Kaysing’s alternate theory was elaborate. He believed the astronauts had been removed from the ship moments before takeoff, flown to Nevada, where, a few days later, they broadcast the moon walk from the desert. People claimed to have seen Armstrong walking through a hotel lobby, a show girl on each arm. Aldrin was playing the slots. They were then flown to Hawaii and put back inside the capsule after the splash down but before the cameras arrived. This scenario was turned into Capricorn One, probably the best acting work of O.J. Simpson’s career. In that movie, which did as much as Kaysing to spread doubt, the capsule burns up on reentry, leaving NASA with no choice: they must kill the astronauts. O.J. escapes, runs across the desert, and shows up at his own funeral. This twist was said to echo another aspect of the conspiracy, the most chilling. Some attributed the fire that tore through the rehearsal capsule during preparations for Apollo 1, killing three astronauts—Gus Grissom, Edward White II, Roger Chaffee—was really part of a cover-up, a way to silence men who were about to go public.
At any other time, such theories would have been dismissed as a madman’s raving, but America was willing to doubt in the seventies. That’s when the dream faded, when everything we’d been told began to sound like a fairy tale. American history itself was questioned, rewritten. Were we in fact the good guys at Plymouth Rock? How was the West really won? It was all recast in the afterglow of the Vietnam War, which was escalated with lies, and Watergate, when the president operated in the way of Don Vito Corleone. In other words, the space program, which began in one era, the buzz-cut age of American exceptionalism, culminated in another. There was a new sensibility. We were all becoming conspiracy theorists, trained to see behind the screen, spot the hoax, suspect everything. That cynicism is the only thing many Americans still have in common. It used to be baseball; now it’s the certainty that we’re being tricked.
Of all the fables that have grown up around the moon landing, my favorite is the one about Stanley Kubrick, because it demonstrates the use of a good counternarrative. It seemingly came from nowhere, or gave birth to itself simply because it made sense. (Finding the source of such a story is like finding the source of a joke you’ve been hearing your entire life.) It started with a simple question: Who, in 1969, would have been capable of staging a believable moon landing?
