Conspiracy Theory: Moon Landing…
Conspiracy theorists must be having a field day after NASA’s announcement that they had lost the original film taken of the first moonwalk. For decades, the walk on the moon has been regarded by some as a hoax, and the misplacement of the primary evidence might seem suspicious to the already jaded. Some of the questions posed by the theorists even had me doubting the authenticity for a while. There are two basic camps, both with their own pros and cons. Either everyone involved knew, or only a select few were privy to the hoax.
The biggest advantage to the “everyone knows” theory is that no spaceworthy hardware actually needed to have been constructed, aside from a basic rocket that went up and a command module that came down. A contractor had to have been brought in on the scam, paid a whole lot of money and told, “Just pretend to make some hardware; we don’t care if it actually works.” After a public announcement to say it had been awarded a major government contract to build space hardware, the contractor paid off all the employees with a huge bonus. What doesn’t work with this scenario is that at the height of the Apollo project almost half a million people were working on it. Yet, in over thirty years, not one of these half million people has come forward to say he was part of the conspiracy and provide evidence for it.
At the other end of the spectrum is the possibility that only a few top people at NASA knew of the conspiracy. Therefore, all of the contractors and most of the folks working at NASA truly believed the lunar landing was a fact. By keeping the number of people aware of the secret very low, NASA employees and contractors could go to their graves staunchly asserting that NASA did what it said it did. The big disadvantage would be that the contractors believed they must actually build the space hardware. These engineers were not dummies. The whole reason NASA hires this class of engineer to build spaceships is because they have the expertise to do it. In short, this scenario would produce equipment actually capable of going to the moon. So if the equipment worked, then what was to prevent NASA from actually performing the lunar landing in the first place?
I had considered detailing and debunking many of the suggested theories around the falsification of photos and videos of the moon walks, including those that concerned dust, shadows, and lighting. However, I figured you might be smart enough to read them and make decisions on their likelihood yourself.
A few websites in favor of hoax theories:
A few websites in favor of a moon landing:
