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it solidifies at the bottom of the cavity, and the earth above it collapses, creating the crater. The glass-coated rock, giant boulders, and loose rubble that remain resemble the craters found on the moon. So similar in geology were the atomic craters to moon craters that in voice transcripts sent back during the Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 missions, astronauts twice referred to the craters at the Nevada Test Site. During Apollo 16, John W. Young got specific. A quarter of a million miles away from Earth, while marveling at a lunar crater laden with rocks, Young asked fellow astronaut Charles M. Duke Jr., “Remember how it was up at that crater? At Schooner.” He was referring to the atomic crater Ernie Williams took the astronauts to in Area 20. During Apollo 17, while looking at the Haemus Mountains, Harrison H. Schmitt can be heard talking about the Buckboard Mesa craters in Area 19. For Ernie Williams, hearing this comparison was a beautiful moment. For lunar-landing conspiracy theorists, of which there are millions worldwide, the feeling was one of suspicion. For these naysayers, Schmitt’s telemetry tapes, the moon photographs, the moon rocks—everything having to do with the Apollo moon missions would become grist for a number of ever-growing conspiracies that have been tied to man’s journey to the moon.

Just two months after Armstrong and Aldrin returned home, a UFO-on-the-moon conspiracy was born. On September 29, 1969, in New York City, the newest installment of National Bulletin magazine rolled off the printing press with a shocking headline: “Phony Transmission Failure Hides Apollo 11 Discovery. Moon Is a UFO Base,” it read. The author of the article, Sam Pepper, said he’d been leaked a transcript of what NASA had allegedly edited out of the live broadcast back from the moon, namely, that there were UFOs there. Various UFO groups pressed their congressmen to take action, several of whom wrote to NASA requesting a response. “The incident… did not take place,” NASA’s assistant administrator for legal affairs shot back in a memo from January 1970.

As time passed the ufologists continued to write stories about the moon being a base for aliens and UFOs. For the most part, NASA ignored them. But then, in the midseventies, a newly famous film director named Steven Spielberg decided to make a film about aliens coming down to visit Earth. He sent NASA officials his script for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, expecting their endorsement. Instead, NASA sent Spielberg an angry twenty-page letter opposing his film. “I had wanted co-operation from them,” Spielberg said in a 1978 interview, “but when they read the script they got very angry and felt that it was a film that would be dangerous. I think they mainly wrote the letter because Jaws convinced so many people around the world that there were sharks in toilets and bathtubs, not just in the oceans and rivers. They were afraid the same kind of epidemic would happen with UFOs.” Fringe ufologists were one thing as far as NASA was concerned. Steven Spielberg had millions of movie fans. He was a modern-day version of Orson Welles.

Right around the same time, another moon conspiracy theorist let his idea loose on the American public, a theory that did not involve UFOs. In 1974, a man named William Kaysing self-published a book called We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty-Billion-Dollar Swindle. With these three questions, Kaysing became known as the father of the lunar-landing conspiracy:

How can the American flag flutter when there is no wind on the moon?

Why can’t the stars be seen in the moon photographs?

Why is there no blast crater where Apollo’s landing vehicle landed?

Kaysing, who died in 2005, often said his skepticism began when he was an analyst and engineer at Rocketdyne, the company that designed the Saturn rockets that allowed man to get to the moon. While watching the lunar landing live on television, he said he experienced “an intuitive feeling that what was being shown was not real.” Later, he began scrutinizing the moon-landing photographs for