Virgil
Conspiracy Theories and a Man On the Moon
by , 03-11-2009 at 09:57 PM (6635 Views)
Conspiracy Theories and a Man On the Moon
There as a crazy discussion last week on lit net, people who claimed that the Apollo moon landings of the early 1970’s were a hoax. http://www.online-literature.com/for...highlight=moon I must admit I was taken aback. First of all the moon landings to me are probably man’s greatest technical achievement and to deny it was startling. I know there are all sorts of conspiracy theories on all sorts of subjects, the JFK assassination, UFOs, creatures from outer space landing and kidnapping simpletons, the September 11 attacks. But I had no idea that there was a cottage industry claiming that the moon landings were a hoax. The conspiracy theories I was accustomed to don’t seem to challenge facts, but generated facts in circumstances that were murky. Who knew who was behind the JFK murder? The conspiracy wasn’t that a murder didn’t happen but the murky facts surrounding the planning of the event. The moon landings hoax is a claim outright denying facts, that an event that was filmed was faked, rocks and artifacts brought back frauds, missiles launched in pretense, rockets and spacecraft built but never left the earth, reporters reporting lies and documenting an event that didn’t occur, and actual documents forged. This conspiracy could not have involved just a hand full of folks but literally thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of people and institutions.
Perhaps the reason I was upset over it was because so much of my identity is wrapped up in the space missions. Not that I’m an astronaut.I’m an engineer. The great accomplishment of the moon landings wasn’t so much the piloting of the spacecraft, though I’m not saying that was insignificant, or the survival of the crew, though their courage was immense, nor the project planning and management (and as a project manager I can attest to managing something like this must have been incredibly challenging) but the shear technological ingenuity. The rocket science, the computer technology, the mechanical devices, the managing of the air system. When you think about it, something as seemingly trivial as rubber seals to seal in an artificial atmosphere from the space vacuum is a feat of critical importance. And possibly the finest technological accomplishment was the Command Module survival reentry through earth’s atmosphere and resisting the heating as it hurtles through the sky to a parachute landing in the ocean. I was inspired to be an engineer because of the space program.
Actually I grew up wanting to be an astronaut. I remember the Apollo 11 moon landing. I was sitting on the floor of my grandmother’s living room on that July day in 1969, an eight year old boy with the family around and we watched with incredible awe. It was truly unbelievable. And someone bought me a record (those old vinyl things) with all the great audio of the moon mission complied, JFK’s famous challenge to reach the moon in his decade (“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”), the countdown and launch of the Saturn rocket, the sounds and discussions at Huston ground station, the decoupling of the lunar module from the command module, the landing onto the moon, and then the moon walk, that famous first step by Neil Armstrong, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” My heroes as a kid were Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins. I knew the names of all the astronauts like a kid knows the names of ball players. I wanted to be an astronaut, not because of movies or TV shows but because of the real thing. (Of course I found out later I was near sighted and got sea sick.
Could it have been a hoax? You know, I was sitting in a meeting with my project team last week, and I don’t recall how the subject of conspiracies came up but when it did I brought up the fact that I had just gotten into a dispute with a group of people who claim the Apollo lunar landings were a hoax. Most of the engineers were surprised but one wasn’t. He’s an amateur astronomer and he teaches astronomy at a local university at night. He said that lots of the kids coming in to school all think the moon landings were faked. He said he was initially surprised, but apparently this seems to be embedded into the mindset of this new generation of young people. Most of the people in that lit net thread were non-Americans, so I had rationalized that well they didn’t grow up here, America is a resented super power, and you know all the anti American crap that’s out there now. But here, in America itself, a generation of moon landing deniers.
Could it have been a hoax? Not on your life. You can’t create a conspiracy between literally thousands of people. And how would they have gotten the news media, a media that is obsessed with digging out any government lies and exaggerations to go along with it? Impossible. You can’t fake actual rockets and space craft in museums (I’ve sat in some of those crafts at the Air and Space Museum in Washington), lie in history books, and have astronauts who have done the voyages, landed on the moon, and walked in space lie to the public every day for forty years.
But this asks an interesting question. How do I know any event in history actually happened? How do I know Napoleon really lived, conquered the European continent, and was defeated at Waterloo? I didn’t see it. No one living experienced it. It’s only words in a history book. How do I know the Roman Empire actually existed? Of course I believe that Napoleon lived, and that the Romans had an empire, but if one is predisposed to believe in conspiracies how does one pick and choose?
But is one surprised that people believe in conspiracy theories? I shouldn’t have been. In the news in the last few weeks was a British Roman Catholic Bishop, and to reach that post one has acquired a deep education and a world of experience, Bishop Richard Williamson, denied that the holocaust ever existed. Like denying the moon landings, denying the holocaust is a denying of facts. Here is an educated man denying a fundamental fact of the 20th century. And frankly I was actually surprised at those that I thought were highly intelligent lit netters either denying or entertaining the possibility of a moon landing hoax. And if you look through the thread it was filled with beliefs in all sorts of conspiracy theories.
So what to make of it? Is this a generation raised on movies and TV and video games where all reality is in flux? Is this a generation so cynical that all advertisement is propaganda, all price fluctuations a conspiring to cheat people, all government actions secret chicanery? No hardly. This generation is not unique. Conspiracies go back to the beginning of time. The notion that businesses are out to screw people goes back, my goodness, to Marx and well before. Conspiracy theories are akin to folklore and urban legends. Just like in the middle ages (and not just the middle ages, even today) there are legends about Jews killing babies, women who are witches, and people from the neighboring town who kidnap children. This apparently is part of the human condition, a touchstone of paranoia, events we can’t personally verify the facts and so impose themselves into our fears.
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