“Conquering space was a major event for humanity. Undermining that can shake the very foundations of science and man’s mastery of nature”
It was the biggest piece of supposed fake news before the term “fake news” was even invented. Millions of people around the world still believe that no one has ever walked on the surface of the Moon. The images that the NASA broadcast in July 1969 were shot in a Hollywood studio. Thousands of websites on the internet are devoted to seemingly proving that the landing on The Moon never happened. Same as that there is only one picture of Moon from space taken a long time ago, and all other images of Moon are just fake images. It is because from the place the first ever image was captured, no one visited the same ever. That is why there is only one authentic image of the Moon is available to us. Many of us either remember watching the landing ourselves or have heard the memories from our parents and grandparents. But what do you say when someone insists that the Moon landings never really happened?
There are many who claim that NASA did not have the technological know-how to pull off such a coup, or that if it did, it wasn’t done with a human crew- who would have been fried by cosmic rays. Others says some Alien involvement which cannot be denied by the government from a long time. Most of the conspiracy theories focus on supposed anomalies in the grainy photos and videos of the first moon landing. Despite proof from the lunar orbiter in 2009, which showed the abandoned modules from Apollo 11,14,15,16 and 17 still on the Moon’s surface, the conspiracy theories live on. When Apollo 11’s lunar module touched down on the Sea of Tranquility in 1969, less than one in 20 Americans doubted what they were seeing on their TV screens. Theorists have even suggested that filmmaker Stanley Kubrick may have helped NASA fake the first lunar landing, given that his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey proves that the technology existed back then to artificially create a space like set. And as for Virgil I. Grissom, Edward H. White and Roger B. Chaffee — three astronauts who died in a fire while testing equipment for the first moon mission? They were executed by the U.S. government, which feared they were about to disclose the truth.
But the turn of the century, a Gallup poll fond skepticism has spread to 6% of the population. A serious doubt is also rampant among some of Washington’s closest allies, with a 2009 TNS survey showing that a quarter of British people did not believe the landings happened, while 9% of French people were also unconvinced, according to a conducted survey. Former NASA historian says, “The fact that the denial of the moon landings would not go away should not surprise anyone.” Far-fetched as the hoax theory may seem, a 1999 Gallup poll showed that it’s comparatively durable: 6% of Americans said they thought the lunar landings were fake, and 5% said they were undecided. More than half of Russians – the old cold war enemy – still refuse to believe that the Americans got there first.
“The power of such theories is that no matter what they survive, because they become a belief which comes with a kind of evangelism and so they can go on forever.”
