One Small Step for Man, One Giant Conspiracy Theory: A Timeline Analysis of the “Fake Moon Landing”
By Echo Nattinger & Merritt Cozby
On July 20th, 1969, three men made history. Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to step foot on the moon after several days of flight in the Saturn V (NASA, 2019). In the years since, a conspiracy theory has blossomed: the U.S. government faked the moon landing. While the theory has existed for decades, it has seen a revival (and rebranding) in the wake of social media. The story remains the same, but the methods of conspiracy theorists have changed with the evolving media landscape.
The Emergence of the Conspiracy Theory
For the sake of this project, we adopt a definition of conspiracy theory based on Merlan’s: a belief that a small group of people are working in secret to hide or conceal the “truth” from the common people (Merlan, 2019, p.17). To properly study the history of the fake moon landing conspiracy, it’s important to acknowledge the political and cultural landscape of the times. In the years following the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, several real-life political scandals were unearthed. The news of Watergate and MKUltra (a CIA-sponsored mind control experiment secretly conducted on U.S. citizens) in the 1970s primed U.S. citizens to be distrustful of the government (Dickson, 2019). While these revelations have nothing to do with the moon landing directly, they plant the seeds for conspiracy thinking: “actual government conspiracies have generated a long afterlife. They linger in collective memory, give rise to new conspiracy theories, and lay out a detailed, easy-to-follow playbook for fomenting further division and distrust” (Merlan, 2019, p.58).
Not long after the news about MKUltra and Watergate broke, the fake moon landing conspiracy was born. In 1976, Bill Kaysing published a pamphlet entitled “We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle,” in which he argues the moon landing was faked by the U.S. government to deceive the Soviets. Kaysing did, in fact, have some shred of credibility in his stance. He had worked for Rocketdyne, a company that helped in the design of the engines on the Saturn V (Godwin, 2019). In the pamphlet, he pointed to the fact that no stars are visible in the sky in the photos from the moon landing (Dickson, 2019). While this fact is attributable to details about a camera’s aperture ratio (Dickson, 2019), the theory captured the American public. In a 1976 poll conducted by Gallup, around 28% of Americans believed the conspiracy (Dickson, 2019). Kaysing’s theory was further propagated by the release of the 1978 film Capricorn One, in which a scrappy journalist uncovers a U.S. government conspiracy to fake a landing on Mars.
The Revival
Between the 1980s and 2000s, the conspiracy theory lost relevance. However, it was far from over. Two key events of the 21st century revived the conspiracy theory from its latent state: NASA’s finding of the impact crater from the Apollo 16 crash site on the moon and the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. The modern fake moon landing conspiracy revolves around two key pieces of media: the Stanley Kubrick “confession” and the so-called behind-the-scenes footage of the moon landing. We discuss each in turn.
On December 3rd, 2015, NASA released footage of the newly-discovered crash site of the Apollo 16 boosters (NASA, 2015). Immediately, the fake moon landing conspiracy rebirthed. On December 11th, 2015, conservative publication site Daily Express publicized a “deathbed confession” of deceased director Stanley Kubrick who has been thought to be in on the government conspiracy since the 1980s (Dickson, 2019). The video was not, in fact, one of Kubrick — it was an actor dressed as him, claiming that the 1969 landing was faked and he had been a part of the coverup (Evon, 2015). Kubrick’s family denounced the claims (Austin, 2015), but it didn’t stop the video from circulating across social media.
Then, shortly after the 50th anniversary of the moon landing in 2019, a new video took the conspiracy internet by storm. First published on BitChute (a video publishing site similar to YouTube) in 2020, the 12-minute video splices together behind-the-scenes footage of the aforementioned 1978 film Capricorn One with the caption “WIKILEAKS RELEASES MOON LANDING CUT SCENES FILMED IN NEVADA DESERT.” To be clear, the video has zero connection to WikiLeaks; it was never published there (Reuters, 2021). The video made its way to Rumble, a Reddit-like site that serves as a brewery for conspiracy theories.
Old vs. New Conspiracy Thinking
The comments under the video on Rumble offer a fascinating insight into modern-day conspiracism:
“You know if it’s being deleted there must be truth in it.” (January 2022)
“I knew it was fake! Just had a feeling it was false.” (December 2021)
“I’m not sure what this proves, but it definitely puts the doubt in my mind now.” (December 2021)
These comments encapsulate well the difference between old and new conspiracy thinking (Rosenblum & Muirhead, 2019). Old conspiracism “tries to make sense of the political world” — it examines facts to offer alternative explanations to events (Rosenblum & Muirhead, 2019, p.20). New conspiracy, however, lacks the theory element, abandoning reason or investigation and resting on “bare assumptions” (Rosenblum & Muirhead, 2019, p.25). Whereas the “old” moon conspiracy relied on compiling photographic evidence to propose an alternative explanation for the landing, the “new” moon conspiracy makes up evidence (staged interviews and doctored videos) to confirm their distrust of the government. There is also a newer emphasis on intuitionism, the reliance on feeling and heuristics to make judgments (Oliver & Wood, 2018).
While the fake moon landing conspiracy emerged right after the moon landing itself, the modern theory takes a completely different shape than the old one. The modern theory can be said to have begun in 2015, with the publication and wide spread of the Kubrick “confession” on YouTube, Facebook, and conservative news site Daily Express. The Capricorn One footage followed, first posted to BitChute in 2019, before spreading to Rumble and Twitter. Even today, new versions of the Kubrick confession and Capricorn One footage surface, proving the fact that while conspiracies may become dormant, they rarely disappear for good.
References
Austin, J. (2015, Dec 15). MOON LANDINGS ‘FAKE’: What Stanley Kubrick’s family say about ‘hoax admission’ video. Daily Express. https://www.express.co.uk/news /science/626119/MOON-LANDINGS-FAKE-Shockido-Stanley-Kubrick-admit-historic-event-HOAX-NASA?fbclid=IwAR2cgYBDYUmDyJ1rC2mvuQgvzKWwbam6P
7ZZCHV4L35zrAwhFde7PrV8
Dickson, E. (2019, July 19). A Brief History of Conspiracy Theories About the Moon Landing. Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/ culture-features/moon-landing-conspiracy-theories-explained-861205/
Evon, D. (2015, December 11). Did Stanley Kubrick Fake the Moon Landings? Snopes. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/false-stanley-kubrick-faked-moon-landings/
Godwin, R. (2019, July 10). One giant … lie? Why so many people still think the moon landings were faked. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com /science/2019/jul/10/one-giant-lie-why-so-many-people-still-think-the-moon-landings-were-faked
Merlan, A. (2019). Republic of Lies. Metropolitan.
NASA. (2019, July 20). July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/apollo11.html
NASA. (2015, December 3). LRO Finds Apollo 16 Booster Rocket Impact Site. https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/lro-finds-apollo-16-booster-rocket-impact-site
Oliver, E. & Wood, T. (2018) Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics. University of Chicago Press.
Reuters. (2021, December 31). Fact Check-Video claiming to prove fakery of moon landings uses authentic footage interspersed with clips from fictional movie ‘Capricorn One’. https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-movie-moonlanding-idUSL1N2TG0R4
Rosenblum, N. & Muirhead, R. (2019). A lot of people are saying: The new conspiracism and the assault on democracy. Princeton University Press.
