Author: Caleb Xiang
Ever since I’ve learned about the moon landing, I’ve been a skeptic. How is it
even possible that you could land a man (or woman) on the moon that’s so far away? I
mean, I can’t even walk to the grocery store without burning most of my calories!
Despite the many, many researches on the moon landing, I’m still wary of NASA and
their so-called moon landing. To find the truth about the moon landing, I went to the
internet. The place where conspiracies are born, and the best place to find cat memes.
The first thing I came upon was a book called We Never Went to the Moon:
America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, by a former US Navy officer named Bill Kaysing.
Published in 1976, the book claims that “the chance of a successful crewed landing on
the moon was calculated to be 0.0017%” and that despite the close monitoring by the
USSR, faking the moon landing would have been much easier that to really go there.
Kaysing’s book was the first ever theory to ever doubt whether or not the moon landing
was really real. I mean, let’s be honest here. Can we really believe what the government
and NASA feeds us? For all I know, the earth could be flat!
Speaking of flat earths, in 1980, the Flat Earth Society accused NASA of faking
the landings. They argued that they were “staged by Hollywood with Walt Disney
sponsorship, based on a script by Arthur C. Clarke and Directed by Stanley Kubrick.”
Folklorist Linda Dégh’s observed that a spacecraft in the movie Capricorn One, which
showed a fake journey to mars, looked identical to the Apollo craft. This observation
might have made the hoax theory much more popular during the post-Vietnam War era.
But why would NASA want to fake the moon landings anyways? There are many
theories of why NASA would fake the moon landing. But the main reason many people
think why NASA would fake the moon landing is because of the Space Race.
Landing on the moon was seen as a national and technological accomplishment
that would place the US at the top. However, going to the moon would be risky and
expensive, as well as time consuming. As John F. Kennedy said in his famous 1962
speech, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do all the other things, not
because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
However, in his book Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait says that “the Soviets –
“with their own competing Moon program, an extensive intelligence network and a
formidable scientific community able to analyze NASA data – would have 'cried foul' if
the United States tried to fake a Moon landing, especially since their own program had
failed. Proving a hoax would have been a huge propaganda win for the Soviet.” In fact,
the USSR had been sending unmanned spacecraft to the moon since 1959. The Soviet
Union even tracked the Apollo missions at the Space Transmissions Corps, which was
“fully equipped with the latest intelligence-gathering and surveillance equipment.” There
is even evidence to suggest that the Soviet Moon program slowed after the Apollo
landings showing that indeed the US landed on the Moon.
During Penn & Teller: Bull crap! (had to use a synonym) season 3 episode 3, Penn explored the crazy conspiracies people believed in, and one of the conspiracies was the moon hoax. Penn noted that with the number of people involved and with the Watergate scandal, someone would have revealed the hoax. According to James Longuski, the conspiracy would have been impossible because of the massive size of the Apollo project. There was a total of 400,000 people involved in the Apollo project. With that many people to keep track of, how could NASA even hide the hoax? As it turns out, the moon landing was not fake. However, there are plenty of conspiracies out there, many seem logical, others are beyond comprehension. Some of these even may be entertaining to read cause not all conspiracies are balderdash. In those theories lie creative thinking lying outside the box. But we can’t always let these go to our head. As Roger Launius, the former chief historian of NASA, once said, “The reality is, the internet has made it possible for people to say whatever … they like … And the truth is, Americans love conspiracy theories. Every time something big happens, somebody has a counter-explanation.” Sources : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theories Kaysing, Bill (2002) [First published 1976]. We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/apollo-11-moon-landing-conspiracy-theories- endured-debunked/story?id=64339363 Penn & Teller: Bullshit! Season 3 ep 3 (aired 9 may 2005) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon https://semipartisansam.com/2012/03/09/we-choose-to-go-to-the-moon/ https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190617-apollo-in-50-numbers-the-workers https://www.space.com/apollo-11-moon-landing-hoax-believers.html
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