Moon-landing conspiracy theories fail truth tests

To this day, millions of Americans think Apollo 11 never landed on the moon — nor any of the other five lunar missions.

The digital world is teeming with dozens of conspiracy theories about the moon landings, and they all start with a common thread: The government masterminded the fakery.

From that, the variations flow. Some deniers point to anomalies in photos — shadows in the wrong places and no stars in the sky behind the lunar module. Others contend renowned filmmaker Stanley Kubrick outdid himself by making a movie that duped the world.

The theories have been debunked by independent researchers, yet they still live 50 years later.

Deniers popped up almost immediately after the Apollo 11 landing, news accounts show. But the conspiracy theories didn't start taking root until the mid-1970s, when a book titled "We Never Went to the Moon" came out, said Rick Fienberg, a spokesman for the American Astronomical Society. 

"This was the time of Watergate, Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers," Fienberg said. "People began to wonder whether the government was telling them the truth."

Two decades later, the internet breathed new life into the conspiracy theories by taking them "from the fringe into everybody's news feed," he said. 

Opinion polls have routinely estimated that 5 percent of Americans don't believe the moon landings happened, Fienberg said. Using that figure, with the U.S. population totaling roughly 327 million, the number of deniers comes in just shy of 10 million.

"People like to be difficult," said Josh Stoff, curator of the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, which is home to one of the original lunar modules. 

Stoff dismisses the notion of a conspiracy if for no other reason than the sheer number of people who would have had to keep the hoax a secret for decades. Hundreds of thousands of federal and private employees across the country worked on the Apollo program.

James Head worked at Mission Control. He is offended by the conspiracy theories. 

"Why would I lie?" said Head, now a professor of planetary geoscience at Brown University. "Why would I build a career on this?"

Fienberg is resigned that the conspiracy theories will live on, no matter all the evidence to the contrary. For example, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has transmitted high-resolution pictures that show the lunar modules, the moon buggies and even the astronauts' footprints.

"They would have to admit they were wrong, that the government didn't lie," Fienberg said of deniers. "That doesn't conform to their world view."

By Craig Schneider

craig.schneider@newsday.comScraigo

Craig Schneider is a Long Island native and Stony Brook University alumnus. He joined Newsday as a general assignment reporter in January 2018 after 20 years at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.