Conspiracy Theories on the Moon Landing: All lies!

These days, the movie "First Man" with Ryan Gosling is in the role of Neil Armstrong, and in the Internet forums, the usual doubters and persistently claim that no one was on the moon. Never, never, never. As proof, they made short video sequences: Once astronauts rush away from critical questions, aggressively swinging their fists, steadfastly refusing to swear on the Bible to ever really have been up there.

Whatever they object to, the doubters will feel affirmed and remember their role model - American author Bill Kaysing. In 1976, he unmasked the moon's flight as what he has since become a conspiracy theorist: a gigantic, completely overstimulated staging, filmed in top-secret television studios. A show so megalomaniacal and impossible to realize that after all, the world should immediately see the truth, Kaysing's truth.

At an early stage, Bill Kaysing saw the "most compelling news story of the entire twentieth century and perhaps all time" in the moonlight. And at the same time the biggest fake that ever staged a government. He published his theses in self-publishing in 1976, thus establishing the subversive and lucrative genre of moon landing conspiracies.

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In his book, "We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty-Billion Dollar Swindle," he explained in detail why the landing was impossible. In the late fifties, according to a feasibility study, it had been regarded as a completely hopeless undertaking. Chance of success: 0.0017 percent.

And only ten years later, everything should suddenly have worked like clockwork - without any incident? From a purely statistical point of view, that would be very strange.

And who staged it? Stanley Kubrick

Kaysing specifically named Ross and Reiter: The film was shot on behalf of then-President Richard Nixon, also known by the nickname "Tricky Dick", at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino. The gigantic forgery was staged by none other than star director Stanley Kubrick, whose sci-fi film "2001 - Odyssey in Space" had been published in 1968.

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Bill Kaysing

His fans Bill Kaysing is considered a knowledgeable insider. After all, he worked for several years in a leading position for a supplier of the Apollo program: In 1956 he joined the Rocketdyne Research Department and was responsible - without being an engineer - the department for technical publications.

Kaysing, whom his daughter once called a "vagabond," quit his job in 1963 and invented a radically new. He sold his house, roaming from place to place in a motorhome, searching for spectacular stories as a freelance reporter and proclaiming himself "the fastest pen in the West."

Soon, Bill Kaysing came up with entertaining self-help books that carried a touch of American existentialism. He wrote about how you can buy a piece of land with little money, feed on a dollar a day or set up on a houseboat. Once he published a programmatic newspaper called "The Better World News". In it he celebrated life as a great adventure and warned against materialistic temptations, which meant a new form of social bondage.

While his homeland sank in the Vietnam War, Kaysing recognized a dangerous opponent in the state. Nobody, he claimed, should see a scripture in official statements. He himself distrusted any official success reports. For Kaysing it was clear: in every war - even in a cold - the truth dies first.

In mid-July 1969, half a billion people watched live on television as astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin jumped around on Earth's moon, while Michael Collins remained in the capsule as the third man. Nearly no one doubted the message of the krisseligen black and white pictures: America has made it to the moon! Not even the Soviet Union was skeptical.

Antarctic course instead of moon

At first, Bill Kaysing's book about the Moon Conspiracy was ignored, ridiculed, or mocked. And yet it found enthusiastic readers and quickly gained cult status. Because unlike the end of the 1960s, many Americans now saw skeptically what their government told them. Scandals had shaken the public, especially the Watergate affair. Instead of being visionaries, politicians in the cinema have now been characterized as corrupt, incompetent, power-hungry: villains who are at stake, not just for the good of the nation.

From now on, Bill Kaysing and his fans consistently questioned everything that is considered proof of the moon landing. Why do the photos look like they were created by professionals? How is it that there are no stars in the vast majority of pictures? And why did the US flag flutter, though there's no atmosphere up there? The answers can be found in the photo gallery.

In the cinema: the space adventure "departure to the moon"

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Universal Pictures

On every argument Kaysing had idiosyncratic explanations. Hundreds of thousands of people watched the launch locally. So what? As soon as Apollo 11 was out of sight, the author explained to his audience, the astronauts had secretly changed the course. While everyone thought the space shuttle was headed for the moon, it flew in the direction of Antarctica in Kaysing's version. Following his "alternative facts," the astronauts spent a few days there before being dropped by a military plane in the Pacific, where they were later hoisted on board an aircraft carrier in front of running cameras.

A reporter from the US magazine "Wired" told Kaysing in the mid-nineties of a pilot who has seen exactly how the command module of the Apollo 15 mission slipped from an unidentified cargo plane. Unfortunately, he no longer has the name of the witness. Also the name of the airline: unfortunately omitted.

Answer à la Astronaut: Straight straight line

The real astronauts responded angrily to the insinuations that they had acted only as actors in the greatest hoax of history. So in 1996, Bill Kaysing received a letter from astronaut Jim Lovell, commander of the almost tragically failed mission Apollo 13: "Leave a legacy you can be proud of, not some garbage where readers have to doubt their sanity."

It must have been in Lovell. The newspaper "Metro" he said, Kaysing was probably brainwashed, programmed, at least "wacky" (crazy). Kaysing then accused him of slander and wanted money from Lovell, who had damaged his credibility, but lost in 1997 in court.

Legendary is the encounter of Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin with a camera crew: In September 2002, reporter Bart Sibrel pursued the second man on the moon; held out a Bible to him and demanded to swear that he was really there; insulted him with "coward" and "liar". What happened then (here in the video): Aldrin, 73, countered with a lopsided right straight in the face of 35 years younger Sibrel.

Kaysing held fast to his wild theories. Few knew that this jumble could take responsibility: He cared for the homeless, supported the founding of a church, last resorted to neglected cats. For about three decades nothing could dissuade him from his moon landing theses - Bill Kaysing took her to the grave when he died on 21 April 2005 at the age of 82 years.