Conspiracy Therapy: The Moon landings

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin stands beside the United States flag on the moon, July 20, 1969. Or does he...
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin stands beside the United States flag on the moon, July 20, 1969. Or does he? PHOTO: NASA
Alternative fact specialist Peter Dowden investigates Nasa's Moon landings.

Conspiracy: The Moon landings were faked by Nasa
Disputed event:  The Apollo crewed landings of 1969 to 1972
First allegations:  1971 movie Diamonds are Forever depicted James Bond, played by Sean Connery, evading baddies by running through a lunar landscape and stealing a moon buggy as a getaway car. A 1976 book had more specific hoax claims.
And they would have got away with it too: The astronauts had to use a stick to hold their flag out straight. If it were really on the moon, that star-spangled banner would yet wave. Solar wind, right?

 

Americans just love choosing stuff, and are always thanking each other for choosing choices.

Pro-choicer John F. Kennedy declared in 1962 ‘‘We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things — not because they are easy, but because they are hard’.’

The cosmonauts of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, on the other hand, had no choices. They went into space because they had to. Soviet sci-fi films were so clunky in their special effects that the USSR’s cosmonauts didn’t have a hope of faking anything. Then again, their space efforts were done on a meagre budget; instead of a $23 million toilet, they used a device that looked like a steampunk ice cream scoop on a vacuum cleaner hose.

Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick is accused of having produced much of the footage for Apollos 11 and 12, presumably because he had just directed 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is partly set on the moon and featured advanced special effects.

This is an example of conspiracy theorists getting very near the truth: Kubrick’s film was so expensive to make, $10 million in 1968 (equal to $300 trillion in 2023) that he regretted not making it in actual space to make it cheaper. Choreographing those gorillas cost him a fortune in bananas.

The 1976 book We Never Went to the Moon: America's thirty-billion dollar swindle, by Bill Kaysing, really set off the conspiracy theory. He was a former US Navy officer with a bachelor of arts in English, so clearly an unassailable authority on the matter.

Lunar-landings scepticism in America fluctuates from 5% to 20%, with Apollo-incredulous Russians at 28%. Cuban school teachers were propagating the faked-landings theory in 2003.