10% of Americans, 12% of Britons, 20% of Italians and 57% of Russians do not believe that man landed on the moon
This article is a continuation of yesterday's article: It was impossible to fake the landing on the moon - a film expert explains why.
By: Peter Knight, Professor of American Studies, University of Manchester
Bill Kaysing was a former US Navy officer who worked as a technical reporter for one of the rocket manufacturers for the Apollo program. He claimed to have inside knowledge of a government conspiracy to fake the moon landings, and many conspiracy theories about the Apollo moon landings that continue to attract believers to this day originated in his 1976 book, We Never Went to the Moon: The Thirty Billion Dollar Fraud.
The basic premise of the conspiracy theory is that NASA was unable to safely land a man on the moon by the late XNUMXs as President John F. Kennedy had promised, so he only sent astronauts into Earth orbit. Conspiracy theorists claim that NASA staged the moon landing in a movie or television studio, and that hints of this can be found in the documentation of the alleged mission. They also claim that NASA has been covering the hoax ever since.
Moon landing skeptics point to clues such as photos showing the astronauts in front of hair etched on the camera glass, or a mysterious formation in the form of the letter C visible on the moon rock. These and many other anomalies have already been dispelled, but the conspiracy theory about the moon landing continues in the popular imagination.
Public opinion polls in the US indicate that between 5 and 10% of Americans do not trust the official version of the events. In the UK, a 2012 YouGov poll found that 12% of Britons believed in the conspiracy theory. A recent survey found that 20% of Italians believe the moon landings were a hoax, while a 2018 survey in Russia raised the number to 57%, which is not surprising given the popularity of anti-Western conspiracy theories in Russia.
ready to believe
The Kaysing conspiracy theory was prevalent in the mid-1971s, America was largely in a very broad crisis of confidence. In XNUMX, citizens read the leaked Pentagon Papers, which show that the Johnson administration systematically lied about the Vietnam War. This also matched the reports of the later Watergate break-in.
A series of congressional reports reported on the failures of the CIA both in the US and abroad, and in 1976 the House of Representatives Committee on the subject of assassinations concluded that - contrary to the Warren Commission more than a decade earlier - there was a high probability that there was a conspiracy to kill the Canadian. This conclusion helped to promote a broader change in conspiratorial thinking since the late sixties, from a belief in external enemies, such as the communists, towards the suspicion that the American state itself is plotting against its citizens.
Moon landing conspiracy theories have always been attractive. To understand their popularity we need to consider their cultural context, and also the psychological disposition of the believers.
As in the case of the Kennedy murder, a new type of conspiracy theory was created. These theories reinterpret the publicly available evidence, find inconsistencies in the recorded records, and ignore conflicting information. Visual evidence is necessary: despite all the skepticism, the starting point is that visual evidence is reliable. In the field of evidence, the assumption is that everyone can be a detective. In the conspiracy theory that appeared in the late 60s, the independent investigation was at the center.
Reality is rebuilt
Moon landing conspiracy theories also brought into the mainstream the idea that significant events were not what they seemed. They were presented as part of an official disinformation campaign. The idea that tragic events are created by "crisis actors" employed by the government has become the default explanation for many events today, from 11/XNUMX to mass shootings. This type of conspiracy theory is particularly damaging – for example, parents of children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School are already relentlessly hounded by internet trolls claiming they are paid clowns.
The Hollywood movie Capricorn 1, from 1978, added to the popularity of conspiracy theories about the moon landing. Keesing claimed that just as the fake landing in the movie where the Martian soil was shot in a movie studio led to rumors that the moon landings themselves were directed by Stanley Kubrick. This myth partly hints at the idea that special effects became much more sophisticated with Kubrick's 1968 film, A Space Odyssey, though still far from the capabilities that conspiracy theories claim.
Even if they are far-fetched in practical terms, conspiracy theories about the moon landings nevertheless offer a more plausible possibility. In our media-saturated reality, reality itself is reconstructed, if not falsified.
For the original article on THE CONVERSATION website
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Comments
Maybe from a cinematic point of view it is possible to fake it - but what is it good for?
By the way - she shouted "Idle" when Yigal Amir shot Yitzhak Rabin - in Etbash,
A popular code, Sarak => Hagad => Hagai, Gali, Dror... It is clear that this is a password.
And why does it not appear among conspiracy theories?
And the "Remadia" affair - a year before the Japanese elections to make journalists mention...
George W. Bush's publicist took down opponents using their words -
One was accused of alcoholism, the second was allegedly drugs, and the third, who at the time owned "Heinz" to which "Remedy" belongs
Maliciously sabotage a trusted pharmaceutical factory that manufactures formula
for babies for a remedy.
I was also in the hall. Nevertheless, Nixon was the one who spoke with them on the phone to the moon, and then to the isolation room where they were on the Hornet, but indeed it is little compared to Kennedy's mention several times.
I think we will do historical justice here to a certain extent. Nixon was the one who took NASA down from a level playing field to its deepest capital, turning it into a small budgeted body that could do little, as one panelist said, most of the major missions of the XNUMXs ran on the Apollo fuel vapors.
And 25% of Israelis believe that the moon is a painting on the dome of the sky that the angels are constantly pushing so that it does not stop... and once a month, when the moon is reborn, one should pray to it and bless its rebirth (yes, contemporary Judaism).
But seriously: there is a certain percentage of the population, about a third, that is ready to believe anything they are told, including completely delusional things, simply because whoever says it convinces/hypnotizes/pushes the information straight into their brain. This percentage are those who believe in reincarnation, astrology, numerology, tarot, gurus of all kinds - from the creator of the galaxy, Uri Geller to Jesus - (sorry, Uri Geller does not claim to be God, neither did Jesus, just make him God).
These thirds are the ones who choose all the dictators who have been elected in democratic elections since the beginning of the twentieth century, including here in Israel recently.
Yesterday (17.07.2019), at the Astronomical Club event of Tel Aviv University, in the Smolarch Hall, I watched the NASA documentary about the first manned flight to the moon of the Apollo 11 spacecraft, which took off on 16.07.1969, and returned and landed in the Pacific Ocean about - 8 days, on July 24.07.1969, XNUMX.
The film is extremely interesting from a number of aspects, technological, cultural, and even social and political. I will mention two aspects that stood out to me the most:
1]. It's amazing to see, at the "primitive" level of computing in those days, and how much manual recording on paper forms was used then, in the control center at Fun Canaveral - Florida. The center was staffed by hundreds (!!!) of people, controllers, who each sat in front of one device that was connected by radio to some control device in the spaceship, and they wrote down by hand, on paper forms, the values that were received and were seen on the television monitors (of that time ) and analog control lamps. Here and there, control lamps with a digital display were also seen, but very few.
2]. In a very strange way, the viewer of the film gets the impression that the US president who served during the Apollo 11 flight was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He is the most prominent president in the film. Much less than him President Eisenhower, during whose time NASA was founded and the American space program began, while Presidents Johnson and Nixon, who served after the assassination of Kennedy on November 22.11.1963, XNUMX, were not revealed at all in the film.
It seems to me that NASA has a political score with the Republican Party. The Republican presidents, and Nixon the first of them, "mercilessly" cut NASA's budgets, and in fact closed the expensive and wasteful Apollo program.
So how do you explain the iron that was placed on the moon for the benefit of the measurements of our distance from the moon?
The nonsense of the non-moon landing conspiracy
http://www.tapuz.co.il/blogs/viewentry/7375082
The nonsense of the non-moon landing conspiracy.
http://www.tapuz.co.il/blogs/viewentry/7375082