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TIL a guy at a Vancouver meetup said the moon landing hoax idea was cooked up by the USSR, and now I can't stop reading about it
So I went to this small meetup in Vancouver last month, like 12 people in a back room of a library, and a retired guy named Ron started talking about the moon landing. I went in thinking the usual stuff, you know, the flag waving and the shadows and all that. But Ron said something I had never heard: that the whole hoax idea did not come from Americans at first, it got pushed by Soviet folks during the space race to make the US look bad, and then it just stuck here. I pushed back on him because I figured that was just something he read on a blog, but he pulled up like 4 sources on his phone and made me read them right there. Two hours later I was still in that room and my parking meter had run out and I got a $38 ticket. The weird part is I still don't know if I buy the Soviet angle or if Ron was just a smooth talker. So I'm asking here: has anyone actually dug into where the hoax story started, and does the Russia part hold up or is it a dead end?
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tara7458d ago
Digging into the history a bit, the Soviet angle is only partly true and Ron probably oversold it. The USSR did push some doubt in the early 70s through outlets like Pravda and even made a whole movie about a faked landing, but they never really pushed the full "we never went" idea because they were tracking the missions themselves and would have called it out at the UN if they could prove it. The modern hoax thing mostly grew in the US in 1976 when a guy named Bill Kaysing put out a book called We Never Went to the Moon, and that's the source almost every later claim pulls from. So Russia poked at it, but the story you're reading now is way more homegrown than Ron made it sound. Did he show you any actual historian sources or just Youtube docs and blog posts?
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