When Did the Apollo Hoax Nonesnese start?

[Dcdrac]

Purely out of historical interest when did this Apollo Hoax nonesense begin?

 

[MG1962]

The first I recall is a couple of years after the program finished an astonishing number of French people didn't believe the landings were real. My wife's grandfather never believed they landed on the Moon

 

[JayUtah]

Purely out of historical interest when did this Apollo Hoax nonesense begin?

No later than 1974, and possibly earlier.

In 1974 Bill Kaysing self-published his book We Never Went to the Moon. That book has been the blueprint for Apollo conspiracism to this day, and many of Kaysing's original claims, though of course debunked long ago, still pop up in blog posts etc.

Some consider a scene in the 1971 James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever to be an allusion to faked Moon landings. In this scene, Bond runs across a simulated lunar landscape in a secret lab. Conspiracists say this is Ian Fleming's revelation of faked Moon landings, but the scene was written only for the movie and does not appear in the book, which was written in the mid-1950s anyway. It is unclear what role of the simulated lunar surface plays in the film's plot, so it's unclear that it was meant to suggest faked Moon landings; it may have been training simulations such as those carried out extensively at NASA. Screenwriters Tom Mankiewicz and Richard Maibaum passed away before I could interview them, and I have not been able yet to contact director Guy Hamilton.

According to some of the Apollo flight crews, there were hoax theories circulating at the time the missions were being flown, some as early as 1969. I don't have any corroborating documentary evidence for them. Kaysing's book claims Dutch newspapers broke the hoax story shortly after Apollo 11, but no documentation can be found to substantiate this.

 

[Patrick1000]

Not buying into Apollo was/is much more common outside of the US

Purely out of historical interest when did this Apollo Hoax nonesense begin?

Not buying into Apollo was/is much more common outside of the US.

I was 11 when the Eagle landed. Several of my cousins in Italy, all college educated, my age, never believed the landing to be real. In China, subsequent to the landing, "textbooks" featured and continue to feature the landing as fact, yet many Chinese did not and do not believe the landings occurred. Many of these people are highly educated.

 

[Dcdrac]

Why can people just not be proud of an amazing acheivement and look forward to the day when, politicians and economics allowing, we go back and doo all the other things as Kennedy said, not becasue they are easy but becsue they are hard......

(Not an American but that was one hell of a speech)

 

[Darat]

Not buying into Apollo was/is much more common outside of the US.

...snip..

Really? I had never heard about this CT in the UK until a few years back when it got a bit of publicity thanks to a TV show or two. Prior to that I had never heard anyone ever mentioning the silliness.

 

[Dcdrac]

Even on discovery channel the Hoax programmes seem to be getting closer and closer to the graveyard shift times after midnight so maybe finally this daftness is on the wane

 

[ixolite]

Not buying into Apollo was/is much more common outside of the US.

Disagree.

Really? I had never heard about this CT in the UK until a few years back when it got a bit of publicity thanks to a TV show or two. Prior to that I had never heard anyone ever mentioning the silliness.

Dito, except that I only know of this particular CT because of the internet, never seen/heard it mentioned on tv, radio or print here in Germany.

 

[Dcdrac]

What I would love to see is some of the Apollo Astronauts and the main hoax hucksters in the same TV studio and the hoax con artists trying to tell the Astronauts they did not go to the moon to their faces.

 

[ixolite]

What I would love to see is some of the Apollo Astronauts and the main hoax hucksters in the same TV studio and the hoax con artists trying to tell the Astronauts they did not go to the moon to their faces.

 

[JayUtah]

...yet many Chinese did not and do not believe the landings occurred.

Source for this information, please?

Many of these people are highly educated.

Source for this information, please?

I hear very often that "so-and-so believes the Moon landings were faked, and he's a smart guy, so it must be true." But what one believes is not generally as important to me as why one believes it. I know many people who believe things for what we would consider objectively irrational reasons. But the believers know their reasons are irrational and don't try to pretend otherwise. They reap substantial personal benefit from their beliefs and don't pretend that those benefits would apply to others.

In my 12 years of researching, writing, and interviewing people associated with Moon landing hoax theories, I have yet to encounter a single person whose stated reasons were valid. In other words, the stated reasons have universally alluded to pseudo-science, to gross misrepresentations of fact, or to layman's misconceptions about how the universe works. In no case could the proponent maintain an argument in favor of his stated reasons that would survive any sort of real-world scrutiny.

This has led me to investigate other reasons for belief in this and other conspiracy theories, and I have found very fertile ground in the psychology of belief itself. Therefore it doesn't take very long to see past the stated reasons for belief -- which are invariably a pseudo-scientific veneer -- and arrive at the actual reasons for belief, which are almost always psychological, political, or social.

Therefore when I learn that a particular belief finds more traction in a certain culture than in others, I look for the cultural reasons. In the case of China, we find that China was the only major nation in which mainstream coverage of the Moon landings did not occur. Even in the Soviet Union there was live news coverage of the Apollo 11 mission. China missed out entirely on the "happening now" phenomenon.

 

[Patrick1000]

Italians are hard to convince........

Really? I had never heard about this CT in the UK until a few years back when it got a bit of publicity thanks to a TV show or two. Prior to that I had never heard anyone ever mentioning the silliness.

Italians are hard to convince........I made my first trip to Italy in 1989. My cousins there and several soon to be good friends, informed me they believed Apollo phony. Moreover, they indicated they NEVER had bought in.

Educated Chinese, all the more so.

 

[Sword_Of_Truth]

I was 11 when the Eagle landed. Several of my cousins in Italy, all college educated, my age, never believed the landing to be real. In China, subsequent to the landing, "textbooks" featured and continue to feature the landing as fact, yet many Chinese did not and do not believe the landings occurred. Many of these people are highly educated.

"Educated" is meaningless in this context.

What you need is people "educated" in very specific fields. I can guarantee none of your America-hating euroweenie cousins or commie-propaganda sucking chinese friends are astronomers, astrophysicists or aerospace engineers.

 

[JayUtah]

What I would love to see is some of the Apollo Astronauts and the main hoax hucksters in the same TV studio and the hoax con artists trying to tell the Astronauts they did not go to the moon to their faces.

The YouTube link says it all. That guy is one of the most notorious astronaut-stalkers.

As a matter of fact, the Apollo crews have very little interest in these hoax theorists. They're so beneath the radar for those men, and for the overwhelming majority of the aerospace industry and space science fields. They're seen as literally the foil-hat wearing crowd, on par with people who sell magic crystals and who use rattles and dousing rods to pretend to cure cancer. There is zero respect for them in the scientific and engineering community.

Whatever your job is, imagine how you would regard someone who tells the world that you really don't do what you do. You'd have a hard time wrapping your mind around the severe mental brokenness that would lead to someone denying reality, and you'd probably have a hard time dealing with sheer arrogance of someone who would so vigorously try to tell ill-founded lies about you. Put yourself in that mindset and you'll understand how most of the spacefaring world regards these hoax theorists.

Unfortunately TV studios and radio call-in shows and the like are actually where hoax hucksters do their best. Those venues thrive on 30-second sound bites, which are just what hoax claimants need to stir up meaningless, unfounded, but nevertheless effective doubt. Correcting the misconceptions, misrepresentations, and outright lies requires a bit more effort, and involves presentations that are correct and valuable, but rather dry from an entertainment standpoint.

Further, informal venues let hoax theorists get away with their meta-debate tricks like changing the subject and evading rigor. Most of what passes for debate among Moon hoax theorists and advocates of most other conspiracy theorists involves actually manipulating the debate so it only appears they're answering questions.

I think a more interesting venue would be a courtroom, where rules of evidence prevail. While none of the hoax theorists have standing to sue for their allegations, I think it would be fun to see one of them have to defend himself in court against defamation claims. I would love to see them try to prove their hoax claims in a venue where they can't rely on their usual tap dancing.

 

[JayUtah]

Italians are hard to convince...

I lived in Italy (Sicily and Apulia) for a number of years in the late 1980s, working amongst engineers. I never meet a hoax believer there. I again visited Italy (Rome and Piedmont) in the late 1990s without encountering any hoax believers. Further, I find Italians to be, on the whole, rather passionate and not especially prone to critical or skeptical thinking.

I don't care what your cousins, mother, sister, or girlfriends think. Anecdotes are not evidence for trends in belief.[/QUOTE]

 

[Patrick1000]

My view was/is this is a set up, a hoax of its own.....

My view was/is this is a set up, a hoax of its own.....Bart Sibrel, the man who was punched, pushes a view of Apollo reality, a view as to what went down and why, that is beyond ridiculous. It doesn't hold water, not to mention cryogenic liquid oxygen.

Photo's of the punching appeared the very next day in newspapers, including on some front pages. Jay Leno talked about it. It was/is a publicity stunt, a pro astronaut stunt, a pro Apollo stunt, and a very inauthentic one at that, just like the rest of Apollo.

Sibrel, the punchee, is very much a main-streamer, though covertly so. He is an idiot, and his idiocy discrdits the notion of Apollo inauthenticity, get it?

Aldrin is not dumb enough to let this yo-yo, and he is a yo-yo, corner him. Nor would Aldrin have been dumb enough to punch Sibrel out of genuine anger. The whole thing was a silly set-up. That much is obvious......

 

[JayUtah]

Really? I had never heard about this CT in the UK until a few years back when it got a bit of publicity thanks to a TV show or two. Prior to that I had never heard anyone ever mentioning the silliness.

Here in the U.S. we had some interest in Britons David Percy and Mary Bennett who wrote a cinder block of a book called Dark Moon. They've largely faded into obscurity now, although their book is still for sale. Their web site has been taken over largely by notorious conspiracy theorist and self-proclaimed photo analyst Jack White. Portions of Percy's film What Happened on the Moon? can be seen on YouTube. As he produced it, it's a 4-hour monstrosity.

I was contacted by Zig Zag Productions in the U.K. to help them film a rebuttal television program which aired on Channel 4. Percy and Bennett were also invited to participate, but declined. We shot a lot of footage in Hollywood and in the Mojave Desert, and the program aired in U.S. markets on National Geographic with the narration re-recorded using an American narrator.

The only other U.K. conspiracy author I can think of immediately is "Cosmic" Dave Cosnette, who runs a prominent UFO web site in the U.K. He dabbles in Apollo hoax theories, but rarely debates publicly.

 

[Tomblvd]

Purely out of historical interest when did this Apollo Hoax nonesense begin?

As pointed out previously, it has been around since the 70s. It hung around in the dregs of UFO and other "paranormal" mags and publications. However it was given a new lease on life when the FOX network aired a moon hoax program, largely pushed by Sibrel, IIRC, around 2000. At that point it exploded into the internet where anonymous cowards felt free to call innocent engineers, technicians, astronomers and astronauts; "perps", "traitors", "criminals", and any other pejorative they could find at thesaurus.com.

It started out on numerous geocities webpages, identifiable by the prodigious use of multi-colored and sized types and fonts, lack of paragraphs, and mezmorizing, moving backgrounds. Now many have taken to youtube and really gotten annoying.

 

[Garrison]

No later than 1974, and possibly earlier.

In 1974 Bill Kaysing self-published his book We Never Went to the Moon. That book has been the blueprint for Apollo conspiracism to this day, and many of Kaysing's original claims, though of course debunked long ago, still pop up in blog posts etc.

Some consider a scene in the 1971 James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever to be an allusion to faked Moon landings. In this scene, Bond runs across a simulated lunar landscape in a secret lab. Conspiracists say this is Ian Fleming's revelation of faked Moon landings, but the scene was written only for the movie and does not appear in the book, which was written in the mid-1950s anyway. It is unclear what role of the simulated lunar surface plays in the film's plot,

I think it was just part of showing that the billionaire who owned the company was doing cutting edge space research to tie in with the laser satellite that's the main plot device, I certainly never had the impression it was implying anything about an Apollo hoax.

 

[Hans]

In the conspiracy addled Middle-East I occassionally came across people who believed the United States hadn't gone to the Moon or in space travel at all, this was often based on a proposed hadith of Mohammed, which stated (I paraphrase) that 'x' was a believable as a man claiming to touch the moon.

No such Hadith has ever been found to my knowledge