If you want to gauge how truly insane and moronic some Americans can be, just do a google search on "Moon landing conspiracy."
So contentious is the issue that the topic on Wikipedia is now blocked from editing. What idiocy! We have a President spying on most of us, three wars, and THIS is what 6% of us find most important?! Yes, according to a Gallup Poll in 1999, 89% of us believe that we landed on the moon in 1969-onwards, while 6% do not.
Amazing, and we know how they vote. I'm not giving any of the living-proponents of this crap theory any advertising, so here's the deadite who started it all: Bill Kaysing. Kaysing was generally a transient who worked a short time as a technical writer for Rocketdyne (like "Yo-Yo Dyne" from Buckaroo Banzai) until 1963, but was generally a bum who found a new way to make money. He could be called a former "disgruntled employee."
Fox News' overly-credulous 2001 special on this goofy conspiracy theory just goes without saying about the quality of their programming and of their viewers.
Some theories have Stanley Kubrick being part of the conspiracy, helping with the same effects he used in "2001: A Space Odyssey." But, it seems movies have probably played-a-hand in most of this.
In a brief scene in the James Bond thriller, "Diamonds are Forever" (1971, three years before Kaysing's book) there is the faking of a moonlanding! In 1978, the movie "Capricorn One" increased the popularity of this theory.
I saw Capricorn One when it was first released, and it is more relevant as an expression of post-Watergate cynicism towards the federal government than anything. Oh yeah, O.J.'s in it, nuff-said, it sucks.
Today, the tin-foil hat crew are rejoicing: NASA says it cannot-find the original master tapes of the video-feed from the first moonlanding. Big deal, we have copies from it, and I'm betting they locate them soon. It all reminds one of how much "aliens" from abduction accounts resemble aliens from bad 1950s B-movies. I'd chock-it-up to the fact that many people don't understand allegory and metaphor--they can only view the world, movies, books, words, as literal reality (like the Christian Bible). This makes them crazy, of course, and dangerously stupid. We now know the political results of this lack-of-consciousness. We saw it 60+ years-ago in Germany...
Oh, the whack-jobs. And, they say liberals are conspiracy nuts! BTW, this is a nice little site you've got going here. This is my first visit and I'll be back to check you out later. I loved the post about Fidel.
ReplyDeleteMany-thanks! Check Capricorn One, it's actually got a few "moments" in it. As a kid, the idea of the government watching-people, making them and their lives disappear--all portrayed in Capricorn--was disturbing. I have some great personal-anecdotes that will be posted later-on. They are mostly adolescent-ones, and a few college and post-college ones. Crazy stuff.
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