The New Yorker Radio Hour - Watching the Moon Landing

Episode Date: July 19, 2019

Some people have always believed that the moon landing was a government hoax, and, in the age of the Internet, that conspiracy theory continues to thrive. Andrew Marantz explores the value of skepticism, and the point at which disbelief leads to a totalitarian breakdown. We went to the archives for three real-time accounts of what it was like to watch the moon landing on television.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. On a July night in 1969, I was in summer camp with a whole bunch of kids, and we watched as a counselor dragged a big black and white television outside. And amidst the mosquitoes and all the rest, we sat on the ground and watched two astronauts walk on the moon. Me and about 600 million other people watched two men walking on the surface of the moon. It was the most incredible thing, but as remarkable as that event was, maybe just as amazing as to how many people refused to believe it. To this day, people say that the space voyage was faked,

an elaborate hoax engineered by NASA for some sort of nefarious purpose. And in some accounts, the fake footage was directed by none other than Stanley Kubrick. Generally, when I'm trying to understand something that outlandish and something that's all over the internet, I call on Andrew Moran's. He's a staff writer who reports for us on politics, extremism, and social media. So some sources say that 20% of Americans, 20% believe the moon landing never happened. This is something that goes way back. It obviously predates social media. Where does it come from?

What do we know? So I think there were skeptics from the moment that the footage was being beamed back to Earth, right? There were people watching that broadcast and saying, nah, I don't buy it. It doesn't seem real. And actually, there was this really interesting passage in Bill Clinton's autobiography, my life, that actually a lot of the moon hoax conspiracy theorists will point to, where he talks about, I think he was back in Arkansas working construction for the summer or something, and he talks to this kind of crumudgeonly older carpenter guy.

And he says, hey, what do you think? You know, we just landed on the moon. This is, you know, summer of 1969. And the carpenter goes, do you really think that happened? And young Bill Clinton says, yeah, I'm pretty sure it happened. And the carpenter says, I don't know, those television fellers could do whatever they want to do. They can make things seem real that aren't real. And then Bill Clinton, in this kind of ironic touch, says, you know, I thought he was a crank back then.

but after eight years in Washington, I think he might have been on to something. So the conspiracists will point to that as evidence that, you know, a president is confessing to this great hoax that he's sort of been clued into since he was in the White House. My read of that is these people, these skeptics, have always existed. But all they could really do in 1969 was talk to the guy next to them on the job. They couldn't go out on Facebook and, you know, blast their theories to the world. My understanding is that these rumors percolate for about six or seven years. And then in 1976, there comes along a self-published book by someone named Bill Kasing called We Never Went to the Moon, America's $30 billion swindle.

Who is Bill Kasing? And what was the theory that he was putting forward? So he was a guy who worked for a rocket manufacturing company many years before he puts out this book. claims that he saw these classified NASA documents that that proved that this never happened. His evidence, I don't think it will entirely surprise you to learn, is not rock solid. There's, for instance, there's this iconic image of the flag, the American flag being planted on the moon. If you think back to that image, you have a mental image of that, the flag is waving, right? Yeah. That seems like it should be impossible because there's no atmosphere.

on the moon. So what wind is it waving in? And there are dozens and dozens of things like this. There's a photo where, you know, it looks like the astronaut should be in shadow, but instead the astronaut is fully lit. People will say that's because it was on a soundstage. There's, I mean, literally dozens of these things. And there has been a kind of cottage industry of people, you know, knocking down these rumors one after another, NASA and other people, essentially since this book came out. What kind of exposure did he get? Yeah, so he didn't get much right away. He publishes this book in 1976.

It's a self-published book. You know, it's sort of in this long tradition of people writing pamphlets that have wacky ideas in them that don't really have a huge impact on the culture. And it kind of just sits there and slowly percolates for a while essentially until 2001. Fox puts out this documentary called Conspiracy Theory, Did We Land on the Moon? Tonight, investigate the most extraordinary event of the 20th century. They pose it as a question. They say this is controversial material, we don't know what's true or not true. And their main source, their main talking head for this was Bill Casey.

Could the government have orchestrated the deception of the century? NASA could have pulled off the greatest hopes of all times. You be the judge. So it's a little bit Trumpian. It's a little bit like, you know, a lot of people say, or I've heard that. Exactly. Many people are saying. Yeah. Right.

Many people are saying, and like the Trumpian impulse, the impulse is to shock and titillate. I mean, Fox has been the most ratings conscious, the most clever about getting stuff out there since its inception. And even then, you know, this was a big moment for the hoax theory, but as big as that exposure was, it was still just a one-time event. But then, you know, you move forward in time to the current decade when you have YouTube and all kinds of social networks, Facebook, you know, these things that kind of where you can get these feedback loops, these echo chambers, these rabbit holes. I don't know exactly how this kind of theory got started, but the theory develops that Stanley Kubrick, the director of The Shining, had also directed 2001 A Space Odyssey. 2001, a Space Odyssey came out a year before the moon landing. And after The Shining comes out in 1980, there is a small but passionate cohort of people who believe that The Shining was Stanley Kubrick's secret confession

to having been part of this secret government conspiracy. And there are reams of material. And so I think a great example of the YouTube version of this stuff is this very homemade-looking documentary called the Shining 2.0 or sometimes it's called the Shining Code 2.0. And it's basically this one guy who, it seems like, just sat down with a bit of editing software and made this extremely in-depth examination, I guess you could say, exegesis. Jack Nicholson plays the lead character Jack Torrance in The Shining.

Jack represents the director Stanley Kubrick and his experience with NASA in producing and directing the Apollo 11 Moon Mission. You're basically watching him freeze frame on the shining, write words in text on the screen. And it's essentially this for every bit of the shining. The eagle sitting on the window sill between the number 11 represents the Apollo 11 lunar module, the eagle. Wow. So it's a real la-la land. Yes. This is extreme. I mean, this makes Bill casing look like a rocket scientist.

Where is the moon landing conspiracy theory at today? Who still believes this and why? Look, it's impossible to put exact numbers on this, but there are a lot of people who believe things like this. And in fact, it's not just, you know, random cranks. There are people who believe this who have huge platforms. A good example is Joe Rogan, who has arguably the most popular podcast in the world. He's a comedian. He's interested in, you know, fighting, mixed martial arts fighting.

He's not quite a denialist that we landed on the moon, but he's definitely, um, hoax curious and you can hear him on his show doing this again and again you can theoretically you can jump higher and if you believe in NASA bro there's some videos

of guys jumping around on the moon the problem with the videos of people on the moon is that there are videos that look 100% fake so you're still wavering on whether we went to the moon I'm more way no I'm too

dumb and uneducated to really know but I am wavering more on the possibility that some of the footage was faked? He's obviously deeply intrigued, you could say, but he also has enough kind of distance and kind of self-ironic posture to know that this is wacky stuff. It sounds like it's good for business.

It's good for business. That could be it. Or it could be a combination of that and also that he wants to maintain his right to be skeptical. You know, there is this kind of fundamental thing that we have as humans, as Americans, we particularly in the press, you know, we like to be skeptical of claims. And, you know, frankly, some of the best art, comedy, investigative journalism, certainly, comes out of that skepticism, comes out of not believing the official narrative of something.

So it's an impulse that I think is really helpful in a lot of cases. It's just a question of how far do you take it? So conspiracy theories are all over the place in many different political contexts, but right now they're often associated with the alt-right. You have QAnon, Pizza Gate. Why is this kind of stuff so attractive to that particular political group? I think there are a lot of people who don't like the way things are going for them. A lot of people who really thought that they were going to support Trump,

and Trump was going to come in and drain the swamp. And it doesn't really seem like he's doing it. And so they need to come up with a... theory, in many cases, an extremely outlandish theory to explain why what they wanted to happen is actually happening. It's just not visible on the surface. So QAnon is a perfect example of this, right? You have a lot of people who, the basics of it is Trump is actually cleaning out all the corruption and all the alleged, you know, pedophile rings and all these really deep, dark things. He just doesn't want us the American public to know about it yet. So he's doing it in secret.

The Jeffrey Epstein arrest is a big part of this most recently, but this goes back way before that. PizzaGate was part of it where there was this allegation that Hillary Clinton's campaign manager was running a secret sex trafficking ring. Basically, there are these dots that people will connect, that to them, they've built up this kind of internally cohesive world where these are secret breadcrumbs that the Trump administration is dropping to them to let them know, we're taking care of stuff behind the scenes, we will reveal it all to you and everything will be okay. but we just have to take care of it first behind the scenes. Andrew, are there conspiracy theories on the left of politics as well? And what do those look like? Oh, definitely. You know, 9-11 conspiracies generally are the domain of the left.

And I should say, you know, all the allegations about Putin interfering with the 2016 election, it is literally speaking a conspiracy theory. It's one that has a lot of evidence behind it, but, you know, not all the evidence has panned out. Some of the things in the steel dossier were borne out by evidence. Some of them were not. And there are definitely people on the left who took everything in that dossier as gospel and advisedly, and they were proven wrong. So the human mind can make up a conspiracy theory about anything it wants to. How much does it matter whether or not people believe that we went to the moon in 1969? I think it matters in the sense that, you know, we have to live in a shared reality. It's fine to have an academic exercise where you go, how do I know what's really true? And how do I know what the shining is really about?

And how do I know that your blue is my blue? I mean, I think that stuff is really all to the good. The question is, can we ever get down off of that academic perch and come down to some shared ground truth where we, say, you know what, I think that the report that the CBO just put out is basically true. Or if I think it's not true, I have reasons for that. And, you know, you can listen to my reasons and I can listen to your reasons. Like, if we can't do that, it's very hard to have a republic. Now, it seems to me that not only do we have a president who has no problem propagating racism from the White House as much the most in years since say Woodrow Wilson, but we also have a president. of the United States, who even if he's not repeating conspiracy theories as absolute truth, he is gesturing toward his sympathy with them, whether it has to do with UFOs, whether it has to do with a sympathy with Alex Jones. How has that affected the whole politics that we think of

as Trumpism? Yeah, it's a big part of it. He does overtly signal that he doesn't really believe that vaccines are good for you. There's the individual level of that, which is, you know, his supporters can sort of find comfort in his denial of facts that are inconvenient, climate change being the biggest and most important one. But there's also the larger atmosphere that that creates, which Hannah Arendt had this famous phrase, you know,

in a totalitarian regime, nothing is true and everything is possible. So by just attacking the very notion of facticity, the very notion that you even could ever know information about the world, you know, you're not only rebutting one particular claim, you're creating a set of conditions where you can say anything. And then as an authoritarian figure, you can use that to your advantage. So you've done a very good job of sketching out the history and the problem. How do we fix it all? I think you just pass a bill in Congress and it should

take care of itself. No, I don't think it's that simple. I think, you know, I think about this stuff. I think a lot about the kind of informational morass we're in and this moment where nobody knows what to think or what to say about anything. I think of it like a, you know, like the opiate crisis or like the climate crisis. It's a big, complex tangle of things. And like any of those issues, it's going to take a lot of different approaches to get out of it. So I think, you know, we have to figure out what to do about big tech, whether they need to be regulated, whether they need to be broken up, whether they need to just be, you know, know, better understood and, you know, people need to find ways to interact with them in a more healthy way. Education is a big part of it. News literacy, you know, it sounds sort of on the nose,

but I think it would help if people knew kind of how the news was put together. I also think that just kind of reducing inequality and reducing the conditions that make people feel alienated and afraid and, frankly, angry at any institution that has any sway over their lives. would indirectly, but I think very meaningfully, combat this. But I think the key thing is we're really just at the beginning of dealing with the most outward symptoms of this. You know, we see someone come along who is breaking the rules of this or that social network. And, you know, we say that person should be banned. And then that person is either banned from the social network or not.

That is the end stage. That's the symptom. We're not getting to the underlying causes yet. And we need to do that. Andrew Moran's, thank you so much. Thank you. Andrew Morantz is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and he's been finishing up his book called

Anti-Social, Online Extremists, Techno-utopians, and the hijacking of the American conversation. It's out this fall. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In the ground floor apartment of a brownstone in the East 90s at around 8.30,

guests began to arrive for a moon-watching party being given by two young men just out of law school. When three Americans headed toward the moon, and two of them landed and left the vessel to bounce around and collect rocks, they were watched on television by hundreds of millions of people back on Earth. And as that singular event took place, reporters from the New Yorker fanned out across the city to watch the people watching. Here are three accounts of that evening, published in The New Yorker in 1969.

The male guests, most of whom were young lawyers, were dressed in light-colored summer suits or in richly colored shirts. The ties were wide, but not flowery. The women, who seemed a few years younger, were in silky, bold-patterned, bell-bottom trouser suits. Just 50 minutes from now, well within the hour. The moon is due to have visitors from another planet. The guests sat down on a sofa, on chair. or on a mattress, which had been brought in from a bedroom. Conversation about the moon landing was restricted to jokes or brief comments.

Many people seemed to want something to happen that was more exciting than what could really happen. It would be great if they found an animal, one man said. We've seen everything in simulation. They might as well do it all in simulation, a girl said. Several people said they were not sure whether the CBS simulation of the lunar module being shown at that moment was real or not. Hey, these furry claws coming down the ladder, someone said. No, coming out of a crater, said a girl.

A telephone in the next room rang and a young man went to answer it. When he returned, Walter Cronkite was saying, Commander Armstrong is about to pull the ring that will give us our first live television coverage from the moon. The telephone ring again, and someone said, let it ring. But another man, after hesitating, went to answer it. The landscape of the moon appeared on the screen.

The man announced, There's a girl up at the corner who can't find the party. The group was riveted to the screen in silence during Armstrong's descent to the ground. During his first steps and his first steps, and his first words, and during Colonel Aldrin's descent. Then there was some more joking. When we find the first moon men, we'll have to decide which ones to support.

The ones from the south, or the ones from the north, we'll have to send military advisors. On the sofa, a couple began talking about a girl named Margie. Suddenly, Armstrong emerged with amazing speed from the black shadow of the lunar module into the brilliant sunlight. There was a sigh from the group. Then it fell silent again for a moment.

There's something interesting in a crater here, Armstrong called out. A girl who was sitting on the floor began to tell about a friend of hers who had married a nun. The nun was in the lecture course he was giving, she said. He had her out of her robes and married in two weeks. And a year later, she had twins. On the screen, Aldrin was loping in a circle on the surface of the moon. The girl looked up at the screen and cried out, I just don't believe it.

I'm used to it already, a young man next to her said. When you get blasé about people going to the moon, you know you've changed. At the headquarters of the National Broadcasting Company in Rockefeller Center, the central control room was hot and stuffy, being packed with people in shirt sleeves. The controllers worked at two tiers of equipment-laden consoles, facing a wall covered with a formidable array of monitors. In the center of it sat the director, Tony Massuri, a bald man wearing a headset and a pink shirt.

Executives of the News Division occupied the second tier, and the center of this tier was occupied by the executive producer of the space unit, James Kitchell, a bushy-haired man wearing a short-sleevee black shirt. The voice of Frank McGee said, Neil Armstrong's on his stomach, feet first, coming out. Missouri shouted to a technician responsible

for the superimposition of titles on the screen. Set me up. First live picture from the moon, baby. Go to Houston, Kitchell said loudly. And take it, Missouri cried. Here it comes, Kitchell shouted. On the monitor appeared a ghostly, unclear yet

unmistakable, black and white. image of the lower portion of a heavily suited astronaut. The control room was filled with cheers and clapping. The foot, Missouri cried. Put first step on the moon, Kitchell ordered. And then he said, wait, he's not on the moon yet. So far, he's just on the footpad. That's okay, Missouri objected.

After all, what's the footpad connected to? The shin bone, someone said. There was some technician laughter. Armstrong's foot could now be. be seen raised as he tried mounting the lowest rung of the ladder. And then his voice could be heard. The surface appears to be very, very fine-grained. It's one small step.

Take it! First step on the moon! Everything became very quiet in the control room as the ghostly figure touched what seemed like white-rigging. It all looked like an old movie showing some frost-shrouted polar explor standing by the bulwark of an ice-bound ship. Start setting up a split screen with the White House and the lunar shots, Kitchell said. After a pause, he added, it's unbelievable. Unbelievable.

Armstrong's figure could be seen moving about the lunar surface as he tested his walk. He began walking with long, loping steps. Look at that, Kitchell said, galloping across the moon. Then the president made his telephone call to the astronauts. The interchange went off the air, and for a few moments, before the television lights and the White House were extinguished, Mr. Nixon could be seen on the monitor disengaging a microphone he had about his neck. Donald Meaney, a vice president of the NBC News Division, remarked, The picture is going everywhere in the world by satellite.

I hear they're getting a great picture in Bucharest, and in Belgrade. And, you know, nobody has the inside track on seeing these pictures. The scientists in Houston, the president, all of us in this room, perhaps Serbian peasants, they're all seeing the same fantastic live pictures at the same time. Nobody any better than anybody else, really. Maybe that holds something pretty good for all of us. The Lincoln Bar at the corner of Lennox Avenue in 135th Street in Harlem, scarcely anyone was looking or listening when Armstrong placed his foot on the moon.

A jukebox was blaring what the word. needs now by the sweet inspirations. A man with his back to the television set and a highball in his hand was telling a group of his friends about a girl he had just treated to a huge Chinese dinner who had declared on their way out of the restaurant that she now wanted a barbecue supper. Man, I had to unload her, he said. I didn't have enough left to put gas in my car. One of the customers reached out, touched him, and said, Hey, buddy, they walk in on the moon. The man with the highball put down his drink and walked out of the bar.

When Colonel Edwin Aldrin climbed down to join Armstrong, the jukebox in the corner had shifted to, I'm going to Chicago, sorry I can't take you. The bartender went and turned off the jukebox. Hey, leave that thing on, man. A male voice yelled. We ain't care about no moon. I do, the bartender said.

And there's a few other people here that do too. Well, damn, the man said. I hope those whiteys never come back. They might just decide to stay there, too. Nah. A female voice said, You can be sure the white man don't want to live up there. It's got no gold.

It's got no silver. It's got no oil. And ain't that what Wadi wants. He don't want no part of all that rock up there. The man whose girl had demanded the barbecue came back and started telling another group his story. Be quiet, the barmaid said. You're full of nothing but Seagram's gin, and I want to see the man walking on the moon. Oh, hush, with your moon, he replied.

You believe any of that wild stuff? I'm going to Illinois just as fast as I can. You New York women think you make a fool of any man. From the archives of The New Yorker published in July 1969, those pieces were written by Jonathan Shell, Thomas Whiteside, and Jervis Anderson. And they were read for us by Christine Renee Miller and Peter Gross. I'm David Remnick, and that's our show for today. Thanks for joining us and have a great week.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garvis of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Riannon Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Kegan Zima, Mung Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.