In August 2001 Kaysing was interviewed by Katie Couric on the Today show. By then, Kaysing’s theory had morphed to involve Area 51. He was often quoted as saying that the Apollo landings were filmed at a movie studio there. “Area 51 is one of the most heavily guarded facilities in the United States,” Kaysing said, and anyone who tried to go there “could be shot and killed without any warning. With good reason… because the moon sets are still there.”
In the twenty-first century, a new generation of moon hoaxers walk in Kaysing’s footsteps to expose what they say is NASA’s fraud. Like the game of Whac-A-Mole, as soon as one element of the conspiracy appears to be disproven another allegation surfaces — from missing telemetry tapes to outright murder. So aggravated has America’s formidable space agency become over the moon hoaxers that in 2002, NASA hired aerospace historian Jim Oberg to write a book meant to challenge conspiracy theorists’ questions and claims — now numbering hundreds — in a point-by-point rebuttal. When news of the project was leaked to the media, NASA got such bad press over it they canceled the book.
The idea that the moon landing was faked was born at a time of high government mistrust. In 1974, for the first time in history, a U.S. president resigned. In 1975, the CIA admitted it had been running mind-control programs, a number of which involved human experiments with dangerous, illegal drugs. Then, in April, Saigon fell. The general antigovernment feeling was heightened by the fact that while government proved capable of many nefarious deeds it had been unable to win the war in Vietnam; 58,193 Americans were killed trying.
Kaysing was also tapping into a tradition. There had been one successful Great Moon Hoax already, over 130 years earlier, in 1835. Beginning on August 25 of that year, the New York Sun published a series of six articles claiming falsely that life and civilization had been discovered on the moon. According to the newspaper story, winged humans, beavers the size of people, and unicorns were seen through a powerful telescope belonging to Sir John Herschel, the most famous astronomer at the time. Editions of the newspapers sold out, were reprinted, and sold out again. Circulation soared, and the New York Sun made tremendous profits over the story, which readers believed to be true. On the subject of the public’s gullibility, Edgar Allan Poe, who also wrote for the paper, said, “The story’s impact reflects on the period’s infatuation with progress.” But the original Great Moon Hoax came and went without a conspiratorial bent because there was no government entity to blame. It was a publicity stunt to sell papers, not perceived as a nefarious plan by a government elite to manipulate and control the common man.
Shortly after Kaysing’s book was published (it is still in print as of 2011), a 1978 Hollywood film followed along the same lines. Peter Hyams’s Capricorn One told the story of a faked NASA landing on Mars. Even James Bond entered the act, referencing a lunar-landing conspiracy in the film Diamonds Are Forever. From there, the moonhoax theory remained a quiet staple among conspiracy theorists for decades, but with the rise of the Internet in the late 1990s, the moonhoax concept resurfaced and eventually made its way into the mainstream press. In February of 2001, Fox TV aired a documentarystyle hourlong segment called Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? and the debate was rekindled around the world. This gave way to an unusual twenty-first-century moon- hoax twist.
In September of 2002, Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, agreed to be interviewed by Far Eastern TV. This was because “they seemed like legitimate journalists,” Aldrin explains. Buzz Aldrin has the highest profile of the twelve Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon, and he regularly gives interviews. A former fighter pilot, Aldrin flew sixty-six combat missions and shot down two MiG-15s in the Korean War. He is also an MIT-trained physicist, which affords him extra fluency when discussing outer space. Sitting in a suite in the Luxe Hotel in Beverly Hills in the fall of 2002, it did not take long for Aldrin to realize something was awry when the TV interviewer began asking him questions involving conspiracy theories. “I tried redirecting the discussion back to a legitimate discussion about space,” Aldrin says. Instead the interviewer played a clip from the Fox documentary about moon hoaxes. Aldrin believes “conspiracy theories are a waste of everybody’s time and energy,” and he got up and left the interview. “I’m someone who has dealt with the exact science of space rendezvous and orbital mechanics, so to have someone approach me and seriously suggest that Neil, Mike, and I never actually went to the moon, but that the entire trip had been staged in a sound studio someplace, has to rank with one of the most ludicrous ideas I’ve ever heard,” says Aldrin.
Then, down in the hotel lobby, a large man in his midthirties approached Buzz Aldrin and tried to spark a conversation. The man, whose name was Bart Sibrel, had a film crew with him. “Hey, Buzz, how are you?” Sibrel asked, the cameras rolling. Aldrin said hello and headed out toward the street. Sibrel hurried along beside him, asking more questions. Then he pulled out a very large Bible and began shaking it in the former astronaut’s face. “Will you swear on the Bible that you really walked on the moon?” Aldrin, who was seventy-two at the time, said, “You conspiracy people don’t know what you’re talking about” and turned to walk in the other direction. The man began hurling personal insults and accusations at Aldrin. “Your life is a complete lie!” the man shouted. “And here you are making money by giving interviews about things you never did!” The conspiracy theorist ran in front of Aldrin, blocking his way across the road. Aldrin, who had his stepdaughter with him, walked back to the hotel and asked the bellman to call the police. “You’re a coward, Buzz Aldrin!” shouted the conspiracy theorist. “You’re a liar; you’re a thief!” Aldrin said he’d had enough: “Maybe it was the West Point cadet in me, or perhaps it was the Air Force fighter pilot. Or maybe I’d just had enough of his belligerent character assassination… I popped him.” The second man on the moon punched the lunar-landing conspiracy theorist squarely in the jaw, cameras catching it all on tape.
In no time, the video footage was airing on the news, on CNN, on Jay Leno and David Letterman. CNN political commentator Paul Begala gave Aldrin the thumbs-up for pushing back against conspiracy theorists. But elsewhere, all across America, many millions of people agreed with the conspiracy theorists who believed that the lunar landing was a hoax. By the fortieth anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 mission, in 2009, polls conducted in America, England, and Russia revealed that approximately 25 percent of the people interviewed believed the moon landing never happened. Many said they believed that it was faked and filmed at Area 51.
As of 2011, the lunar-landing conspiracy is one of three primary conspiracies said to have been orchestrated at Area 51. The other two that dominate conspiracy thinking involve captured aliens and UFOs, and an underground tunnel and bunker system that supposedly exists below Area 51 and connects it to other military facilities and nuclear laboratories around the country. Each conspiracy theory contains elements of fact, and each is perceived differently by the three government agencies they target: NASA, the CIA, and the Department of Defense. In each conspiracy theory lies an important clue about the real truth behind Area 51.
Michael Schratt, who writes books and travels around the country giving lectures about government cover- ups at Area 51, says that the secret facility is “directly connected to Edwards [Air Force Base] North Base Complex and Air Force Plant 42 at Palmdale by an underground tube-shuttle tunnel system developed by the Rand Corporation and others [circa] 1960.” Schratt also says that Area 51 is “very likely connected to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio” this same way. “The tunnels were dug by a nuclear-powered drill that can dig three miles of tunnel a day,” Schratt says. “These tunnels also connect, by underground train, to other military facilities where leaders of government will go and live after a nuclear event” such as World War III.
In fact, underground tunnels, called N-tunnels, P-tunnels, and Ttunnels, have been drilled next door to Area 51, at the Nevada Test Site, for decades. The 1,150-foot-long tunnel at Jackass Flats, drilled into the Calico Mountains, through which NERVA scientists and engineers like T. D. Barnes accessed their underground workstations is but one example of an underground tunnel at the Nevada Test Site. The NERVA complex in Area 25 has since been dismantled and “deactivated,” according to the Department of Energy, but elsewhere at the test site dozens of tunnel complexes exist. In the 1960s, one tunnel dug into the granite mountain of Rainer Mesa, in Area 12, reached down as far as 4,500 feet, nearly a mile underground. There are many such government tunnels and bunkers around America, but it was the revelation of the Greenbrier bunker by Washington Post reporter Ted Gup in 1992 that set off a firestorm of conspiracy theories related to postapocalypse hideouts for the U.S. government elite — and since 1992, these secret bunkers have been woven into conspiracy theories about things that go on at Area 51.
The Greenbrier bunker is located in the Allegheny Mountains, 250 miles southwest of the nation’s capital. Beginning in 1959, the Department of Defense spearheaded the construction of a 112,544square-foot facility eight hundred feet below the West Virginia wing of the fashionable five-star Greenbrier resort. This secret bunker, completed in 1962, was to be the place where the president and certain members of Congress would live after a nuclear attack. The Greenbrier bunker had dormitories, a mess hall, decontamination chambers, and a hospital staffed with thirty-five doctors. “Secrecy, denying knowledge of the existence of the shelter from our potential
