Moon landing conspiracy theories

Go ahead and intro us here.

Well, welcome to The Moon Conspiracies, where we tell you the real reason we never went back, because they don't want to tell you the real reason.

That's right.

They want to tell you it's about money, it's about, ah, there's nothing to find, there's nothing to do.

And also, don't get us started on the paltry government salary they earned to do all of this, and the hilarious lengths they had to go to provide some semblance of a life insurance policy for their families should the worst happen during the missions.

So, who first got the idea that the moon landings were faked? While it's highly likely there were at least a few individuals here and there who doubted man could accomplish such a thing a little over half a century after the end of the period in which humans were still hitching up covered wagons, the first to really get the moon landing hoax story going popularly was a writer called Bill Kaysing.

How did he do it? Well, Kaysing self-published a book in 1976 called We Never Went to the Moon, America's $30 Billion Swindle.

Released a few years after the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, Kaysing's book popularly introduced some of the most well-known talking points of moon landing deniers, such as that the astronauts should have been killed when they passed through the Van Allen radiation belts, noting the lack of stars in photographs, the missing blast crater below the lunar modules, etc.

The ridiculousness of these many claims, and how easily they crumple under the slightest bit of scrutiny, is likely why, in the 2002 re-release of his original book, Kaysing changed his story in various ways, including claiming that the engines on the Saturn V actually did work, and that Collins, Aldrin, and Armstrong did go to space after all, instead of going to hang out with strippers in Vegas.

He then states that all three men orbited the planet while pre-recorded, not live footage was shown on Earth.

Despite, to put it mildly, straining credibility on pretty much everything he said from start to finish, and him providing absurdly specific details generally without bothering to provide any evidence whatsoever backing up these claims and changing those specific details frequently over time, Kaysing's book and subsequent work nonetheless helped spawn the still thriving moon landing hoax conspiracy theory.

As for Kaysing… He didn't stop there.