Further Reading Preston Nichols and Peter Moon, The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time, 1992
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” said Neil Armstrong on 20 July 1969, as he stepped down from the lunar landing module on to the face of the moon and proudly planted a fluttering Stars and Stripes.
Except Armstrong wasn’t really on the moon. He was in a lunar mock-up in the Nevada desert at Area 51. Despite being bunged $30 billion by John F. Kennedy, NASA had failed to achieve a viable moon landing project, so decided upon a hoax one. How could the flag flutter when there is no wind on the moon?
Rumours that Apollo 11 didn’t truly put a man on the moon were widespread by 1970, and are archly acknowledged in the 1971 Bond film Diamonds are Forever when 007 crashes through a staged lunar scene in the desert. However, the “Apollo Moon Landing Hoax” industry really hit its stride in 1976 with the publication of the book We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle! by Bill Kaysing, an Apollo engineer and aeronautics writer. According to Kaysing, not only was the 1969 landing a fake but astronaut Gus Grissom was murdered to prevent him exposing the whole Apollo scam. There was more grist to the conspiracy mill with the release of the 1978 movie Capricorn One, which featured a faked mission to Mars. Kaysing himself repeated his claims in a 2001 TV programme called Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land On The Moon? in which Gus Grissom’s widow and son concurred that the launchpad fire which obliterated Grissom’s Apollo 1 mission had been deliberately staged. Bart Sibrel’s 2001 movie A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon re-aired the hoax theory with the addendum that the faked landings were an intentional distraction from the disastrous Vietnam War.
Apollo 11, of course, did go to the moon. The billowing Stars and Stripes is explained by the simple fact that the flag was still swirling from being planted.
The Apollo moon landings were an astronomical hoax: ALERT LEVEL 1 Further Reading Bill Kaysing and Randy Reid, We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, 1999
On 14 October 1791, in his last surviving letter, the composer Mozart wrote to his wife Constanze that he had taken the Italian composer Antonio Salieri to a performance of The Magic Flute, and that Salieri had been laudatory: “From the overture to the last chorus there was not a single number that did not call forth from him a bravo! or bello!” Less than two months later, Mozart was dead.
Within a week of Mozart’s death, there were rumours of poisoning based on the strangely swollen condition of his body. Suspicion soon focused on Salieri who, despite his loud enjoyment of The Magic Flute, had long been a rival of Mozart’s on the Viennese music scene. Salieri was the mature Kappelmeister to the court of composers, Mozart the youthful upstart who threatened his position. Mozart had feared for some years before his death that his meteoric musical ascendancy would create a jealousy among his peers that might inspire one of them to murder him: in 1789 he had told Constanze “I am only too conscious [that] my end will not be long in coming; for sure, someone has poisoned me!” In summer 1791 Mozart claimed he had been given aqua toffana (an arsenic preparation); he also wrote to his father that “Salieri is poisoning me…” Only weeks before his death, Mozart tearfully told Constanze in the Prater Park, “I am sure I have been poisoned. I cannot rid myself of this idea.” After Mozart’s demise on 5 December 1791, Constanze regularly told anyone who would listen that Salieri had conspired to murder her husband. And then, in his dotage, Salieri himself is said to have confessed to bringing down the baton on Mozart’s life.
The rumours that Salieri assassinated Mozart were stoked by the Russian playwright Aleksandr Pushkin, who in 1830 wrote a short play called Mozart and Salieri in which envy drove the Kappelmeister to murder his rival. Rimksy-Korsakov turned the Pushkin piece into an opera, and the rivalrous Mozart-Salieri theme was later picked up by Peter Shaffer in his stage play Amadeus, which in 1984 became an award-winning movie of the same name, directed by by Milos Forman. According to Forman’s twist, Salieri did not poison Mozart but caused his death by overwork, after provoking him to finish the Requiem.
Salieri, however, does not fit the bill of Mozart’s murderer very neatly. The nurses who cared for Salieri in his dotage testified that they had never, contrary to gossip, heard Salieri confess to the deed. Salieri himself utterly refuted the suggestion, telling musician Ignaz Moscheles in 1823, “I can assure you on my word of honour that there is no truth in that absurd rumour: you know, that I was supposed to have poisoned Mozart.” Neither did Salieri have a clear motive: in the 18th century it was Salieri who was the big noise—it was Salieri who was the Emperor Joseph II’s chief musician, it was Salieri who had the wealth and reputation. Certainly, Salieri might have obstructed Mozart’s career at court, but the reason was not personal resentment but professional estimation: Mozart’s music was not in the Style Gallant that both Salieri and the Emperor favoured. When Mozart wrote that “Salieri is poisoning me” he meant it figuratively—that he would have to trim his style to the court taste if he wanted to get on.
Something of the close personal relations between Salieri and the Mozart family can be judged from the fact that Salieri was one of the small group of mourners who followed Mozart’s coffin as it was carried from the funeral service at St Stephen’s Cathedral to the cemetery. Salieri also became the teacher of Mozart’s son Franz Xaver Wolfgang. Would Constanze Mozart really have entrusted her son to Salieri if she believed him her husband’s murderer?
There are other candidates as Mozart’s murderer. The composer was a serial womanizer and among his conquests was, allegedly, Magdalena Hofdemel, the 23–year-old wife of his Masonic brother Franz Hofdemel. On the day after Mozart’s funeral, an altercation in the Hofdemel house ended with Franz brutally hacking Magdalena with a razor before slitting his own throat with the implement. Magdalena, five months pregnant, was revived and gave birth to a boy which she named Johann von Nepomuk Alexander Franz. Since she named the baby after both her husband and presumed lover (Johann was Mozart’s given first name), many believed the child was Mozart’s and that her cuckolded husband had poisoned the composer in revenge before committing suicide.
Inevitably, Mozart’s and Hofdemel’s membership of the Freemasons would eventually cause somebody to conjure up the theory that the composer was assassinated by the Brotherhood. The Mozart- Masonic murder theory originated in 1861 with Georg Friedrich Daumer, a researcher of antiquities and religious polemicist. His thesis was elaborated in the Third Reich period, chiefly by General Erich Ludendorff and his wife, the neuropsychiatrist Mathilde.
The case against the Freemasons takes two main lines. Daumer claimed Mozart had offended the Masons in The Magic Flute by his use of Christian religious music in the chorale of the Men of Armour. (For good measure, Daumer also believed the murder thwarted Mozart’s desire to found his own secret lodge, “The Grotto”.) Mathilde Ludendorff raised another anti-Masonic argument, suggesting the Masons were outraged at The Magic Flute’s covert counterplot, which depicted Mozart (as Tamino) attempting the release of Marie Antoinette (Pamina) from her Masonic jailers. Untroubled by historical reality, Frau Ludendorff suggested that Jews and Catholics—she was writing during the reign of Hitler after all—joined with the Freemasons in poisoning the Teutonic Mozart. Only marginally more sophisticated is Mozarts
