As time passed the ufologists continued to write stories about the moon being a base for aliens and UFOs. For the most part, NASA ignored them. But then, in the midseventies, a newly famous film director named Steven Spielberg decided to make a film about aliens coming down to visit Earth. He sent NASA officials his script for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, expecting their endorsement. Instead, NASA sent Spielberg an angry twenty-page letter opposing his film. “I had wanted co-operation from them,” Spielberg said in a 1978 interview, “but when they read the script they got very angry and felt that it was a film that would be dangerous. I think they mainly wrote the letter because Jaws convinced so many people around the world that there were sharks in toilets and bathtubs, not just in the oceans and rivers. They were afraid the same kind of epidemic would happen with UFOs.” Fringe ufologists were one thing as far as NASA was concerned. Steven Spielberg had millions of movie fans. He was a modern-day version of Orson Welles.
Right around the same time, another moon conspiracy theorist let his idea loose on the American public, a theory that did not involve UFOs. In 1974, a man named William Kaysing self-published a book called We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty-Billion-Dollar Swindle. With these three questions, Kaysing became known as the father of the lunar-landing conspiracy:
How can the American flag flutter when there is no wind on the moon?
Why can’t the stars be seen in the moon photographs?
Why is there no blast crater where Apollo’s landing vehicle landed?
Kaysing, who died in 2005, often said his skepticism began when he was an analyst and engineer at Rocketdyne, the company that designed the Saturn rockets that allowed man to get to the moon. While watching the lunar landing live on television, he said he experienced “an intuitive feeling that what was being shown was not real.” Later, he began scrutinizing the moon-landing photographs for evidence of a hoax. Kaysing’s original three questions have since planted seeds in millions upon millions of people who continue to insist that NASA did not put men on the moon. The lunar-landing conspiracy ebbs and flows in popularity, but as of 2011, it shows no signs of going away.
In August 2001 Kaysing was interviewed by Katie Couric on the Today show. By then, Kaysing’s theory had morphed to involve Area 51. He was often quoted as saying that the Apollo landings were filmed at a movie studio there. “Area 51 is one of the most heavily guarded facilities in the United States,” Kaysing said, and anyone who tried to go there “could be shot and killed without any warning. With good reason… because the moon sets are still there.”
In the twenty-first century, a new generation of moon hoaxers walk in Kaysing’s footsteps to expose what they say is NASA’s fraud. Like the game of Whac-A-Mole, as soon as one element of the conspiracy appears to be disproven another allegation surfaces—from missing telemetry tapes to outright murder. So aggravated has America’s formidable space agency become over the moon hoaxers that in 2002, NASA hired aerospace historian Jim Oberg to write a book meant to challenge conspiracy theorists’ questions and claims—now numbering hundreds—in a point-by-point rebuttal. When news of the project was leaked to the media, NASA got such bad press over it they canceled the book.
The idea that the moon landing was faked was born at a time of high government mistrust. In 1974, for the first time in history, a U.S. president resigned. In 1975, the CIA admitted it had been running mind-control programs, a number of which involved human experiments with dangerous, illegal drugs. Then, in April, Saigon fell. The general antigovernment feeling was heightened by the fact that while government proved capable of many nefarious deeds it had been unable to win the war in Vietnam; 58,193 Americans were killed trying.
Kaysing was also tapping into a tradition. There had been one successful Great Moon Hoax already, over 130 years earlier, in 1835. Beginning on August 25 of that year, the New York Sun published a series of six articles claiming falsely that life and civilization had been discovered on the moon. According to the newspaper story, winged humans, beavers the size of people, and unicorns were seen through a powerful telescope belonging to Sir John Herschel, the most famous astronomer at the time. Editions of the newspapers sold out, were reprinted, and sold out again. Circulation soared, and the New York Sun made tremendous profits over the story, which readers believed to be true. On the subject of the public’s gullibility, Edgar Allan Poe, who also wrote for the paper, said, “The story’s impact reflects on the period’s infatuation with progress.” But the original Great Moon Hoax came and went without a conspiratorial bent because there was no government entity to blame. It was a publicity stunt to sell papers, not perceived as a nefarious plan by a government elite to manipulate and control the common man.