Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

aMerICaN SpaCefLIght hIStory’S MaSter NarratIve
aND the MeaNINg of MeMory
375
economic depressions, wars, and disasters; and enjoys the misery foisted upon
the culture under attack. advocates of conspiracy assign demonic omnipresence
to whatever and whomsoever they have decided are a part of the conspiracy.
they possess a special source of power which is used malevolently against
others, especially those who have learned about the conspiracy and are seeking
to combat it. any suggestion from non-believers that a presumed conspiracy
might be just as easily and accurately explained by some less diabolical method
is met with a sharp rebuke that the non-believer is either a willing participant
or a dupe being used by the conspirators. 65
almost from the point of the frst spacefight missions, a small group of
americans began to spin conspiracy theories. these range from fantastical theories
of extraterrestrial visitation, abduction, and government complicity, to the
development of secret technologies such as the aurora ultra-secret spaceplane, to
elaborate collusions between great powers to subvert human liberties. by far the
most important of these were those that emerged to question the Moon landings
undertaken by NaSa during project apollo, and it is this conspiracy theory
that I intend to discuss in this short essay. the Moon landing had, they argued,
been faked in hollywood by the federal government for purposes ranging—
depending on the particular apollo landing denier—from embezzlement of
the public treasury to complex motivations involving international intrigue
and murderous criminality. for example, andrew Chaikin commented in his
massive history of the apollo Moon expeditions that at the time of the apollo
8 circumlunar fight in December 1968 some people thought it was not real;
instead it was “all a hoax perpetrated by the government.” bill anders, an
astronaut on the mission, thought live television would help convince skeptics
since watching “three men foating inside a spaceship was as close to proof as
they might get.” 66 he could not have been more wrong.
Some of those skeptical of the apollo fights made their cases based on
naïve and poorly constructed knowledge, but imagery from space did not seem
to help. for example, my paternal grandfather, Jefrey hilliard Launius, was a
75-year-old farmer from southern Illinois at the time of the frst Moon landing
in 1969. a Democrat since the great Depression of the 1930s—because, as he
said, roosevelt gave him a job with the Work projects administration (Wpa)
when he could not feed his family and was on the verge of losing everything—
his denial of the Moon landing was based essentially on lack of knowledge and
65. this conspiracy motif has been an important part of the “political correctness” debate
currently raging in which everyone who does not accept at face value the arguments about
minority oppression and the means of ending it, even though those committed to the
goal do not themselves agree on the proper means, are charged with racism, chauvinism,
or prejudice. See aaron Wildovsky, The Rise of Radical Egalitarianism (Washington, DC:
american university press, 1991).
66. Chaikin, A Man in the Moon, p. 100.