There is a special place in my cold, shriveled heart reserved for the Moon landing hoax crowd — the true believers who, against all available evidence and common sense, have convinced themselves that humanity’s single greatest technological achievement was faked on a soundstage somewhere in the desert by Stanley Kubrick, the CIA, or whichever shadowy organization their YouTube algorithm is currently promoting.
Let’s set the scene. It’s July 20, 1969. Hundreds of millions of people around the world are glued to their televisions. Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins are hurtling through the void, strapped inside a tin can powered by math, grit, and a national sense of “let’s see if we can do it before Russia does.”
Twelve men — actual human beings — walked on the surface of the Moon between 1969 and 1972. They planted flags. They collected rocks. They installed instruments. They kicked up dust that floated exactly the way dust floats in a vacuum, something not a single Hollywood special effects house at the time could have convincingly faked. (Watch a feather fall in a vacuum chamber sometime, if you’re feeling ambitious. Then try to stage it with 1969 technology.)
But no. Apparently, that wasn’t enough. Because forty years later, a critical mass of people watched a blurry YouTube video explaining that the flag “waves in the wind” (it doesn’t) or that there are “no stars in the sky” (correct — because of camera exposure settings, you walnut) — and decided that several hundred thousand scientists, engineers, pilots, technicians, mathematicians, and support staff all participated in a global conspiracy without a single credible leak, confession, or shred of legitimate evidence.
That’s right. The same country that can’t keep a politician’s affair secret for six weeks supposedly kept a fake Moon landing airtight for half a century.
I would laugh if it weren’t so appalling. You know what’s easier than building a Saturn V rocket, launching human beings into lunar orbit, and returning them safely? Faking the footage and hoping no one notices that the math doesn’t add up, that the Moon rocks match no terrestrial geology, that the retroreflectors we left on the lunar surface can still be pinged by Earth-based lasers today — if you happen to have a spare observatory in your backyard.
If you ever want to experience secondhand embarrassment powerful enough to rupture an organ, just spend five minutes listening to a Moon landing denier. It’s like watching someone proudly announce they’ve outsmarted gravity by falling down the stairs on purpose.
And let’s not even get into the logistical nightmare. Thousands of engineers, scientists, radio operators, and ground control personnel were involved. Do you think all of them were paid off? Silenced? Killed? Hypnotized? Please. The government can’t even keep the location of the good office coffee machine a secret, let alone orchestrate a global fake Moon mission.
The Moon landing hoax theory doesn’t just insult the astronauts. It insults the thousands of anonymous engineers who burned out their lives designing fuel cells, guidance computers, lunar modules, reentry trajectories, pressure suits, and a thousand other tiny miracles of physics and engineering — all so some guy named Chad with a conspiracy podcast and a ring light can tell you it was all filmed in Burbank.
The saddest part? The people who scream the loudest about “thinking for themselves” are the ones most desperately clinging to the easiest answers. It’s much simpler to believe in a hoax than to accept that humanity, for one shining moment, actually did something extraordinary.
If you think the Moon landing was fake, I have good news: you don’t need to look up at the night sky for answers. You can find everything you’re looking for by staring straight into a mirror. You want to see a hoax? Look at the one you’re pulling on yourself.