On I-69, doing the loop around Bloomington because it’s the best way to get from Karst Farm Park, where I eat my lunch, to my home, clear across town on SR 466. I want to get over into the right lane so I can exit at SR 45/46 but there’s a pickup truck next to me. I’ll have to either speed up or slow down. He’s been inching ahead of me, so I catch sight of a bumper sticker he has on the rear window of his cab. It reads:
Let’s Quit Pretending We Landed on the Moon
The first crewed moon landing, the pretenders would like everyone to believe, took place some 56 years ago, on July 20th, 1969. That mission was followed by five more crewed moon landings. Overall, a total of 12 NASA astronauts have left their footprints on the moon. Another 15 crew members on various Apollo flights, orbited the moon, either waiting for their mates to finish cavorting on its surface, or in the case of Apollo 13, because their spacecraft had been damaged and they had to whip around the moon to get back home, or as in Apollos 8 and 10, the three-guy crews were rehearsing and testing equipment in orbit around the moon prior to that historic first touchdown.
That makes 27 people who’ve taken the spacetrip to the moon and back. Returned to Earth, they received congratulatory phone calls from the president, rode in parades, gave interviews, wrote memoirs, helped brief and train crews who’d succeed them, and to this day (or the day they died) insisted that, yes, they’d flown to the moon.
Liars, all of them.
Would You Trust These Three Men?
Twenty seven liars. Yet they’re a tiny percentage of people pretending “we” landed on the moon. Hundreds of thousands of people worked on the Apollo mission, planning, designing, testing, manufacturing, fixing, tweaking, cleaning up after, and writing reports on it all. And that’s just the Americans. How about the Indian, Chinese, and Soviet/Russian space program workers who participated in their countries’ uncrewed moon missions and willingly participated in the release of photographs of Apollo landing sites and equipment left behind? Call it another few hundred thousand.
That’s a lot of liars.
None of whom, to this day, has come forward to admit it was all a scam.
They were all good, man. Real good. Liars, that is.
As a rule, the best way for two people to keep a secret is for both of them to die before they blab. Somehow, though, several hundred thousand human beings, working for wildly disparate countries’ space programs, have remained mum regarding what has to be the greatest secret ever.
Somehow, a guy in a pickup truck, last seen on a south central Indiana interstate, has seen through their charade.
People are an odd lot.