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Honestly, why would you screw with Buzz Aldrin?Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969. It provided the scientific and national pinnacle of a decade defined by upheaval. And like the Kennedy assassination and the ongoing machinations of the Cold War, the Apollo 11 mission provided fertile ground for conspiracy theories in the decades to come. In 1974, two years after Apollo 17 blasted off from the Taurus-Littrow Valley, Bill Kaysing authored We Never Went To The Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, the first canonical text of the lunar landing hoax conspiracy.Kaysing had worked as a technical writer for Rocketdyne (who, coincidentally, would contract to build the Apollo missions' rockets after Kaysing left the company in 1963) before striking out on his own as a freelance writer. According to an interview Sibrel filmed towards the end of Kaysing's life, the genesis of the book came from a junkie Vietnam Vet who was living in Kaysing's houseboat in the early 70s. Reading the text now, Kaysing's vision of the entire Apollo Space Project working in totally covert locations while still being able to get away for martinis and black jack on the Sunset Strip reads like Borroughsian science fiction. We Never Went To The Moon is out of print (score your own copy on the used market for about $500), yet Kaysing's ideas continue to form the backbone of moon truthers' arguments that Apollo never left the Earth's orbit.
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Not every waving flag needs a breeze–at least not in space. When astronauts were planting the flagpole they rotated it back and forth to better penetrate the lunar soil (anyone who's set a blunt tent-post will know how this works). So of course the flag waved! Unfurling a piece of rolled-up cloth with stored angular momentum will naturally result in waves and ripples–no breeze required!
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As long as some people find more consolation in limitations than exploration, scientists will have to play interstellar whack-a-mole with moon truthers. If the stars are in our favor, we'll have Aldrin around to be our muscle just a little longer.Made possible by Operation Avalanche. In theaters September 16th.The conspiracy theory of society cannot be true because it amounts to the assertion that all results, even those which at first sight do not seem to be intended by anybody, are the intended results of the actions of people who are interested in these results.