One giant leap for lunar skeptics

[Guest guest]

<h3>One giant leap for lunar skeptics</h3>

 

<h4>As many as 20 percent of Americans believe that the moon landings were faked.</h4>

 

Michael Cabbage | Sentinel Space Editor

 

Posted July 10, 2001

 

CAPE CANAVERAL --

 

As cosmic conspiracies go, this one has it all. Government lies and treachery. Murdered astronauts. Global domination by a one-world cabal.

 

Move over, grassy knoll and Area 51. The myth that America’s lunar landings were faked by the U.S. government is booming -- and not just among X-Files addicts. Millions of Americans, as many as 1 in 5 according to some estimates, now suspect Neil Armstrong took his one small step inside a television studio in the Nevada desert.

 

While most Americans still snicker at such a scenario, not everyone is laughing. NASA has been forced to officially deny that Apollo was a fraud. Teachers are facing increasingly cynical students. And hundreds of Apollo veterans are being branded as liars and phonies for their role in one of humankind’s defining moments.

 

Books and videos detailing the conspiracy "evidence" are growing in number -- and sales -- almost daily. Internet sites are popping up everywhere. And now, television is helping win converts by the millions.

 

An hourlong primetime special called Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? aired Feb. 15 and March 19 on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Network. The show, an almost unchallenged soapbox for conspiracy theorists, comes on the heels of other Fox investigative triumphs such as Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?

 

Conspiracy Theory recently was replayed in Britain. A similar program is making the rounds in France.

 

The conspiracy claims go something like this: TV broadcasts of the Apollo missions were filmed at a secret military base by (take your pick) Disney or Stanley Kubrick. The lunar photos were faked. The moon rocks were faked. The astronauts are lying or brainwashed. The 1967 Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts was a triple murder to keep commander Gus Grissom from talking. The Soviets never blew the whistle on the U.S. moon scam because they were faking their space missions too.

 

"This conspiracy theory has everything going for it," said Phil Plait, an astronomer at California’s Sonoma State University who takes on Apollo doubters at www.badastronomy.com. "You’ve got big, evil government. You’ve got lots of money. And you’ve got a way of distorting complicated science and physics so that you can make claims sound plausible on the surface that in reality are just so much hot air."

 

Conspiracy epidemic

 

As Apollo 11 nears its 32nd anniversary later this month, many who worked on the program are livid that their lives’ work is grist for the conspiracy mill.

 

Buzz Aldrin, Armstrong’s Apollo 11 crewmate and the second man to walk on the moon, recently was besieged at a teachers conference in St. Louis after the Fox special aired. Teachers were stunned that students had begun earnestly questioning whether the space program was all a big lie.

 

"The dismay of the teachers really prompted me to give this some thought," said Aldrin, who has been reluctant to discuss the hoax claims. "There’s no point in getting angry with people who are following natural pursuits like profit and ratings. I can’t get angry or laugh at it. I feel regret.

 

"What I don’t want to do is give them attention and create a lot of indignant responses from those of us who went to the moon," he added. "The more we call attention to this, the more we play into their hands."

 

That attention appears to have had an impact already. A Gallup Poll taken July 20, 1999 to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Apollo 11’s lunar landing found 89 percent of Americans were convinced the mission was genuine. Recent estimates by Fox television and others indicate the number of believers may have shrunk another 10 percent since.

 

"The number [of doubters] is clearly growing," said Howard McCurdy, an American University professor of public affairs and conspiracy opponent who was an adviser to the Fox show. "We haven’t been back in nearly 30 years, so the reality is disappearing."

 

McCurdy and others argue the Lunargate myth is a small part of a much larger national conspiracy epidemic: The Holocaust never happened. The government is hiding aliens at Area 51. The CIA killed President Kennedy.

 

The claims are rooted in an increasingly paranoid mistrust of Washington.

 

"It’s a social phenomenon in the United States and this is a byproduct of it," McCurdy said. "If the government says we went to the moon, they must be lying."

 

Risky business

 

The founding father of the moon conspiracy and star of the Fox program is 80-year-old Bill Kaysing, who spent seven years as a technical writer for aerospace contractor Rocketdyne. He’s considered the most credible of the conspiracy mongers.

 

Kaysing began the movement in 1975 with his self-published book We Never Went to the Moon. His other work includes Never Pay Income Taxes Again and contributions to supermarket tabloids. He claims to have conceived the movie Capricorn One, in which a mission to Mars is faked. The screen credits say otherwise.

 

Kaysing contends NASA panicked after President Kennedy pledged America would land astronauts on the moon before 1970. The result, he says, was faked lunar telecasts, bogus photos and manufactured moon rocks. Cold War adversaries in Moscow never exposed the fraud because the Soviet Union was in on it too.

 

"They were all operating under the direct orders of the people who control the world," Kaysing said. "Russia would have no reason to blow the whistle on us because we refused to blow the whistle on them. Much of what Russia claims to have accomplished was also faked."

 

One of Kaysing’s most sensational claims is that NASA has been knocking off astronauts for more than three decades to prevent them from spilling the beans. It started with the Apollo 1 astronauts. Later, he says, schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe and her six crewmates aboard the shuttle Challenger were murdered too.

 

"That sounds a little bit far out," Kaysing concedes. "But who knows? When NASA and the corporate state get together, what they’re protecting is the integrity and money-making capability of U.S. industry."

 

In 1996, Kaysing sued Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell for libel after Lovell called him "wacky" in a California newspaper. Kaysing lost. In the same story, Kaysing called Lovell "a sort of comic Manchurian candidate . . . brainwashed, hypnotized, programmed or whatever to present this spurious story."

 

Being a conspiracy theorist apparently isn’t without risks. Kaysing claims numerous attempts have been made on his life. Once, he insists, a radio transmitter was napalmed during his 1975 appearance on a talk show in San Jose, Calif.

 

"Of course, that’s been covered up," Kaysing says.

 

Strange bedfellows

 

 

Kaysing’s work has been an inspiration to others.

 

One of the Internet’s best-selling videos is A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Moon by Nashville resident Bart Sibrel. He claims to have discovered 31-year-old unedited Apollo 11 footage proving Neil Armstrong falsified some of the mission’s photography. For $29.95 plus shipping and handling, Sibrel will share that evidence with you. Major news organizations have been slow to follow up on his scoop.

 

New Jersey carpenter and self-taught physicist Ralph Rene released a 206-page book in 1992 titled NASA Mooned America! His work focuses on "clues" that suggest the lunar photos are bogus. Rene claims intense radiation on the way to the moon would have killed the "astro nots." He’s also convinced NASA fakery didn’t start with Apollo.

 

"It started in the Gemini missions for sure," Rene says. "The first missions, the Mercury missions, they were all done just as they said they were."

 

Rene has since published a book called The Last Skeptic of Science, which concludes Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein knew virtually nothing about physics.

 

"I’ve got 200 footnotes in that book," Rene said. "No one wants to believe that Newton was a lying son of a . . . "

 

The conspiracy claims have made for strange bedfellows. One of the harshest debunkers is well-known extraterrestrial researcher Richard Hoagland. His colorful resume includes assertions that a rock formation resembling a face on Mars is evidence of a past civilization and the 1995 Bosnian peace talks were held at Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base so negotiators could view alien remains there.

 

According to Hoagland, the moon landings must be real. Why? His detailed analysis of Apollo photos detected ruins of giant crystal structures built on the moon by aliens.

 

"He finds himself in the rather delicate position of having to defend NASA for the moon missions while having to attack NASA for suppressing the fact that space aliens lived there," Plait said, laughing. "When I found that out, my irony gland was basically squeezed dry."

 

Humans will likely have to return to the moon before doubters are convinced. Even then, there will always be skeptics out to make a buck.

 

Maybe Rene had it right after all -- although in a way he never intended:

 

"A fool will keep on believing. A wiser man will check the evidence and see who has the preponderance."

 

Michael Cabbage can be reached at mcabbage@orlandosentinel.com or 321-639-0522.

 

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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon

 

 

 

 

[This message has been edited by rand0M aXiS (edited 07-11-2001).]