I just watched “Capricorn One” for the 8th time. It’s about a conspiracy to fake a mission to Mars. In the movie, we see at least a score of people who knew of the conspiracy, including the FBI agents who guard the astronauts, the TV crew at the fake Mars stage, Hal Holbrook, the guy who opens the hatch, the pilot who flies the astronauts to Texas, the engineers who determined that the flight would have been fatal, etc, etc. Surely there were others we didn’t see such as the radio operators who played the pre-recorded conversations between the Johnson Space Center and the capsule. What strikes me as impossible is that everyone who learned of the charade kept mum about it.
Which leads me to my question: If the moon landings had been faked, what’s the minimum number of people who would be necessary to put on this make-believe event. My off-the-cuff guess would be somewhere north of 1000.
So, do the moon-hoax-conspiracy-theorists really believe that as many as 1000 people (most of whom presumably believe in the U.S. Constitution) could keep a secret for 45 years.
Yes, they apparently really do believe that. Even worse, those who don’t accept the recent orbital images of the landing sites apparently believe in a multinational and multi-generational conspiracy of tens or hundreds of thousands.
Not only keep a secret, but wouldn’t there be someone on the crew who would have spirited away some artifact (a “C” rock?) to support the claim? We have eager whistle blowers everywhere but here, it seems.
The Apollo 11 mission was probably the most televised event in history, at least until 9/11. I’m pretty sure that every minute of the entire mission was shown live in one place or another. So how ever many people you can imagine – all those white-shirted guys in Mission Control, etc. – you have to have multiple shifts of them, so you can rotate them in and out, so no one could go back and review the tapes to see the same people on camera all the time (like how Dennis Hopper figured out the tape loop in* Speed*.)
Plus you need to keep the crews of an entire aircraft carrier and support ships from blabbing that they didn’t really see the capsule come down. The U.S.S. Hornet alone carried a crew of 2,600. I’d say we’re talking more like 10,000 people involved in the conspiracy.
I think it’s not as implausible as some people believe. During World War II, over a hundred thousand people worked on the Manhattan Project, which was kept a secret at the time. Taking this picture and eyeballing it (since I don’t feel like integrating by parts, though someone else is welcome to), it looks like about 220,000 man-years of secrecy were mustered until the bombing of Hiroshima. That equates to a population of about 48,000 staying secret for 45 years with regards to Apollo. Also, if the government was smart, it could have tried to bump off its goons sooner, perhaps by aiming to give them cancer via radiation or something. But of course, the moon landing did occur, so it’s all moot.
*I know this is a terrible way to look at the situation.
Except sticking people in 30 separated places with no contact, and not televising any of it is different from the Moon landing. And the Soviets still knew.
I know it is. I said that it’s a terrible way to look at the situation, and that the moon landings happened. Just that it’s not as impossible as believed from a logistical standpoint.
In the first case, you have isolated groups of people engaged in research activities that few people suspected or even understood, during an actual hot war where the majority understood and respected the need for secrecy. There was no public scrutiny because few even knew that there was something to scrutinize. Also, it was an effort that most Americans would have supported so little coercion would have been needed to convince those involved to keep silent.
In the second case, you have people, most of whom went home everyday, trying to manufacture a reality under full public scrutiny, in the freaking 60s! We’re talking about a time when everybody suspected everything, a large proportion of the population suspected anything and everything the government did, and journalists built careers and became celebrities by exposing government wrongdoing. And they would have been trying to do something, fake a moon landing, that most people would not support.
The Manhattan Project isn’t an example of a project that was successfully kept secret, though. The Soviet Union knew much of what was going on in Los Alamos because several of the people there were giving them the information.
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of fraudulently claiming to land a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth. No single conspiracy in this period will be more impressive a fabrication or more important for the long-range exploitation of the people.”
All moon landing conspiracy theories fall apart when you consider the USSR has nothing to gain by keeping it secret and would have loved to expose the USA if we had faked it.
Plus the timeline, there’s no way, IMHO, that the Manhattan project could’ve been kept secret. Of course, if they’d tried, there would be CTers today explaining why the US couldn’t possibly have done it so the Japanese must have faked it.
