Why do so many people still believe the moon landings were a hoax? – podcast
It took 400,000 Nasa employees and contractors to put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in 1969 – but only one man to spread the idea that it was all a hoax. His name was Bill Kaysing.
It began as “a hunch, an intuition”, before turning into “a true conviction” – that the US lacked the technical prowess to make it to the moon (or, at least, to the moon and back). Richard Godwin tells Anushka Asthana how Kaysing’s self-published 1976 pamphlet We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle sought to provide evidence for his conviction by means of grainy photocopies and ludicrous theories. Yet somehow he established a few perennials that are kept alive to this day in Hollywood movies and Fox News documentaries, Reddit forums and YouTube channels.
And: Geoff Andrews on his part in the Guardian’s historic moon landings front page back in 1969 – and how he missed the famous quote
Photograph: Neil A Armstrong/AP
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