We Went To The Moon Because It Was Hard To Do
54 years on, Lunar Landing Conspiracy and Psyop claims are either click bait, cover for grifters or just plain ignorant
“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” - The correct version of what Neil Armstrong said from the lunar surface, 20 July, 1969.1
On the night of 20 July, 1969, my grandma Pearl urged me to “take a nap” after the Eagle had landed on the moon carrying Neil Armstrong and colonel Buzz Aldrin. “They said the astronauts are taking a nap before the moon walk, you should too” grandma urged. Reluctantly I donned my home-made Apollo project pajamas and headed off to bed. At 10:10 pm, grandma, woke me. “Michael, honey, time to wake up, they’re about to walk on the moon!”
I bolted off the sofa and down the stairs to the den where grandma and grandpa’s ultra bourgie, Magnavox cabinet TV was, parking my self on the rug in front of the TV to get the best, closest look. Then at 10:56 pm, Neil Armstrong descended the steps of the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) and uttered the above, most famous words since Christ spoke to us. Armstrong is followed by a boyhood hero of mine, Colonel Buzz Aldrin. 10 other men would follow and walk on the moon, the last of which would be astronaut Eugene “Gene” Cernan and I watched every single one of them. In the 2007 film In The Shadow of The Moon, Cernan said of the conspiracy theorists.
"[T]ruth needs no defense… nobody can take those footsteps I made on the surface of the Moon away from me". - Gene Cernan
What an irony now that I find a growing number of “traditional catholics”, supposed denizens and guardians of all things true, rejecting the demonstrable, objective truth of the Apollo Project and its successful moon landings. Here’s one example from Dr. Taylor Marshall on Twitter and my response.
While I sympathize with the growing chorus who say the CoronaDoom lockdowns & resulting death-jabs, stolen 2020 elections and CIA nation building coups, are driving many conspiracy theories, the idea that all of America’s previous milestones are cut from the same, corrupt, cynical cloth is either click bait, cover for grifters or just plain ignorant. This is especially true of anyone falling for the Apollo moon-landings as a hoax, conspiracy or “psy-op” and there are literally mountains of evidence, the least of which is the historical record, to prove it. But what bothers me and ought to bother you most is this never ending, best-selling drumbeat of fear and apocalypse porn and that people justify its sullying of nearly everything including now, the Apollo moon landings.
THE FIRST CONSPIRACY THEORY IS IN THE BIBLE
The oldest conspiracy theory in the world is the one that holds that the Resurrection did not happen. Its authors were possessed souls whose aim was and remains, pure evil. This conspiracy is worth looking at for a moment to put the moon landing was faked/psy-op/distraction into perspective: like the moon landing hoax, there is 0.0 evidence for this theory and a mountain of evidence to debunk it.
“Who when they were departed, behold some of the guards came into the city, and told the chief priests all things that had been done. And they being assembled together with the ancients, taking counsel, gave a great sum of money to the soldiers, Saying: Say you, His disciples came by night, and stole him away when we were asleep. And if the governor shall hear this, we will persuade him, and secure you. So they taking the money, did as they were taught: and this word was spread abroad among the Jews even unto this day.”- Matthew Chapter 28
The pharisees at the time of Jesus were the Klaus Schwab’s of their day and their conspiracy has continued to con and thereby enslave 2,000 years worth of the children of Israel and many an agnostic (or gnostic) crackpot into denying the Incarnation, life, death and Resurrection of the Messiah. Note that this, the oldest conspiracy theory known to man, is still working to shield men from the truth of their savior (and thus salvation), surely the greatest crime ever committed since the temptation in the garden. Note also that this truth can be objectively learned, in the real world, by the eye witness testimony of those who with their own ears heard, with their own fingers touched and with their own eyes saw Our Risen Lord (no, that’s not a comparison to the moon landings). Certainly God has given all of humanity since then the opportunity to, as Our Lord says, be “blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed”.
This conspiracy theory holds that God would not humble himself and become a mere man while the “moon landing is a hoax” theory holds that a mere man could not humble God’s created space. We know the authors of this conspiracy so who then is the author of the “moon landing was faked”?
IF THE MOON LANDINGS WERE FAKED THEN JFK WAS THE MASTERMIND
Every great conspiracy theory needs an equally great and sinister mastermind, the Blofeld or Moriarty who provides the cunning, visionary genius behind the plots; the Klaus Schwab of New World Order. So, who then is the mastermind of the moon landing hoax/psy-op? Well that would be the subject of the grandest, pre-Covid, conspiracy theory of them all: JFK. But if JFK was the mastermind he was also the greatest actor in politician’s garb in all of history because from the time he first publicly announces and promotes the Apollo Project lunar missions, Kennedy is at the least, a dreamer with a sugar daddy’s (Congress’s) checkbook. Witness this clip, announcing the goal of a lunar landing, from his STOTU speech in 1961.
Is this what got JFK assassinated? That he would spill the beans on the “end of the decade”, greatest hoax in history after announcing it to the entire nation?
Note that Kennedy implies that he is conscripting “every citizen” into his grand scheme and even asks them all “to fully invest” in the scam dream! Boy, could we use a scam like this today in our age of listless cynicism, who would care if it was a hoax!?I agree with Ronald Reagan that Kennedy, who could “curse like a sailor”—and then he was one— could wax poetic and inspirational — perhaps that’s what makes this grand psy-op/hoax, so damn convincing for the rest of us, including Reagan: Kennedy.
“Many men are great, but few capture the imagination and the spirit of the times. The ones who do are unforgettable. Four administrations have passed since John Kennedy's death, five presidents have occupied the Oval Office, and I feel sure that each of them thought of John Kennedy now and then, and his thousand days in the White House.”- Ronald Reagan
But if Kennedy was the mastermind of the moon walk hoax, then he must be the mastermind of Apollo program and indeed the Saturn V rocket as well. Most of you know the “…we choose to go to the moon and do those other things not because they are easy but because they are hard” speech but if you ever give the entire speech a listen, you’d hear Kennedy laying out a pretty detailed blueprint for the Saturn V rocket, years before it would be built. This speech was given at Rice University, 12 September, 1962, 15 months after the “land a man on the moon” address to Congress. Please view the entire speech at my CRUSADE Max Podcast Streaming Service, here!
If Kennedy and his co-conspirators were planning the Apollo Project and the moon landings as a grand hoax/psy-op/distraction, why go into such excruciating detail and alert, nay excite the public (and the Soviets), of what the Saturn V would look like and was capable of? Was he a sadist/mental terrorist… “psyche! I got you” type, too? Please note that many “moon landing is a hoax” theorists also insist that Saturn V never left Earth orbit because it couldn’t cross the Van Allen Belts without frying the astronauts with killer radiation (a charge that has been debunked dozens of times, here, by the Institute On Physics).
Of course, thanks to Lee Harvey Second Gunman Grassy Knoll CIA Myer Lansky Oswald we’ll never know if JFK ever had ulterior motives for proposing the moon shot but the historical record, Kennedy’s actions and recorded words and the actions of hundreds of thousands who posthumously carried out his vision of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth” say, loudly and clearly, he wanted the U.S. to go to the moon “because it was hard” and that’s exactly what happened.
THE “STARLESS” PHOTOGRAPH PROVES THE HOAX!
I could spend another twenty pages on the various “moon landing was faked, psy-op, distraction” canards but instead, let’s just crush the biggest one of all: the photograph of Buzz Aldrin descending the LEM was shot by Stanley Kubrick on a well-lit soundstage and the lighting/shadows proves it.
Bollocks.
In a stunning and very ingenious recreation of the LEM, the astronauts and the “Tranquility Base” landing site, the computer graphics company NVidia proved (watch the video below) that the ambient light refracting off of lunar dust provided more than enough light for Neil Armstrong to photograph Buzz Aldrin’s descent. In fact, there was so much light that Armstrong had to change the aperture and shutter speed so as to not overexpose the shot. Oh, and the absent stars? Puh-lease, anyone who lives in a rural environment where the streets are brightly lit should be able to answer/understand that one explained below.
For extra credit, Nvida recreated the simulation in 2018 using their latest graphics gpu and the results were the same.
Writing on the company blog, Nvidia's Brian Caufield says, "All of this only heightened the fidelity of our latest demo -- and re-confirmed what we'd discovered four years ago. That the illumination of the astronaut in the photo wasn't caused by something other than the sun -- such as studio lights -- but by light doing what light does."
Similar simulations and other ingenious reenactments and stagings have confirmed every facet of the moon landings from launch at Cape Kennedy to orbit, to breaking orbit to lunar insertion orbit (LIO) to docking, to separation, to piloting the LM to the surface to the buggy stowage and deployment to the return trips and splashdowns. They are in some manner, as exciting as the historical events that generate their necessity.
Cynical modern man, largely devoid of life outside the silicon and pixel based digital bubbles we are voluntarily trapped inside simply cannot conceive of the dedication to a thing larger than themselves actually producing the wonder and magnificence of the moon landings though these same people can imagine the same devotion and labor applied across generations to build e.g. Notre Dame de Paris; where’s the disconnect!?
I believe it lies in what Marshall McLuhan identified as our age’s rejection from enchantment. We simply cannot and in many cases, will not believe that there is wonder left to behold in this world because we can and seemingly must explain and then pretend to understand all that is life in terms of what science says “makes it tick”. But science cannot explain beauty and it cannot explain why when men used to look up at the heavens, he saw God and in seeing God he saw the infinite possibilities God blessed us with in the wonder of the heavens and that includes, exploring them… successfully.
Try it sometime, you might be just a bit less cynical about it all.
CONCLUSION: WHY WOULDN’T YOU WANT THIS STORY TO BE TRUE?
I’ll leave you with this 2005, 60 Minutes, Ed Bradley interview with Neil Armstrong and pray that around July 20th, 2024, there’s a lot less “moon landings were staged, psy-op distraction”.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/science/space/03moon.html