The post below operates on the assumption that the reader understands that the moon landings were a hoax. But I don’t really know that about my readers, in fact I suspect many cling tenaciously to the lie. So I want to address two aspects of the lie – first, allowing yourself to doubt, and second, debunking sites that protect the lie to this day, almost 47 years from the first fake landing.

While the late Dave McGowan was working on his Laurel Canyon series, his wife sent him an article about how a supposed moon rock that the U.S. had gifted to the Dutch turned out to be petrified wood. It caused a lot of embarrassment. McGowan, never one put off by what people might think of him, decided to take a detour and wrote a series called Wagging the Moondoggie. It was up on the Internet at one time, but since his death his son has taken down all of his writings with a promise they will reappear someday with some spit and polish on them. Fortunately, I made pdf copies last summer when I heard Dave was ill. This is from his opening paper:

And yet, despite the fact that [Apollo] was a relatively benign lie, there is a tremendous reluctance among the American people to let go of the notion that we sent men to the Moon. There are a couple of reasons for that, one of them being that there is a romanticized notion that those were great years – years when one was proud to be an American. And in this day and age, people need that kind of romanticized nostalgia to cling to.

But that is not the main reason that people cling so tenaciously, often even angrily, to what is essentially the adult version of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. What primarily motivates them is fear. But it is not the lie itself that scares people; it is what that lie says about the world around us and how it really functions. For if NASA was able to pull off such an outrageous hoax before the entire world, and then keep that lie in place for four decades, what does that say about the control of the information we receive? What does that say about the media, and the scientific community, and the educational community, and all the other institutions we depend on to tell us the truth? What does that say about the very nature of the world we live in?

That is what scares the hell out of people and prevents them from even considering the possibility that they could have been so thoroughly duped. It’s not being lied to about the Moon landings that people have a problem with, it is the realization that comes with that revelation: if they could lie about that, they could lie about anything.

Indeed, that is the basis for fear, and indeed they have lied about everything. Am I jumping too far ahead of you there? Would you rather I take it one lie at a time? OK.

And, by the way, I disagree with Dave that this lie is “benign.” It was used to divert billions of dollars into other secret programs, most involving weaponry, some of which might well have been put on demonstration on 9/11 – pure speculation, but something turned those buildings to dust. Everything is connected to everything else. The Apollo hoax was a most contemptuous affair, a sign that even at that time we had already lost control of our own government. And there were murders committed on the way.

In another paper (there are 14) he mentions, once he took the dive, how easy it was to judge that the program was a hoax. This has been my experience. All you have to do is look at the evidence. It is kind of a no-brainer, to the point where I have to think that if you have looked at the evidence and still believe Apollo was real, you might be cognitively impaired.

(The rest of this piece was re-posted as “debunking sites” above.)