You’re not the first to ask this. In 1920, an editor at the New York Times asked the same question about Robert Goddard. As the Apollo mission made its way toward the moon, the editors at the Times finally had the decency to print the following retraction…
From the New York Times, July 17 1969:
What on earth is this? I’m in “good old England” as well and I have never heard anyone speak like this - never mind type like this - outside of an American sitcom that is 
I’m not sure we are fighting ignorance here - more being wound up!
I don’t think it was meant to be inflammatory - it sounds like a sort of jokey faux-WWII-fighter-pilot affectation to me, but then I’m posting from Dear Old Blighty myself.
As I’ve remarked before, this has been oversold by movies (since it makes an interesting and gruesome shot) and books.
as Arthur C. Clarke has pointed out many times, bodies don’t explode when suddenly thrust into vacuum. He wrote a piece about it (it’s reprinted in his collection “The View from Serendip”) and he used the idea of astronauts leaving a space ship without suits in three stories at least, and referred to it in a fourth. It even shows up in the film 2001, when Dave Bowman gets back aboard the Discovery after HAL locks him out, even though he has no helmet. Clarke wrote the piece reprinted in TVfS to justify that scene. He had NASA experimental data to back him up.
But exploding things look interesting, so we have people blowing up in the movies Outland, License to Kill, and Total recall, and the books “Garden on the Moon” by Pierre Boule and “Four Came Back” by Martin Caidin. And probably lots of others I haven’t read or seen.
But, as Clarke put it, “we’re built tougher than that” Pigeons too, I’ll bet.
Pigeons might be in slightly more trouble than humans from rapid decompression, as the former have comparatively more air-filled spaces in their bodies.
Hats off to the volunteers in that experiment.
I doubt whether the monkeys were asked though. 