The origins of the Moon hoax theory...
The whole gigantic, noisy and profitable edifice of Moon-landing denial, an industry of doubt that has been feeding authors for decades, self-styled researchers and producers of sensationalist documentaries, did not arise from a secret journalistic investigation or from the deathbed confession of an insider, but stems entirely from a single book, self-published in 1976: "We Never Went to the Moon" (Non siamo mai andati sulla Luna in Italian). Its author, Mr. Bill Kaysing, is systematically revered by conspiracy theorists as a heroic dissident engineer or a scientist purged by NASA because he knew uncomfortable truths. The historical record, however, gives us a diametrically opposite profile. Kaysing was an English graduate, without the most basic training in physics, mathematics or astrodynamics. Between 1956 and 1963 he worked for Rocketdyne, a division of North American Aviation responsible for designing the Saturn V engines, but his job was that of technical writer and librarian: in short, he laid out documents, filed records and corrected the grammar of manuals written by the real engineers. Contrary to what conspiracy lore often romanticizes, Kaysing was not fired by the company for uncovering alleged fraud at all, nor did he suffer any professional wrong to avenge. He resigned voluntarily in 1963, a full six years before the Apollo 11 mission and at a time when the final lunar hardware literally still existed only on paper. He left the corporate world simply to change his lifestyle, retiring to work as a freelance writer. In those years, however, he nurtured a deep, visceral and paranoid aversion to the federal government and the military-industrial complex, convincing himself that the entire space program was just a colossal scam to drain public funds during the Cold War. His "revenge" against the system therefore did not stem from a personal injustice, but from cynical publishing calculation combined with genuine anti-government resentment. Kaysing sensed that in an America left traumatized by Vietnam and by the Watergate scandal, distrust of institutions was a highly marketable commodity. Unscrupulously exploiting the fact that he had "worked at Rocketdyne", while carefully omitting that he was a proofreader there, he put together an essay that is a true manifesto of technical and scientific illiteracy. In his text, Kaysing mistakes ordinary photographic reflections for studio lights, completely ignores the basic concepts of exposure time when explaining the absence of stars in the black sky and shows that he has not the slightest notion of the conservation of motion in a vacuum when he analyzes the oscillations of the flag. There is not a single line in his book that could survive a first-year high school physics exam. And yet, by playing on the general public's scientific ignorance and on the perverse fascination that conspiracies exert on the human mind, that pamphlet became an underground success. From those few dozen pages, steeped in illogical deductions and glaring calculation errors, much of the modern denialist religion was born. Every single photographic anomaly or alleged physical discrepancy debated online today is nothing but an echo, an endlessly recycled copy-and-paste of the fanciful theories dreamed up in the 1970s by a former librarian looking for easy money and attention, turning humanity's most extraordinary engineering achievement into the most banal, cynical and profitable of literary businesses.
