Why so Many People Still Think the Moon Landings Were Faked
It all started with a man called Bill Kaysing and his pamphlet about ‘America’s $30bn swindle’ …
By Richard Godwin
It took 400,000 NASA employees and contractors to put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in 1969 — but only one man to spread the idea that it was all a hoax. His name was Bill Kaysing.
It began as “a hunch, an intuition”, before turning into “a true conviction” — that the US lacked the technical prowess to make it to the moon (or, at least, to the moon and back). Kaysing had actually contributed to the US space programme, albeit tenuously: between 1956 and 1963, he was an employee of Rocketdyne, a company that helped to design the Saturn V rocket engines. In 1976, he self-published a pamphlet called We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, which sought evidence for his conviction by means of grainy photocopies and ludicrous theories. Yet somehow he established a few perennials that are kept alive to this day in Hollywood movies and Fox News documentaries, Reddit forums and YouTube channels.
Despite the extraordinary volume of evidence (including 382kg of moon rock collected across six missions; corroboration from Russia, Japan and China; and images from the…
