The Faux Frontier?

Back in July, around the anniversary of the first moon landing, I read a bunch of articles about Apollo 11 and the space program in general.

Since then — shock of shocks — my social media news feeds are almost all space stuff. Some is just clickbait, but I’ve also come across some cool and informative stuff.

Among the most ubiquitous “stuff” I see on the subject would be the thundering chorus of voices railing about how the moon landings — even the space program itself — were all a big hoax. These are inevitably pitched with the same fervor (and credibility) of the Flat Earthers. Clearly, there have been conspiracy theories of this nature since before Neil Armstrong even set foot on the lunar surface, but I confess I’ve actually been surprised by how pervasive this nonsense has become (and I’m generally pretty hard to surprise when it comes to the pervasive tentacles of the Idiocracy).

No doubt, a huge percentage of this shrillness comes from mere trolls, whose rate of reproduction on the interwebz rivals the world’s busiest rabbit hutch. Trolls in any field will latch onto almost anything to justify their otherwise meaningless existences. Still, the apparent genuine belief in such conspiracies far exceeds what I might have otherwise guessed, even in the present-day world of a la carte conspiracy theories for each day of the week.

Most telling, almost without exception, the “proof” that these adherents cite for their belief is “Go look it up for yourself! You’ll see!”

Yeah. Over my many, many years as an avid outer space nut, I’ve looked. And looked. And looked. It goes without saying that the preponderance of evidence is so heavily weighted to the landings’ veracity that even scratching its surface fills volumes (and the opposite is true; I’ve yet to find any sufficiently compelling contradictory evidence; such outlets for such “evidence” typically offer all the credibility of BuzzFeed or InfoWars). So much evidence in the “FOR” column, physical and otherwise, has been verified by non-NASA sources, particularly internationally (for God’s sake, the Soviets acknowledged it when acknowledging such a defeat was, for them, all but unthinkable) that evidence in the “AGAINST” column would have to be pretty staggering. If you can point me to it, have at it.

One of my favorite articles on this phenomenon that I came across is “How Stanley Kubrick Staged the Moon Landing” in The Paris Review. Informative and fun.

Anyhoo, since the July 20, I’ve been on a pretty good space movie kick. 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010, Apollo 13, Apollo 18, Europa Report, and others — not to mention keeping up, or trying to, with all the Star Trek and Star Wars spinoffs. I might even work in Capricorn I if I can stream it for free somewhere.