Origins The first book about the subject, We Never Went to the Moon: Americas Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle,[8] was written in 1974,[9] two years after the Apollo Moon flights had ended, and self-published in 1976, by Bill Kaysing (1922–2005), a senior technical writer hired in 1956 by Rocketdyne, the company which built the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V rocket,[10][11] despite having no knowledge of rockets or technical writing.[12] He served as head of the technical publications unit at the companys Propulsion Field Laboratory until 1963. Kaysings book made many allegations, and effectively began discussion of the Moon landings being faked.[13][14] The book claims that the chance of a successful manned landing on the Moon was calculated to be 0.0017%, and that despite close monitoring by the USSR, it would have been easier for NASA to fake the Moon landings than to really go there.[15][16] The Flat Earth Society was one of the first organizations to take up the cause and accuse NASA of faking the landings, arguing that they were staged by Hollywood with Walt Disney sponsorship, based on a script by Arthur C. Clarke and directed by Stanley Kubrick.[Note 1][17] Folklorist Linda Dégh suggests that writer-director Peter Hyams 1978 film Capricorn One, which shows a hoaxed journey to Mars in a spacecraft that looks identical to the Apollo craft, may have given a boost to the hoax theorys popularity in the post-Vietnam War era. She notes that this happened during the post-Watergate era, when American citizens were inclined to distrust official accounts. Dégh writes: The mass media catapult these half-truths into a kind of twilight zone where people can make their guesses sound as truths. Mass media have a terrible impact on people who lack guidance.[18] In A Man on the Moon,[19] first published in 1994, Andrew Chaikin mentions that at the time of Apollo 8s lunar-orbit mission in December 1968, similar conspiracy ideas were already in circulation.[20]
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 23:58:40 +0000
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