50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True

by Harrison, Guy P.

  Another pertinent question is why many of the Moonwalkers would add personal and emotionally charged layers to a hoax. Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke lived on the Moon for three days in 1972. He told me how he left behind a photograph of his wife and children as a sort of eternal monument to his love for them. Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean explained to me that his memories of walking on the Moon inspired him to become an artist. Today he is a commercially successful painter of space and lunar scenes. Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan told me how he felt humbled and spiritual as he stared up at Earth—his tiny, faraway home hanging all alone in the cold darkness of space. He also recounted for me how he wrote “T D C,” his daughter's initials, into the lunar dust. “I guess it will be there forever,” he said, “however long ‘forever' is.”1 If these guys are all in on a big, fat hoax, then they sure are being excessive with the corroborating lies.

  Cernan described to me how meaningful it was for him to have commanded the 1972 Apollo 17 mission that put the first scientist on the Moon (geologist Harrison Schmitt). “The Moon was my Camelot for three days. The science was exciting,” Cernan said. “We saw things that no human had ever seen before.”

  After spending more time on the Moon than any astronaut had before, Cernan says he thought to himself, “Pinch yourself one more time and make sure this is real. You're going to be out of here soon, so appreciate it.”

  “When you look back at the Earth,” Cernan added, “it is so overwhelming, so powerful and beautiful. You see no borders, no language differences, no color differences. You don't see terrorism. I just wish I could take every human being up there and tell them to take a look.”2

  It is not only the detailed and personal stories that stand out. Obvious passion for space exploration—past, present, and future—is evident in all these men decades later. There is enthusiasm and pride in their words and facial expressions. Yes, they really did go to the Moon. It's either that or NASA had to have assembled a team of actors far better at the craft than anything Hollywood's best casting agents could have managed.

  In addition to the astronauts, thousands of people worked on the Apollo program. In my view, there simply are too many people describing the same story of a grand vision, hard work, and spectacular success. This is a critical problem with the Moon-landing-hoax claim: too many people and too many layers of detail. Literally hundreds of thousands of people worked on the project. Landing on the Moon was an extremely complex achievement, and if any one phase of it—the Saturn V design, the fuel, the command module, the lunar module, the computers, the navigation, the suits, life support—failed, then the landings could not have happened. Surely somebody—at least one honest person—would have spoken up and presented evidence by now if his or her little corner of the vast project were a sham.

  The astronauts, Mission Control Center personnel, and engineers I have spoken with over the years certainly did not strike me as puppets in some Nixononian-NASA conspiracy. None of them seemed to me like the sort of personalities who would dedicate their entire lives to upholding a colossal lie. My sense is that these were honorable and proud people. If they took part in a hoax, isn't it likely that at least one of them would have come forward and confessed now that they are approaching their twilight years, if only to ease their conscience before dying?

  We can't forget the Soviet Union in all of this. It is very unlikely that America's technologically advanced Cold War rival would have been fooled by such a daring and elaborate hoax. And, if the Soviets did know, it is difficult to imagine why they would have played along and not exposed the lie in order to claim a propaganda victory over the corrupt capitalists. Finally, if the United States had faked the Moon landings out of some perceived need during the Cold War, don't you think it likely that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in the 1990s would have loosened up a few tongues? Surely someone would have come clean by now.

  Another curious problem with the hoax claim is that NASA did not go to the Moon just once. They made the trip nine times! Apollo missions 8, 10, and 13 orbited the Moon without landing. The Apollo 13 mission was supposed to be a landing but was aborted due to a malfunction that nearly killed the crew. If the lunar landings were faked, why would NASA go to all the trouble of faking a failed landing too?

  Apollo missions 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 landed on the Moon. The last two missions spent approximately three days each on the lunar surface. Why? If this was a NASA con job, why would they have repeated it so many times, increasing the risk of discovery with each mission? One faked landing followed by a big parade and an abrupt end to the program would have made more sense. Why would NASA stretch the fraud to include ten more Moonwalkers and five more command module pilots after the Apollo 11 mission? Why make so many more men responsible for pushing the lie for the rest of their lives when limiting it to one three-man crew would have been safer?

  INTRIGUING CHALLENGES, SIMPLE ANSWERS

  I have written many newspaper and magazine articles relating to the Apollo program, including a few about Moon-landing-hoax claims. These have sparked many discussions (and a few arguments) with people who are convinced that men such as Armstrong and Young are among the greatest liars of all time. Over the years, I have learned that there are a few particular points that are most popular with hoax believers and always seem to come up. Each of them is easy to explain.

  No Stars!

  Look at photographs of Apollo astronauts on the surface of the Moon and you won't see any stars. There is only blackness behind and above them. I have several beautiful autographed photographs of astronauts on the Moon, and none of them have even one visible star. Hoax enthusiasts have seized on this as evidence that the photos were taken inside a movie set somewhere on Earth. This is a stunningly bad argument. Those who insist on believing that the landings were faked should not base their case on this one. There are better wrong arguments available.

  Although writing has always been my primary gig, I'm an accomplished photographer as well. I'm no Ansel Adams, but I certainly have seen more of this world through a camera lens than most. Literally thousands of my photos have been published in newspapers and magazines. I once placed third in the British Broadcasting Union's Commonwealth Photographic Awards, an international competition open to professional photographers in more than fifty nations. I won the Canada and Caribbean competition section of that contest. I have taken photos of people, places, and animals in more than twenty-five countries across six continents. I have taken photos in just about every imaginable situation and environment. As a result, I find this specific hoax evidence particularly irritating because it is incredibly silly.

  As a former sports photographer, I have taken countless photographs of athletes at night in lighted stadiums. Guess what? In every one I've taken of football players, soccer players, track athletes, and the like, no stars can be seen in the background of the photos. How can this be? Did I fake the sports photos? Did I really take them in a movie studio with a backdrop that was painted black? Where did the stars go?

  The explanation is simple. To take a good photograph of a runner on a stadium track at night—or an astronaut on the Moon wearing a white suit—the camera's exposure must be set correctly according to the amount of light reflected by the primary subject. That means you have to make sure the camera will let in just the right amount of light for just the right amount of time. But here's the catch: If the exposure is correct for the person you are trying to photograph, it won't be correct for the faint light of stars in the sky behind them. Under routine photography conditions, it's one or the other. You can't get both the person and the stars in the same shot without making a special effort to do so. It works the same way on the Moon.

  The Case of the Missing Crater

  Another popular issue with hoax believers is the missing blast crater that they say should be under the landed lunar module but isn't. Pictures show no noticeable craters under the spacecraft that landed on the Moon. How, they ask, could a ro
cket ship with a powerful engine (ten thousand pounds of thrust) land on the dusty surface of the Moon and leave no visible crater? Again, this is an easy balloon to pop—embarrassingly easy. No conspiracy theorist worth his or her decoder ring should go anywhere near it.

  The lunar module is one of the greatest technological achievements of all time. I believe it ranks up there with the Oldowan hand axe and the computer. It was built and used for space flight exclusively. That's why it looks so weird. It didn't have to be aerodynamic, so it wasn't. It's a testament to engineering efficiency and creativity. On six occasions, a lunar module dropped down from orbit like some invading metallic arthropod and safely delivered two astronauts to the Moon's surface. It was a superb machine, one we should all be proud of. So why didn't it create a giant crater when it landed?

  The lunar module's descent stage engine didn't blast a hole on landing because its ten-thousand-pound-thrust engine was throttled back, way back, on descent. It had to be, right? Otherwise it couldn't land! Look at it this way, why aren't there hideous skid marks all over your driveway? After all, your car is probably capable of going in excess of one hundred miles per hour. So when you pull into your driveway at one hundred miles per hour and stop suddenly, you must make a noisy, messy, and chaotic stop, right? But wait, you don't do that. Just like the Apollo astronauts who flew the lunar module, you ease off the power well in advance of the stopping point so that you can control your arrival onto the driveway and make a gentle stop. No skid marks in your driveway, no crater under the lunar module.

  The Flag Was Waving!

  One of the lowlights of Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? a terrible pseudodocumentary that aired on Fox network in 2001, was video of astronauts standing around what the narrator claims is an American flag waving in the wind. There is no wind on the Moon, of course, so the charge was that the flag's movement was caused by a gust of wind from a door left open on the film set or perhaps an untimely blast from some air conditioner vent. Could this be it? Is this the smoking gun that proves the Apollo Moonwalks were all faked here on Earth? Of course not. The flag does not wave in the wind.

  First of all, there is a support arm that extends out from the flag pole at a ninety-degree angle. It's there so the flag can be spread out and displayed in an environment with no wind. Second, the flag is not moving as a result of wind. It moves because of the astronauts' contact with the flagpole. As they drove it into the ground, vibrations and twisting caused the flag to swing back and forth. It moves for a bit after they let go of the flagpole because of momentum.

  Who Believes NASA Lied?

  Fortunately, only 6 percent of Americans polled admitted to being Moon-conspiracy believers in a 1999 Gallup survey. Unfortunately, 6 percent of the US population equates to several million people. A Gallup spokesperson suggested that the Moon hoax is likely not a very popular belief because 6 percent of the population will say yes to just about anything that a pollster asks.3 I'm not convinced that this is a minor problem, however. I have encountered many Americans who may not qualify as committed hoax believers but are dedicated doubters nonetheless. Additionally, Moon-hoax belief rates are likely to be significantly higher in countries that have low rates of science and history literacy and/or a common mistrust of virtually anything the US government claims.

  What does the future hold for the Moon-hoax belief? Will it fade away in time like most crackpot theories usually do? Or will it only get worse as the landings become “ancient history” in the minds of new generations? As the Apollo program recedes further into history, it may be easier for young people to fall for the hoax claim. A chilling warning of this may be a 2004–2005 survey that found 27 perent of Americans aged 18–25 had at least “some doubt” that NASA went to the Moon, while 10 percent indicated that it was “highly unlikely” that anyone had ever landed there.4 America is by no means the only place where this bizarre belief exists. A 2009 survey commissioned by an engineering and technology magazine found that a quarter of British people think the landings were faked.5 Based on personal experience, I would estimate that the percentage of hoax believers in the Caribbean overall is closer to 50 percent at least. In Jamaica and Cuba specifically, random conversations I had with many local people led me to believe it could be beyond 75 percent there. It might be even higher than that in some Middle Eastern countries, where mistrust of anything to do with the United States is common.

  The reasons for the strange idea that we never went to the Moon probably has a lot to do with the appallingly low levels of science literacy and historical knowledge that are common in the United States and throughout the world. For example, 47 percent of Americans don't even know how long it takes Earth to revolve around the Sun (one year).6 Worse, 18 percent of Americans don't even know that Earth revolves around the Sun! They think it's the other way around.7 It is not uncommon to hear about large numbers of high school students not knowing basic information such as whether the Civil War came before or after World War I or who the United States fought against in World War II. So is it really all that surprising that some people don't know that twelve men walked on the Moon more than forty years ago? As for the hardcore Moon-hoax believers, I suggest giving up on windblown flags, starless photos, and missing craters. Those are dead-end trails. While one certainly could argue that a large government conspiracy of this sort could have been attempted, it's difficult to imagine how it could have succeeded and never been exposed all these years later. Without evidence, this claim goes nowhere. It's nothing more than a wild story, no better than the Roswell spaceship crash.

  I always try my best to look for the bright side in things, and I managed to find something positive in this Moon-landing-hoax belief. I see it as understandable, maybe even appropriate, that some people refuse to believe that human beings have visited the Moon. Apollo was such a fantastic achievement in the 1960s and 1970s that it should be difficult to comprehend, at least at first glance. Everyone won't readily absorb something as profound as our first journey to somewhere beyond Earth. Sometimes I look up at the full Moon on a clear night and still shake my head in amazement. “Wow, twelve guys walked around up there!”

  To have made it to the Moon less than one hundred years after the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk was a stunning feat, apparently one too spectacular for some people to accept as real. That's how special the lunar landings were. Hoax believers are just one more indication of Apollo's greatness.

  GO DEEPER…

  Books

  Bean, Alan. Apollo. Shelton, CT: Greenich Workshop Press, 1998.

  Cernan, Gene. The Last Man on the Moon. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2000.

  Chaikin, Andrew. Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts. New York: Penguin Books, 2009.

  Collins, Michael. Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009.

  Kranz, Gene. Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009.

  Plait, Phil. Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing “Hoax.” New York: Wiley, 2002.

  Ottaviani, Jim, Zander Cannon, and Kevin Cannon. T-Minus: The Race to the Moon. New York: Aladdin, 2009.

  Other Sources

  For All Mankind (DVD), Criterion.

  From the Earth to the Moon (DVDs), HBO Films and Tom Hanks.

  In the Shadow of the Moon (DVD), Velocity/Thinkfilm.

  Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon (DVD), HBO and Playtone.

  To the Moon (DVD), NOVA.

  When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions (DVDs), the Discovery Channel.

  What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof….

  —Christopher Hitchens

  Iowe a huge debt of gratitude to Chariots of the Gods? author Erich von Däniken. His 1968 book was a bestseller and later spawned a documentary in the 1970s that faithfully presented his case that advanced space travelers visited Earth t
housands of years ago and interacted with ancient humans. At some point along the way in my childhood, I saw the documentary on TV and was amazed. I may have only been nine or ten years old at the time, but I was bright enough to recognize that this was a big deal. Aliens had influenced, maybe even started, human civilization! I was shocked and so impressed by how all the evidence converged on the same obvious conclusion: extraterrestrials were here! And the evidence is all over the place. Clearly, extraterrestrials helped build massive structures all around the world and many cultures remember them in folklore and art.

  Yes, like millions of others, Von Däniken fooled me. He reeled me in, hook, line, and sinker, and had me believing that extraterrestrials built the Egyptian pyramids, placed those giant statues on Easter Island, had a spaceport with runways in Peru, and maybe even mated with us. The documentary inspired me to find Von Däniken's book at the library. An interesting side note is that the original 1968 publication of Von Däniken's book was titled, Chariots of the Gods? Today that question mark has been dropped, however, making the title a declaration rather than a question. But this is a complete reversal of reality. As more people have looked into the ancient astronaut idea over the years, Von Däniken's claims have only become less convincing and his evidence exposed as obviously out of line with the facts. I found the book at the library but don't recall if I actually read it. I do remember seeing the photos inside of it and feeling convinced that there must be something to this story. I was particularly impressed by a photo of ancient artwork that seemed to show an astronaut at the controls of a spaceship. Looking back, I can forgive myself for being a naïve child, but why exactly did I fall for Von Däniken's fairy tale?