Did Man Really Walk on the Moon?
50 years ago this coming summer Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made moon walk history. It always surprises me to meet people who still doubt it.
It must have been 10 or 15 years ago I first encountered someone who firmly believed we’d never walked on the moon. It struck me as bizarre at the time because this viewpoint was utterly foreign to me. I remembered that first Apollo moon landing and the famous, “One small step…” Later I read Buzz Aldrin’s account of his experiences, which I found memorable and heartbreaking, and which I will return to shortly.
So, it proved a surprise to me when the topic came up again recently in this email from a friend. (I will note here that both of these skeptics, my friend and the co-worker from long ago, are quite intelligent, not straight-up gullibles.) The email went like this:
“I have been having this debate with my sister for years now. No, I don’t think humans have been near the moon. The moon is 250,000 miles away. Humans have made it 400 miles, not much further than the space station. We repaired the Hubble that was 400 miles and about as far as we have made it.”
Conspiracy theories come in all shapes and sizes, so it isn’t hard to do a Google search and find arguments for these various rabbit holes we can fall into. For a quick overview of this theory’s essential…
