left to counteract things that were untrue? Mythologies emerge and become dominant theme.”
Perhaps the hardest thing to believe about is that which humans could perhaps have done with transcendent achievement – something which even brought out the best in Nixon. “Because of what you have done, the heavens have become part of man’s world,” he said during his telephone call to Aldrin and Armstrong on the moon. “And as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to Earth.”
These days, we generally have less faith in ourselves-it’s funny how most moon conspirators take everything as a joke, or a rabbit hole to drop into one day.
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