Monday was the 46th anniversary of the first lunar landing, yet a small fringe still believes the whole thing was a hoax. According to the conspiracy theory, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on a soundstage instead of the moon. Some even claim that famed filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, who made “2001: A Space Odyssey” the previous year, directed the hoax.
I’ve never really understood why so many in the Tin Foil Hat Brigade are convinced beyond reason that the Apollo 11 lunar landing took place on a sound stage in Burbak. What could the government- or anyone else- have had to gain by engaging in such a massive fraud? For my part, I suspect Stanley Kubrick had better things to do with his time than produce and direct such a counterfeit depiction of a seminal moment in American history.
July 20, 1969 is one of those days indelibly etched in my mind. I was nine years old and completely enthralled by the space program. The only thing I wanted to be at that point in my life (besides an NBA point guard or an NFL quarterback) was an astronaut. I would soon grow out of that fascination and move on to other equally unlikely dreams, but the night that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went for their walk on the moon’s surface is something I’ll never forget. My family was hunched around our crappy little black-and-white TV in our tiny little house across from the county fairgrounds in Hibbing, MN. The grainy images transmitted from the moon’s surface were the most amazing thing I’d ever experienced…and to that point in my young life, it may well have been exactly that.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - if you don't think Apollo 11 landed on Moon you are a colossal nob end & should get a new brain
— Brian Cox (@ProfBrianCox) July 20, 2015. @ProfBrianCox is a pretty smart guy. Also the Russians would have exposed by now if we didn't land. #Apollo11 https://t.co/N8nLKtaqRe
— Buzz Aldrin (@TheRealBuzz) July 21, 2015Then along came the people claiming that it was all a hoax, that the whole thing was filmed on a sound stage in Burbank, CA. There are documentaries devoted to this conspiracy theory, meaning that someone devoted a significant amount of time (and, hopefully, research) to the lunatic belief that Armstrong and Aldrin never walked on the moon.
Here we are, 46 years later, and no one involved in the moon landing at ANY level has come forward to admit that it was all a gigantic hoax. Despite that, there are those ABSOLUTELY convinced Neil Armsttong and Buzz Aldrin never left Earth’s orbit and did all their walking on a sound stage. Just as there are those convinced that 9.11 was an inside job (It couldn’t have been; no one’s blamed Barack Obama yet), the moon landing had to have been faked…and there are monds of “evidence” to prove it. Or something like that.
For my part, I’ll leave the conspiracy theories to others and remember the fascination my nine-year-old self watching it on TV. Then I remember that my cell phone has more computing power than the total computing power of the Apollo 11 mission. Pretty amazing stuff, wh?
