Question about moon-landing deniers: Why is it so all-fire important to them to believe that we

[Aristus]

never landed on the moon, and instead just faked the whole thing?

Why do so many of them devote their lives to spreading, believing, and defending such an absurd idea?

Just saw another one of them on Facebook, and it prompted me to ask.

[MosheFeingold]

1. Soviets

Just a bit of thinking here. The moon landings were very much part of the Cold War, and thus watched rather closely by the Soviets. They had ample men and materials monitoring what was going on.

Does anyone REALLY think they would not have busted a scam?

It's almost silly.

[kentauros]

7. That's the one I've heard.

That we had to "save face" from being embarrassed by the Soviets getting there first, and faking it was much easier. Yeah right.

Since when has this country given a damn how the rest of the world thinks about its actions?

Now what I do find mindblowing, is the one friend I have locally that believes in the hoax, is also another fellow Houstonian. Now granted, he didn't have the unmitigated luck my family did of living in the neighborhood that's situated literally across the road from NASA-JSC, and he didn't go to grade-school with the engineers' and astronauts' children of the Apollo program, so I can cut him some slack there.

However, he also doesn't seem to think about how difficult it would have been to get those same kids and families to keep such a massive hoax a secret. I seem to recall the numbers of 14,000 people working just at JSC during that program, 4,000 directly for NASA, and 10,000 for the contractors. How do you keep that many people quiet?

[MosheFeingold]

14. I think our posts passed in the night

I was not saying we faked it; I am saying the Soviets would have caught any attempt to fake it.

I may be reading your post wrong.

But, yes, I also agree there is zero chance we could have kept the 100,000 or so people involved quiet.

[kentauros]

17. Oh, I never meant to imply you said we were faking it.

Sorry for any confusion. I read your post as a reason for why people would think we might fake something like that. And yes, the Soviets most assuredly would have caught any attempt by us to fake it, and then told the world!

But also, people who would think that we faked the Moon landings for that reason aren't really thinking very well at all

[progressoid]

2. I have a vague memory that these types of conspiracy theorists (faked moon landing, global warming,

new world order etc.) are about twice as likely to be Republican if that matters. It's like the theories are needed to fit their political narrative of how the world works.

I could be wrong though.

I'm currently operating on a couple hours sleep. Back to work!

[MosheFeingold]

15. Not sure it's a right or left issue

But then I think the entire right/left idea is a false dichotomy.

It's more of a three dimensional grid, with Authoritarian/Anarchist being the Y axis, Property rights being the X, and social issues being the Z, with marked correlation between the three.

There's a strong overlap of whackos on the extremes

[frogmarch]

3. A dear friend of mine,

whom I consider brilliant in many ways, is a huge CTist - even though he's not a republican. (He's gung-ho for Bernie Sanders.)

My friend goes off on a tangent periodically on some CT or another. He recently emailed me this:

Please forgive my occasional psychotic episodes, El. I have this not only vivid but connective imagination, and sometimes I go plunging off into the theoretical wilderness and insist on trying to take everyone with me. Back in the late eighties when I was living alone in the boonies and had a television (rare for me) and cable TV (even rarer) I watched hours and hours of TV daily, filling my head with Ross Perot, UFOs, JFK assassination theories, the supposed questionability of the lunar landing, CIA mind control experiments, which some said produced all the well-known serial killers + Charles Manson – and other such stuff. A bizarre worldview formed in my noggin, and I know that some of my letters to friends and family were manic if not unintelligible. Some still are. I hope you’ll pardon my lapses into insanity.

[Orrex]

5. I have a similar friend

He's a millennial and quite intelligent, has a political science degree and is a strong supporter of Sanders.

And he absolutely believes that 9/11 was MIHOP and that Sandy Hook was a false flag operation.

When I learned this about him, I honestly couldn't stand to talk to him anymore because that kind of idiotic thinking is distasteful.

No amount of evidence will sway him, and every single ironclad refutation is met with the standard CT-zealot's response: he tilts his head slightly to one side, shakes it while inhaling audibly, then say "I don't know, man."

I don't have the nerve to ask him about the moon landing, alas.

[Oneironaut]

8. The Sandy Hook thing is especially vile.

The worst part is these lunatics' harassment of the victims' families. They're all mentally deranged. The "evidence" I've seen of the "conspiracy" is borderline psychotic. It's painful to see otherwise intelligent people sucked into such garbage.

[Orrex]

9. I recently found out about the scope of that harassment

It's so despicable that I can hardly believe it, but of course I know that people can be relentlessly cruel without regard for the hurt they're inflicting upon their victims.

What really kills me is the smug self-assurance of the conspiracy theorist, secure in the knowledge that they "get it" while none of us sheep can see what's going on.


Intolerable.

[frogmarch]

13. I lack the nerve to ask my friend

about Sandy Hook or 9/11. He doesn't go off on his tangents often, and I'd hate to be responsible for getting him started on one. I know I'd be sickened if he said Sandy Hook was a false flag operation. I am sure that would be it for me.

I know just what you mean about no amount of evidence swaying him. Same with my friend.

[sharp_stick]

4. Scientific American had a pretty good article

on the mindset of someone that's prone to believe in conspiracy theories. They seem to be primed to believe in them, often if they believe in one, the rest come pretty easy.

I've got an Uncle that's tossed a really weird Jewish/Salt conspiracy at me - I don't think he's ever knowingly even met a Jew
along with the 9/11 Truther stuff and Chemtrails.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-people-believe-conspiracy-theoies/

[frogmarch]

6. Excellent.

Here’s the part that stood out for me in reference to my friend’s “not only vivid but connective imagination,” as he called it:

...conspiracies can become “the default explanation for any given event—a unitary, closed-off worldview in which beliefs come together in a mutually supportive network known as a monological belief system.”

I’m trying to decide whether to send him the article. I value his friendship too.

[CanSocDem]

10. I have a question.

If you were really there, a couple of times, why isn't there a military base? Or at least a platoon of 'advisors'.....?????



.

[edbermac]

11. Buzz Aldrin knew how to answer them.

[frogmarch]

12. The jerk he punched is

Bart Sibrel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_Sibrel He's a CTist who insists the moon landings were all hoaxes. He's produced some films about it. What a jerk.

Good for Aldrin.

[sarge43]

16. Not a good idea

to call a command pilot with 66 combat missions a coward. That annoys him.

[3catwoman3]

25. Go, Buzz.

I love this footage.

[Laffy Kat]

18. I have a (former) friend who during the past few years has bought into every conspiracy out there.

We were best friends for years and years. She now believes: 1) the moon landing was faked; 2) Sandy Hook was faked; 3) the Holocaust is "exaggerated"; 4) Brittany Maynard, the young Californian woman who moved to Oregon for the right to die with dignity due to her brain tumor, is a hoax so Brittany could get a free trip to Las Vegas and hang-out with celebrities. And it goes on and on. She believes Black Ops sites are everywhere. Some of the conspiracy theories she believes in contradict each other. She listens to Alex Jones, of course.

My ex-friend has an undergraduate from an Ivy League in Physics, a law degree, and an M.S. in Biology. It's tragic. I haven't been in touch recently, but I'm sure she's probably supporting Trump. Mental illness is a terrible thing. That's got to be what it is because she is NOT the same person I knew so well for so long.

[PufPuf23]

19. This fellow has an interesting and productive take on fringe thought.

I am immune to most CT thought but have never been satisfied with official narratives of JFK assassination and 9/11.

Crackpot

Dr. Richard Stepp grabs the orange snowshoe by one end as an ersatz pointer to trace an island-hopping path from Northern Europe to Greenland to North America on the overhead projector map. He brought the snowshoe to his April 19 Bigfoot lecture at the Freshwater Grange to demonstrate a point about, well, big feet, but he's taken a detour to talk about another seemingly wild idea: the theoretical journeys of pre-Columbian Vikings.

The hall is packed. There are families, a few burly men with Whitman-esque beards and one woman in a pair of thematically appropriate furry black Ugg boots. Among them are skeptics, believers, the curious and the regulars who've come for the soup potluck. Like the Viking voyage, Stepp's introduction is a long way around to Sasquatch, but he's getting there. By the time he's delineating types of hominids, shuffling stacks of books and relating the tale of a purported Bigfoot abduction, he's right back in professor mode, the projector light rising up in his features like the glow of a campfire.

It's a version of a lecture Stepp has given before to students at Humboldt State University, where he taught for 39 years in the physics department before his final retirement in 2012. He is not trying to argue the existence of Bigfoot so much as why the possibility, along with other so-called "crackpot" theories — a label he tosses around gleefully — shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.

"This is the logical circle: Only crazy people talk about Bigfoot, so if you talk about Bigfoot, no matter what your background, you're crazy," he says. That, he feels, is a dangerous assumption, leading scientists to abandon their methods and turn away from empirical study out of prejudice and self preservation.

"A subject that will not get funded and will endanger your career may never be studied," he says. The resulting blind spots in our collective knowledge extend beyond UFOs and yetis, potentially blacking out less-than-lucrative topics and politically unpopular conclusions.

more at link: http://www.northcoastjournal.com/humboldt/crackpot/Content?oid=3718243

[Wolf Frankula]

20. The Moon Landing was Real

The Moon is fake.

Wolf

[kentauros]

21. "That's no moon!"

And the vacuum of space is fake. George Lucas proved that when we heard the ships passing by while banking in zero-G.

[uriel1972]

22. If CT's were just harmless thought experiments...

or entertainment, I wouldn't give a toss, but they DO hurt people and that makes me angry.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

23. It's good for some people that crackpots like these feel driven to dig in and stay vocal.

That way when something comes up that really does smell a little funny, when the pieces of an official explanation start to get some scrutiny, then anyone with questions can be dismissed derisively as just another CT nut.

[malthaussen]

24. Just off the top of my head...

... to answer your question, I think it may have something to do with control. It is difficult for some to come to grips with the reality that life is just one big crap game, and one poor individual only survives by chance, and not his own virtues. That reality is probably especially aggravated in a culture such as ours, in which the ethos of hard work and gumption leading to inevitable success is so prevalent. Believing that one can see past the lies of authority and know the "real facts" of a matter could provide one with some belief in their own power and control, especially if one is otherwise overwhelmed by their lack in the outside world.

-- Mal

[Mendocino]

26. There's a lot of money to be made.

Same with Bigfoot, Loch Ness, Rosewell, haunted houses etc. Facts don't sell; BS, legends and wild speculation do. PT Barnum was right.

[pressbox69]

27. Not sure if I'm a CT but

I do think there's more to the JFK murder that will probably never get sorted out. Even when I was eight years old I thought Oswald's shooting by Ruby was fishy but at least the bad guy was dead. Still seems to be more info about 911 coming out all the time. Here are some others.