There are certain questions relating to the sphere of science that are raised again and again despite repeated explanations: Does abominable snowman-yeti really exist? What is the reason for the growth of hair and fingernails even after death? Is it true that man uses only 10% of his brain? What is the mystery of Bermuda Triangle in which airplanes and ships have vanished without a trace? Does a monster really infest Scotland’s Loch Ness? Is there life anywhere else in the universe? Is there any element of truth in the news about sightings of flying saucers? And finally, one evergreen question wroth adding to the list and which is refusing to rest for the last 35 years: Had Neil Armstrong and other astronauts of the spaceship Apollo really gone to the moon and landed on it, or NASA had constructed elaborate studio set of the moon landing to misguide the world?
It is a principle of psychology that if a matter of public knowledge is contradicted with apparently logical proof then many will start believing it. The first instigation that the Moon landing was a hoax came from an American author named Bill Kaysing in 1974, two years after the last Apollo mission. He wrote a book titled, ‘We never went to the Moon…’ containing some sensational arguments which succeeded in confusing the readers. His extensive arguments appeared convincingly logical to the ordinary readers so this book became a best-seller. The book sowed the seeds of doubt about NASA’s claims regarding the Moon landings in the minds of many. People got an exciting and spicy topic of conversation. If the Moon missions of staggering 30 billion dollars were really a figment of imagination then it was a mind-boggling scam indeed.
Even this confounding revelation would have eventually taken a back seat and people would have ultimately forgotten it as a baseless canard. But in 1978 a film titled ‘Capricorn One’ was released. It was about a fictitious journey to the planet Mars and the spaceship in the film resembled Apollo spaceship. According to the plot of the film the astronauts had not gone to Mars at all but had staged a drama as if they had actually gone to the red planet. Popular imagination connected the subject matter of the film with the Moon landing missions. The film had been released at a very inopportune time. The credibility of the American government was at the lowest ebb due to misleading statements about the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal in the previous years. People had lost faith in the official announcements. In the prevailing atmosphere of doubt no wonder the needle of suspicion pointed towards the moon landings also.
Despite passage of time suspicion did not lie down. Years later an opinion poll in 1999 revealed that 6% of the persons polled believed that the Moon landings were nothing but conspiracy and hoax perpetrated by NASA. In terms of percentage the figure may appear small but in terms of absolute numbers this group formed a sample representing the opinion of 15 million American. Further 20% persons polled though did not reject the moon landing outright were not ready to accept them as a fact, i.e. they were uncertain. In this atmosphere of persistent disbelief Fox TV network’s program titled, ‘Conspiracy theory: Did we land on the moon?’ telecast in 2001 contributed only in making many people of the generation born after the great technological achievement skeptical about it.
The present day position is not much different. Though the section of population which believes that Apollo project was a hoax is a minority, it is quite substantial in numbers. They have reasons for upholding their beliefs which they present as proofs. There are more than a dozen reasons but the main reasons are 10 in number and here they are
from - http://www.herebeanswers.com/2010/10/neil-armstrong-moon-landing-nasa-fake.html
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