The Moon's a Balloon

By Crispin Sartwell

On July 20, 1969, at 4:17 PM Eastern Daylight Time, the Lunar Excursion Module touched down in the Sea Of Tranquility. A few hours later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking on the moon.

I was eleven, and, like much of the rest of the world, watching on television. I remember that my parents were skeptical; they thought the space program was essentially useless. The moonshot had been conceived as a cold war face-saving strategy in the face of the Soviet Sputnik and had cost a then-astronomical $40 billion dollars. There might have been better uses for the money.

But though there was little economic or scientific justification for the manned flights to the moon, it was impossible not to feel the magic as we watched Armstrong plant the flag and leap into the thin gravity. It was impossible not to think that human history had abruptly entered a new epoch.

Ever since, however, folks have entertained the idea that the whole thing was a hoax that was filmed in the desert (somewhere near Roswell, perhaps) or on a sound stage. And though such a claim might seem to be the raving of a few crackpots, it is surprisingly pervasive. I myself have heard it put forth quite seriously.

Earlier this year, Fox television broadcast a program called "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" which aired the contentions of the sceptics. And typically, the internet - the font of all information and misinformation - has lent continued life to moonshot-denial, as dozens of sites market books such as "Was It Only a Paper Moon?" or purport to find tiny anomalies in the pictures.

Meanwhile, scientific rationalists such as the late Carl Sagan have used moonshot-denial as an example of the deep irrationality, not to say stupidity, of the general public. It seems simply silly and perverse to deny that we went to the moon in the face of photographs and video, the testimony of dozens of fine Americans who went to the moon or helped send people to the moon, the scientific examination of materials taken from the moon, and so on.

But moonshot-denial, wrong though it no doubt is, also embodies an attitude that Sagan, in other contexts, might have regarded as healthy or even scientific. It is not a matter of failing to believe what is right in front of your eyes, but of failing to believe what the authorities tell you.

"Knowledge is power" is a pleasant little slogan that we recite to our children in order to get them to do their homework. But it has a dark side. If knowledge is power, then power is knowledge, and the people with the power use it to manipulate our beliefs. Accepting some claim as true on the grounds that the authorities say it's true is itself to commit a fallacy.

As one evaluates the claims of the moonshot-deniers, it is well to keep in mind a few examples of what we might call the epistemological misuse of power. As we aimed our rockets at the moon, the Department of Defense was fabricating casualty reports and accounts of entire battles in Vietnam. The CIA was testing hallucinogenic drugs on unsuspecting citizens. Soon thereafter, Richard Nixon was running an illegal campaign organization to spread lies about his opponents. The government of the United States was participating in the assassination of the elected president of Chile and claiming he committed suicide.

And so on. No doubt the citizens of the Soviet bloc maintained in the privacy of their own thoughts a certain scepticism about their governments' ridiculous attempts to rejigger history to make it come out the way they wanted. And fortunately, the people of the United States also do not take at face value what the powerful say.

In the case of the moonshot, that sort of scepticism leads to what I think is a false conclusion. But the sceptical attitude itself is essential not only to science, but to freedom.

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