Mythbusters did an excellent episode on this topic.
XKCD points out that if NASA faked the moon landing, they’ve royally screwed up faking the following forty years.
Yes, the March 31, 2000 Apollo moon landing was a hoax.
That’s because President Clinton promised we’d land there by the end of the millennium. 
Wait, wait, would that be 1999 or 2000 or 2001 ?? 
Even worse, was it the solar millenium or the lunar millenium?
no!
It would be 2000, right? You start with year 1. First milennenium is 1-1000, Second millennium is 1001-2000. This one started in 2001.
No, you guys. It was the Willennium.
–Cliffy
Bumped because the column is back on the SD front page.
DavidB wrote in his excellent Staff Report,
There have been other similar claims, of course, and I’m sure there will continue to be new claims of a moon landing hoax. I recently heard one that included the gem that Stanley Kubrick directed the moon footage for NASA, which was filmed “on location.” Hmmm. If he was on location, wouldn’t that mean they made it to the moon? Whoops, never mind! I’m looking for rationality in an inherently irrational subject…
For more on that, see this weird, through-the-looking-glass documentary about various theories on Kubrick’s The Shining: Room 237 - Wikipedia
How many walked on the moon, 12? (think it was 12, too lazy to google it)
12 cover ups? All of them? 
At the risk of thread-shitting – or conspiracy-shitting – what I want to know is: Why should intelligent people, such as we Dopers of course, give a flying rat’s ass if really stupid people insist on believing really stupid stuff like all these idiotic conspiracy theories and flat-earth stuff, and the like? They want to believe blather like that? And are foolish enough to do so, even in the face of all evidence? Okay, let them. What skin is it off any of the rest of our noses?
More to the point: All those debunkers who write books and essays and SDMB posts and all the Skeptical Inquirer writers and similar – why is it worthy of their time and intellectual capacities to even pay any attention to such baloney?
Okay, I can get that idiocy can be contagious and/or hereditary, because they will spread it to anyone who will listen, including impressionable young children (to the extent that they can get their creation theories and Ceiling Cat stories into the public curriculums, etc), and to their own doomed children. Yes, we need to fight the contagion of ignorance, if not the ignorance itself. Is there something more than that?
(Missed edit window above.)
ETA: Speaking of the intelligence of we Dopers, on second thought I think the above phrase should be “such as us Dopers of course”.
Maybe those incinerated golf clubs they found in the Columbia wreckage belonged to OJ.
Because something is wrong on the Internet!:eek:
Slick Willie, wiggles free again.
I want to know - for people who believe the Moon landings were faked - what’s in it for them? What do they get out of believing something like that? Gratification? A feeling of being in-the-know? Smarter than sheeple?
Basically. I think a lot of it starts out with “I can’t understand how they could have done it, and I’m not stupid, so they must have faked it!”
It’s also that this sort of stuff tends to not be free-standing but also ride along with other more pernicious forms of ignorance.
As well as that letting some pseudoscience/conspiracy stories stand creates fertile soil for others to take root. If theycan pull a moon hoax then maybe they can also be controlling the economy on behalf of the International Bankers (you-know-who). If evolution is an evil plot maybe so are vaccines.
One thing that might factor into it:
In southeast Idaho is a National Monument called Craters of the Moon. It is a barren (for the most part) desolate lava field.
Some of the mock-ups and tests for the Moon landing were done there, or so I understand. I can easily envision this creating confusion in those already somewhat confused by modern life.
Major proof it wasn’t: it’s hard to confuse black basaltic lava (like the rocks in your gas grill) with beige regolith. :smack: