Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [165]
In August 2001 Kaysing was interviewed by Katie Couric on the Today show. By then, Kaysing’s theory had morphed to involve Area 51. He was often quoted as saying that the Apollo landings were filmed at a movie studio there. “Area 51 is one of the most heavily guarded facilities in the United States,” Kaysing said, and anyone who tried to go there “could be shot and killed without any warning. With good reason… because the moon sets are still there.”
In the twenty-first century, a new generation of moon hoaxers walk in Kaysing’s footsteps to expose what they say is NASA’s fraud. Like the game of Whac-A-Mole, as soon as one element of the conspiracy appears to be disproven another allegation surfaces—from missing telemetry tapes to outright murder. So aggravated has America’s formidable space agency become over the moon hoaxers that in 2002, NASA hired aerospace historian Jim Oberg to write a book meant to challenge conspiracy theorists’ questions and claims—now numbering hundreds—in a point-by-point rebuttal. When news of the project was leaked to the media, NASA got such bad press over it they canceled the book.
The idea that the moon landing was faked was born at a time of high government mistrust. In 1974, for the first time in history, a U.S. president resigned. In 1975, the CIA admitted it had been running mind-control programs, a number of which involved human experiments with dangerous, illegal drugs. Then, in April, Saigon fell. The general antigovernment feeling was heightened by the fact that while government proved capable of many nefarious deeds it had been unable to win the war in Vietnam; 58,193 Americans were killed trying.
Kaysing was also tapping into a tradition. There had been one successful Great Moon Hoax already, over 130 years earlier, in 1835. Beginning on August 25 of that year, the New York Sun published a series of six articles claiming falsely that life and civilization had been discovered on the moon. According to the newspaper story, winged humans, beavers the size of people, and unicorns were seen through a powerful telescope belonging to Sir John Herschel, the most famous astronomer at the time. Editions of the newspapers sold out, were reprinted, and sold out again. Circulation soared, and the New York Sun made tremendous profits over the story, which readers believed to be true. On the subject of the public’s gullibility, Edgar Allan Poe, who also wrote for the paper, said, “The story’s impact reflects on the period’s infatuation with progress.” But the original Great Moon Hoax came and went without a conspiratorial bent because there was no government entity to blame. It was a publicity stunt to sell papers, not perceived as a nefarious plan by a government elite to manipulate and control the common man.
Shortly after Kaysing’s book was published (it is still in print as of 2011), a 1978 Hollywood film followed along the same lines. Peter Hyams’s Capricorn One told the story of a faked NASA landing on Mars. Even James Bond entered the act, referencing a lunar-landing conspiracy in the film Diamonds Are Forever. From there, the moon-hoax theory remained a quiet staple among conspiracy theorists for decades, but with the rise of the Internet in the late 1990s, the moon-hoax concept resurfaced and eventually made its way into the mainstream press. In February of 2001, Fox TV aired a documentary-style hourlong segment called Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? and the debate was rekindled around the world. This gave way to an unusual twenty-first-century moon-hoax twist.
In September of 2002, Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, agreed to be interviewed by Far Eastern TV. This was because “they seemed like legitimate journalists,” Aldrin explains. Buzz Aldrin has the highest profile of the twelve