Conspiracy Theories Live On 50 Years After Lunar Landing. Fifty years after the Apollo 11 lunar landing, the moon-hoax theory lives on.
Polls show about 5% or 6% of the public believes the landing was faked, former NASA chief historian Roger Launius told The Washington Post.
The conspiracy theory took off when Bill Kaysing, a former technical writer, published a book in 1976 titled “We Never Went to the Moon.” It became a “foundational text” in the moon-hoax mythology, the Post reported.
A key feature of the moon-hoax idea is that photographs taken by the Apollo astronauts don’t look right: no stars and no crater under the moon lander.
NASA responded to the book and film by putting out a statement citing the moon rocks as incontrovertible evidence, the Post reported.
“The rocks and particles, still under study by scientists worldwide, were clearly formed in an atmosphere lacking oxygen and water and they show major chemical differences from any previously known Earth rocks,” NASA’s statement argued.
Sibrel, brandishing a Bible and asking Aldrin to swear on it, said, “You’re the one who said you walked on the moon when you didn’t. . . . You’re a coward and a liar and a thief.”
Aldrin decked him, the Post reported.
The moon-hoax idea is closely related to “flat Earth” theory, which has gained adherents in recent years thanks to social media and viral videos, the Post reported.
When Asheley Landrum, a psychologist at Texas Tech University, attended the first Flat Earth International Conference near Raleigh, N.C., in 2017, she discovered 29 of the 30 people she interviewed embraced the flat Earth argument after watching YouTube videos, and the only exception heard about it from family members who had watched those videos.
“And from there, it is a downward spiral.”
