Speaker 1: Pushkin. There's a place in our world where the dubious
Speaker 1: things end up, a morgue of fakes, hoaxes, frauds, and
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories. I've got a wall of televisions in here.
Speaker 1: I think it's a hoax. I think it's a hoax
Speaker 1: by the newspapers and the Democrats are based on based
Speaker 1: on what you've been with a lot of this stuff.
Speaker 1: No matter what it's supposedly about, the pandemic, the election,
Speaker 1: it sounds like a broken record. It's a hoax. It's
Speaker 1: a hoax. Everybody knows that it's a it's a complete hoax.
Speaker 1: Or it's like a Russian doll. Crack open one hoax
Speaker 1: an inside there's just another hoos hoax after hoaxing. But
Speaker 1: a hoax. It's a hoax because as soon as Teach
Speaker 1: was over, they needed something else to bring down shrump
Speaker 1: and they had to bring the economy down. And this
Speaker 1: is it and I'll tell you why. So wait, wait, James,
Speaker 1: you think that somebody conspired to have a virus to
Speaker 1: bring down the president? Yea a deep state? The deep state.
Speaker 1: Conspiracy theorists look for patterns, they connect the dots. But
Speaker 1: that's also how historians work even here in a place
Speaker 1: that lies half hidden, in the shadow of doubt, where
Speaker 1: the sign on the door reads the last Archive. That's
Speaker 1: where I'm digging through my files to find the hook
Speaker 1: story that started it all. Two minus one minute, thirty
Speaker 1: five seconds on the Apollo mission, The flight to land
Speaker 1: of the first men on the Moon, nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 1: The dawn of the Age of Aquarius, the dawn of
Speaker 1: the age of the hoax, step through an airlock to
Speaker 1: Cape Canaveral, Florida. The Kennedy Space Center Launch time follow eleven.
Speaker 1: When NASA launched Apollo eleven in July nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 1: that rocket fractured time and space. People who watched on
Speaker 1: television live remember it. I was too little. But for
Speaker 1: most people this was a television event, not a big
Speaker 1: bang of an idea like Copernicanism or Darwinism. It was
Speaker 1: something you watched on a screen as if it were
Speaker 1: a TV show like Gunsmoke or Bonanza, a television episode.
Speaker 1: But it also was a dream, and it was a
Speaker 1: big idea. Since the dawn of humanity, people had lain
Speaker 1: awake in the chill and dark of night and looked
Speaker 1: up at the stars in the Moon and wondered what's
Speaker 1: up there or who. Then at the start of the
Speaker 1: Kennedy administration, the President said it was time to find
Speaker 1: the answers. We set sail on this new sea because
Speaker 1: there is new knowledge to be gained and new rights
Speaker 1: to be won, and they must be won and used
Speaker 1: or the progress of all people. The audacity of it
Speaker 1: staggers me. In the middle of the twentieth century, in
Speaker 1: the middle of an arms race, at the height of
Speaker 1: the techno swagger of the Cold War, the United States
Speaker 1: decided to conquer the Moon. We choose to go to
Speaker 1: the Moon and districate and do the other thing, not
Speaker 1: because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because
Speaker 1: that gold we'll serve to organize and measure the best
Speaker 1: of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one
Speaker 1: that we're willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone,
Speaker 1: and one we intend to win. We will win the moon.
Speaker 1: We will win the race to the Moon. It began
Speaker 1: with a big idea in nineteen sixty one, but when
Speaker 1: it finally came off, when it happened it was broadcast
Speaker 1: live in nineteen sixty nine, it became a big idea
Speaker 1: disguised as a TV event, A miniseries beginning with the
Speaker 1: rockets launch on July sixteenth, at nine thirty two am
Speaker 1: Eastern five four three two one zero, all engine running,
Speaker 1: lipped off. We have a lipped off thirty two minutes
Speaker 1: past the hour, ripped off on Apollo eleven. The United
Speaker 1: States had been launching people into orbit and beyond for
Speaker 1: nearly a decade at this point, but this launch it
Speaker 1: was hard to believe it was really happening, probably because
Speaker 1: of where it was going. Norman Mailer, the bad boy
Speaker 1: of mid century American letters, wrote a series of essays
Speaker 1: about it for Life Magazine. The event was so removed,
Speaker 1: so unreal, that no objective choral would have existed to
Speaker 1: prove it had not been an event stage in the
Speaker 1: television studio, like the greatest connoist century. Here's what made
Speaker 1: mail are sure the Moon mission wasn't a con. Going
Speaker 1: to the Moon was hard, but faking it and the
Speaker 1: conspiracy required to cover up the fake would have been
Speaker 1: even harder. It would have been impossible if it were bogus,
Speaker 1: Mailer said, it would have been as incredible an accomplishment
Speaker 1: and mass hoodwinking as the actual mission was in technology.
Speaker 1: It would take criminals and confidence been mightier, more trustworthy,
Speaker 1: and more resourceful than anything in a century of the
Speaker 1: ones before. So that makes sense to me. It'd be
Speaker 1: way too complicated to fake this. Why not just go
Speaker 1: to the Moon? All the same? A not small number
Speaker 1: of Americans began to think the Moon mission was a hoax,
Speaker 1: that there had really been a mass hoodwinking. But believe
Speaker 1: it or not, some people say it never happened. This
Speaker 1: whole thing was a fake. Decide for yourself, as he explore,
Speaker 1: the vice or mid have orchestrated the deception of the
Speaker 1: century massa cop have pulled off the greatest coats of
Speaker 1: all time. Welcome to the Last Archive, the show about
Speaker 1: how we know what we know, how we used to
Speaker 1: know things, and why it seems lately as if we
Speaker 1: don't know anything at all. I'm Jillipour and this is
Speaker 1: our season of doubt. What about going to the Moon
Speaker 1: led to the rise of the modern age of the
Speaker 1: hoax and to the idea that history itself couldn't be trusted.
Speaker 1: It had taken seven years from the day Kennedy said
Speaker 1: we choose to go to the Moon, to the launch
Speaker 1: itself the effort costs nearly two hundred billion dollars in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one. Money, no bucks, no buck, rogers, NASA
Speaker 1: guys told Congress. But Congress kept ponying up all that money,
Speaker 1: not so much because members of Congress were looking to
Speaker 1: the future, but because they were looking to the past,
Speaker 1: specifically to something that had happened in nineteen fifty seven.
Speaker 1: Until two days ago, that sound had never been heard
Speaker 1: on this earth. Suddenly it has become as much a
Speaker 1: part of twentieth century life as the horror of your
Speaker 1: vacuum cleaner. It's a report from man's farthest frontier. The
Speaker 1: radio signal transmitted by the Soviet Sputnik, the first man
Speaker 1: made satellite, as it passed over New York earlier today.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty seven, the Soviet Union had launched the
Speaker 1: world's first satellite, Sputnik. At the time, Kennedy was a
Speaker 1: Massachusetts Senator. He publicly blamed President Eisenhower for what had
Speaker 1: been dubbed a missile gap, for falling behind the Soviets
Speaker 1: in the space race. Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson warned
Speaker 1: that soon the Russians will be dropping bombs on us
Speaker 1: from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses.
Speaker 1: Historians have come to cease since there really was no
Speaker 1: missile gap, which is what Eisenhower had always insisted. Still,
Speaker 1: with some reluctance, Eisenhower agreed to establish NASA, the National
Speaker 1: Aeronautics and Space Administration. It's easy to think American voters
Speaker 1: were super gung ho about NASA and about going to
Speaker 1: the Moon, but Americans were not gung ho about the
Speaker 1: Moon mission. At hardly any point between the day Kennedy
Speaker 1: announced the mission and the day American astronauts landed on
Speaker 1: the Moon did a majority of Americans support the moonshot. Instead,
Speaker 1: critics called it a moondoggle for one thing, A lot
Speaker 1: of people thought, not unreasonably, that there are other better
Speaker 1: things to spend taxpayer money on the head of the
Speaker 1: National Urban League said it will cost thirty five billion
Speaker 1: dollars to put two men on the Moon. It would
Speaker 1: take ten billion dollars to lift every poor person in
Speaker 1: this country above the official poverty standard this year. Something
Speaker 1: is wrong somewhere. The day before the launch, civil rights
Speaker 1: activists staged a protest at the Kennedy Space Center. Ralph
Speaker 1: Abernathy gave a speech that even now unsettles me from
Speaker 1: this day to the heavens beyond. But as long as racism, poverty, hunger,
Speaker 1: and won't prevail on the head, we as a civilized
Speaker 1: nation have failed. Among the skeptics of the Moonshot were
Speaker 1: some of the astronaut's own wives. The wife of a
Speaker 1: member of the crew of Apollo ten said, if you
Speaker 1: think going to the moon is hard, try staying at home.
Speaker 1: This is strange sexual politics to the Cold War race
Speaker 1: to conquer space. A few people said this more squarely
Speaker 1: than the writer and scientist Rachel Carson, who, when the
Speaker 1: Soviets launched their first satellite, had been writing a book
Speaker 1: she'd been calling men against the Earth. In pre spotnic days,
Speaker 1: it was easy to dismiss so much as science fiction fantasies.
Speaker 1: Now the most far fetched schemes seem entirely possible of achievement,
Speaker 1: and man seems actually likely to take into his hands,
Speaker 1: ill prepared as he is psychologically many of the functions
Speaker 1: of God. So yes, even before the Moonshot there were
Speaker 1: people who are skeptical about it, about men trying to
Speaker 1: become gods by flying to the skies. There were misgivings.
Speaker 1: But how did we get from doubts and misgivings to
Speaker 1: a full on conspiracy theory. One answer to that question
Speaker 1: lies in the history of hoaxes. I started to have
Speaker 1: a hunch that hoaxes weren't about what certainly what the
Speaker 1: hoaxes said they were, but even what people sometimes wrote
Speaker 1: about that they were. Kevin Young is the poetry editor
Speaker 1: of The New Yorker and director of the Smithsonian Museum
Speaker 1: of African American History and Culture. He's also the author
Speaker 1: of a very on the noose book, Oh, and my
Speaker 1: book is Bunk. The Rise of Hoaxes, humbug play, dress phonies,
Speaker 1: post facts, and fake News. I called Young because it
Speaker 1: was in his book that I'd first read of the
Speaker 1: Moon hoax. Not the theory that American astronauts never went
Speaker 1: to the Moon in nineteen sixty nine, but a completely
Speaker 1: different hoax perpetrated in the nineteenth century by an American
Speaker 1: penny newspaper, The New York Sun. In eighteen thirty five,
Speaker 1: The Sun ran a series about some astounding new astronomical discoveries.
Speaker 1: Recent discoveries in astronomy will build an imperishable monument to
Speaker 1: the age in which we live and confer upon the
Speaker 1: present generation of the human race, a proud distinction through
Speaker 1: all future time. In the eighteen thirties, astronomers had been
Speaker 1: debating whether life could exist on the Moon. The scientific
Speaker 1: consensus tended towards no, because astronomers had been able to
Speaker 1: determine that there is no atmosphere on the Moon. No atmosphere,
Speaker 1: no life. Still, they weren't certain. There was room for doubt.
Speaker 1: So playing on this doubt, the Sun perpetrated a hoax
Speaker 1: on Herschel. The famous Scottish astronomer had just built an
Speaker 1: enormous telescope in South Africa. That was true, But then
Speaker 1: the Sun published what it claimed was a reprint of
Speaker 1: a journal article reporting to an eager public what Herschel
Speaker 1: had seen through that telescope. This was the hoax. No
Speaker 1: such journal article ever existed. The Sun made it up,
Speaker 1: but in their coverage they reported that when Herschel put
Speaker 1: his eye to the eyepiece he saw life on the
Speaker 1: surface of the Moon. He was about to become the
Speaker 1: sole depository of wondrous secrets which had been hid from
Speaker 1: the eyes of all men that had lived since the
Speaker 1: birth of time. The eighteen thirty five moon hoax was brilliant.
Speaker 1: Readers were duped. It became the talk of the nation,
Speaker 1: was picked up all over the country, reprinted everywhere. Kevin
Speaker 1: Young found it all fascinating. It has this beautiful casing,
Speaker 1: you know, and it starts with sort of, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: observing the moon, and oh. He reports that the first
Speaker 1: day he sees the moon, and then he gets better
Speaker 1: and better, closer and closer. It's almost sort of like
Speaker 1: the heavens parting each day. According to the fake report,
Speaker 1: Herschel was able to see more and more and more
Speaker 1: on the Moon as he focused his lens lakes, oceans, mountains, valleys, plants,
Speaker 1: and then he spies animals. The first observed was a
Speaker 1: quadruped with an amazingly long neck, head like a sheep,
Speaker 1: bearing two long spiral horns. White is polished ivory, almost
Speaker 1: like a sheep, but not a sheep. Everything on the
Speaker 1: Moon was like that, a lot like things on Earth,
Speaker 1: but then not quite like things on Earth, somehow exotic.
Speaker 1: It resembles the beaver of the Earth in every other
Speaker 1: respect than in its destitution of a tail and its
Speaker 1: invariable habit of walking upon only two feet. It carries
Speaker 1: its young in its arms like a human being man
Speaker 1: on the moon a beaver man. Then Herschel saw a
Speaker 1: higher order of human being. We scientifically denominated them as vespaculio, homo,
Speaker 1: oh man, bat man bat on the moon. Finally, the
Speaker 1: fake Herschel sees creatures even more amazing, whiter angelic. Certainly,
Speaker 1: they were like human beings, for their wings had now disappeared,
Speaker 1: and their attitude in walking was both erect and dignified.
Speaker 1: Readers ate it up. They talked about it at dinner,
Speaker 1: they gabbed about it on the way to church where
Speaker 1: they really met on the moon. What was this all about?
Speaker 1: But I also think there was something lurking beneath all
Speaker 1: of these hoaxes. But that was slavery, and the questions
Speaker 1: and schisms of slavery, I think were often made allegorical
Speaker 1: through hoaxes. So how does that work exactly? Then? Like,
Speaker 1: what is it the people are seeing that they want
Speaker 1: to see on the moon that tells us what they
Speaker 1: believe about slavery and race? I think of the moon
Speaker 1: hoax specifically, and the thing that I noticed is there's
Speaker 1: a hierarchy of being there, and it makes a lot
Speaker 1: of sense. So you know, these people are below these people,
Speaker 1: the biped beavers are this kind of person. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a real transplanting of racial hierarchies onto the moon,
Speaker 1: onto these fictional creatures. And you see that in science
Speaker 1: fiction still, you know, there's usually a good set of
Speaker 1: aliens or a good set of people found under the earth,
Speaker 1: and then a bad set. Eventually, the Sun came clean
Speaker 1: and admitted that the whole thing had been a stunt.
Speaker 1: The newspaper printed a half hearted apology, weirdly suggesting that
Speaker 1: the whole stunt had had a useful effect in diverting
Speaker 1: the public mind from the bitter apple of discord the
Speaker 1: abolition of slavery. One of the great things about a
Speaker 1: hoax is once it's revealed, you can tell what people
Speaker 1: really believe, because they wanted to believe this so badly,
Speaker 1: even it's so clearly fake. I mean, biped beavers on
Speaker 1: a moon. It's pretty hard in retrospect to see as credible.
Speaker 1: But I also think there was this real wish to
Speaker 1: find another place somewhere far away in which you could
Speaker 1: put your hopes in dreams. So it's like the cats
Speaker 1: out of the bag. This hoax was about race. Young
Speaker 1: isn't surprised by that cat, though, because he found that
Speaker 1: same cat hidden inside quite a few bags of hoaxes.
Speaker 1: Many of the hoaxes that I turned up or that
Speaker 1: I vaguely knew about but learned more about. We're deeply
Speaker 1: invested in these kind of ideas and deep divisions in
Speaker 1: our country, and there were ways of sort of working
Speaker 1: that out, however, terribly in the hoax. One of the
Speaker 1: things that's so striking to me about the eighteen thirties
Speaker 1: Moon hoax is that they're kind of on the side
Speaker 1: of scientific inquiry somehow, that they're celebrations of empiricism, even
Speaker 1: though he's completely bogus bunk. Is there some pivot point
Speaker 1: there where like earlier hoaxes are like, look, science is real,
Speaker 1: and now hoaxes they're like, look, science is a bogus.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think there's a with the hoax questions
Speaker 1: of science and questions of religion or questions of truth
Speaker 1: get worked out. And it's almost in times when these
Speaker 1: things are uneasy that it might go one way or
Speaker 1: the other. And I do think you're absolutely right that's
Speaker 1: starting in the twentieth century. Early part it flips from
Speaker 1: you know, I'm going to tell you how things are,
Speaker 1: and part of the hoaxes it's authority. And then I
Speaker 1: think starting in the twentieth century, it really erodes, and
Speaker 1: I think that fear and pain become the topics of
Speaker 1: the hoax. So jump ahead to the moonshot in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine. Okay, plainly it's a story inseparable from racial
Speaker 1: injustice and the question of whether we're all in this
Speaker 1: together or not. You have a poem here, it's called
Speaker 1: Whitey on the Moon. That's the poet in musician Gil
Speaker 1: Scott Heron with his indictment of the Moon mission killing it.
Speaker 1: I can't pay no doctor bills, but white He's on
Speaker 1: the moon. Ten years from now, I'll be paying still
Speaker 1: while white He's on the moon. You know, the man
Speaker 1: just up my red last night because Whitey's on the moon.
Speaker 1: No hot water, no toilets, no lights, But Whitey's on
Speaker 1: the moon. White He headed to the Moon on July sixteenth,
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine, the day after civil rights leader Ralph
Speaker 1: Abernathy let a protest at the Kennedy launch site. I
Speaker 1: can't say this moment in time isn't about whether all
Speaker 1: humans are one here together, on Earth because it is
Speaker 1: leaving the Earth for the Moon. Brought all sorts of
Speaker 1: matters into the blinding, flashing light of Apollo eleven's launch
Speaker 1: thirty seconds san conning past NAT's report, it feels good. Team.
Speaker 1: On twenty five seconds that day, three men gained escape
Speaker 1: velocity and left the Earth behind. Soon out among the gods.
Speaker 1: The men in that spaceship looked back at Earth. Are
Speaker 1: you going to a rap rate right now? And it
Speaker 1: took four days to get there, all the way to
Speaker 1: the Moon. And then everyone back on Earth turned their
Speaker 1: televisions on to watch in just fifty minutes from now,
Speaker 1: well within the hour, the Moon is due to have
Speaker 1: visitors from another planet. On the afternoon of July twentieth,
Speaker 1: CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite narrated the greatest single scientific
Speaker 1: expedition in the history of humanity. Apollo eleven's lunar module
Speaker 1: Eagle and two of the mission's three astronauts, Neil Armstrong
Speaker 1: and Buzz Aldron. We were about to land on the Moon.
Speaker 1: Landed rocket quin crank Quility. We caught the on the ground.
Speaker 1: He got a bunch of guys about the turn blue.
Speaker 1: We're breathing again. Thank a lot. Man on the moon.
Speaker 1: We're cutting it down, eagle, Oh boy, thank you, you're
Speaker 1: looking good here. You hardly ever see Cronkite get excited.
Speaker 1: The man holds it all in, but here he's like
Speaker 1: a little boy, so tickled, so thrilled. The astronauts get
Speaker 1: ready to go outside. It took hours, but you wouldn't
Speaker 1: want to miss it, would you. Nine Armstrong opens the hatch.
Speaker 1: He starts climbing down the ladder rung by rung ten
Speaker 1: fifty six pm. He plants his foot on the surface
Speaker 1: of the Moon. Find the fall fast for land, buy
Speaker 1: a plat. In the studio, Cronkite gathered himself up for
Speaker 1: his historic reaction. Malan's dream and a nation's pledge have
Speaker 1: now been fulfilled. The lunar Age has begun. The lunar
Speaker 1: Age had begun, but another age began that day. Something
Speaker 1: else was launched. The lunar Age would undermine the very
Speaker 1: institution and values at Cronkite so iconically stood for the
Speaker 1: integrity and credibility of the news in the lunar Age.
Speaker 1: The more extraordinary scientific research and technology got, the more
Speaker 1: difficult it became to keep sight of the line between
Speaker 1: fact and fiction, between the believable and the unbelievable. On
Speaker 1: the first season of The Last Archive, I talked a
Speaker 1: lot about the era of mystery in the Middle Ages
Speaker 1: and how it gave rise to the age of the
Speaker 1: fact and then the age of the number, but also
Speaker 1: how with the development of the main frame computer in
Speaker 1: the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties, mystery returned in the
Speaker 1: form of data, because data is a kind of knowledge
Speaker 1: that can only be really reckoned with by computers, not
Speaker 1: by people on their own. But consider other forces of history.
Speaker 1: In the middle decades of the twentieth century, beginning with
Speaker 1: Sputnik in nineteen fifty seven, or even really beginning with
Speaker 1: the dropping of the atom bombs in nineteen forty five,
Speaker 1: science got so powerful that it could do things well
Speaker 1: beyond what nearly everyone except a handful of scientists could know,
Speaker 1: or experience or understand. The more extraordinary the scientific accomplishments,
Speaker 1: the harder it became to believe. The news missiles that
Speaker 1: could annihilate the population of the entire planet in an instant,
Speaker 1: men going to the moon. Eventually it became kind of commonplace,
Speaker 1: a little sheek, a little George Orwell meets Marshall mcluin
Speaker 1: to wonder whether all the news was fake. In nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, the BBC broadcast a play called The News Benders.
Speaker 1: We'd like you to help Plan the News for nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy three. In the play, an acclaimed director goes to
Speaker 1: meet with a corporate bigwig. The big wig wants to
Speaker 1: hire him to fake a bunch of film footage that
Speaker 1: will air in the future as news come again. Plan
Speaker 1: the news by nineteen seventy three. You didn't really believe
Speaker 1: there were all these things whizzing about up there? Did
Speaker 1: you spot nicks on rockets? Astronauts crossing their legs? For
Speaker 1: eighty day? How long has this been going on since Hiroshima?
Speaker 1: In the studio, there's a toy sized model of a
Speaker 1: lunar lander sitting on a table covered with sand. Remember
Speaker 1: this play was produced in nineteen sixty eight, a year
Speaker 1: before the Apollo eleven Moon mission. The filmmaker picks up
Speaker 1: the model as he listens to an early cut of
Speaker 1: the news. They've created Fake news for a day five
Speaker 1: years in the future today. April fourteen, nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 1: First Historic Pictures by rad Star of the combined US
Speaker 1: Russian landing on the move. Shown here are Major's Webb
Speaker 1: and Mikhailovitch taking their first steps into the unknown. The
Speaker 1: Nine Way Hotline finally triage it off. But this is
Speaker 1: going to happen in nineteen seventy three. You're going to
Speaker 1: make this happen. No, we are going to make models
Speaker 1: much cheaper than we photographed the models. Fake newsrooms, a
Speaker 1: fake newsmends, whoa dude? The news beenders was mind bending,
Speaker 1: a thought experiment, but it also got to the heart
Speaker 1: of a real problem. The actual news had gotten very
Speaker 1: difficult to believe. Adam bombs rockets to the Moon news
Speaker 1: in the actual year in nineteen seventy three was way
Speaker 1: more dreary than the newsbender's plan for a fake landing
Speaker 1: on the Moon. There weren't even any more Apollo missions
Speaker 1: to report. Those ended in nineteen seventy two. Instead, TV
Speaker 1: viewers flocked to something else on the dial, something different,
Speaker 1: the Watergate hearings, which revealed that Richard Nixon had lied
Speaker 1: and lied, and so had a whole lot of his advisers.
Speaker 1: You couldn't believe anything anymore. But if you didn't want
Speaker 1: to watch Watergate, you could still speculate about space space
Speaker 1: an endless tapestry of stars reaching to its infinity, scattered
Speaker 1: through its fastness, or one hundred billion planets on which
Speaker 1: life theoretically could exist. Yes, that is the sultry voice
Speaker 1: of Rod Serling. He probably knew him from twice Zone
Speaker 1: show he started in nineteen fifty nine. The Twilight Zone
Speaker 1: is where fact turns to fiction, history turns to mystery,
Speaker 1: and mystery becomes conspiracy. In nineteen seventy three, Stirling hosted
Speaker 1: a documentary called In Search of Ancient Astronauts. If only
Speaker 1: one percent of that life is intelligent, there could be
Speaker 1: one million civilizations out there. Listen carefully to that voice,
Speaker 1: not even so much what he's saying, but how he's
Speaker 1: saying it. It's the voice of the news anchor, the authority.
Speaker 1: It's as if he's hypnotizing you into trusting him, and
Speaker 1: of that million, it is conceivable at one discover the
Speaker 1: secrets of space travel. It is possible that ancient astronauts
Speaker 1: went in search of life beyond their own world and
Speaker 1: found it on the planet Earth. Why all this new
Speaker 1: spookiness just after men landed on the Moon. Here's what
Speaker 1: I think everyone can see the Moon, every last human
Speaker 1: being on Earth. It's ours, all of ours. It holds
Speaker 1: out a certain hope for unity, but then the moon
Speaker 1: holds out a certain mirror of division. Some have got
Speaker 1: and some have not. White, black, brown man, bat, beaverman, angels,
Speaker 1: weighty on the moon. But there's something else too, something
Speaker 1: that really slays me. I think people like to have
Speaker 1: things around that are mind boggling, but then just out
Speaker 1: of reach. Conquering the moon deprived people of the Moon
Speaker 1: as a mind boggler. That one huge mystery was solved.
Speaker 1: There was no white haired god up there in the sky.
Speaker 1: There was instead a giant, dusty rock. This intense change,
Speaker 1: I think got all balled together into a specifically nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies fetish for unsolved mysteries, because well, okay, the moon
Speaker 1: is a rock, but maybe there were still other mysteries.
Speaker 1: Bigfoot omni magazine and the news stand spoon bending Urigeller
Speaker 1: on TV. And there was a weird snakeding its tail
Speaker 1: theory that ancient spacemen had visited the Earth thousands and
Speaker 1: thousands of years ago, and maybe they and not Adam
Speaker 1: and Eve, were our ancestors, or maybe they were the
Speaker 1: source of our beliefs about God. If we accept the
Speaker 1: premise that beings from another civilization visited here ages ago,
Speaker 1: then some of the mysteries of our past take on
Speaker 1: a new and startling light. I confess I love this stuff.
Speaker 1: Ancient aliens came to Earth and built the pyramids. Okay, no,
Speaker 1: I don't believe that. I think it's crazy, but I
Speaker 1: love the hypnotic, fake mysteriousness of it, all, the junkie science,
Speaker 1: the completely preposterous historical analysis. If ancient astronauts did land here,
Speaker 1: what effect would they have had upon early Earthmen? Perhaps
Speaker 1: they were worshiped, feared, loved, Perhaps they brought gifts, a
Speaker 1: new world of not This stuff was all over the
Speaker 1: place in the Spooky Kookie late nineteen sixties. In early
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, Still in Search of was also interested in
Speaker 1: actual science. Doctor Carl Sagan is one of the directors
Speaker 1: of the Mariner mission exploring Mars, and he has a
Speaker 1: special interest in the possibilities of intelligent life in the universe.
Speaker 1: At the very end, in just the final seconds of
Speaker 1: this long documentary, Serling introduced a very young Carl Sagan.
Speaker 1: This is seven years before Sagan became famous for his
Speaker 1: masterful series on PBS cause rous the question arises, might
Speaker 1: there have been a visit to the Earth in historical times.
Speaker 1: It's a kind of scientific justification of theological belief which
Speaker 1: people would rather believe in any case, it's kind of
Speaker 1: modern dress for old time religion. I can only say
Speaker 1: that you can't exclude the possible, but there's not a
Speaker 1: smidget of evidence that is compelling. Sagan nailed it believing
Speaker 1: in ancient astronauts or extraterrestrials. It was like believing in
Speaker 1: God's God's in a godless world magic. After the Great
Speaker 1: Disenchantment in the US, In Search Of became a TV series.
Speaker 1: But the show's thesis wasn't everything is a hoax. The
Speaker 1: show's thesis was everything you thought was a hoax is real.
Speaker 1: The lockness monster, esp governments and scientists have just been
Speaker 1: concealing from you all the evidence, hiding it, locking it
Speaker 1: up in government archives. Nothing was a hoax. It's just
Speaker 1: that a lot of things were hidden by conspiracies. Rod
Speaker 1: Serling had died and so the producers of In Search
Speaker 1: Of instead hired Leonard Nimoy from Star Trek to host
Speaker 1: the series. There are episodes about Amelia Earhart and Bigfoot,
Speaker 1: and of course UFOs. Sometimes they come in silence, sometimes
Speaker 1: quiet thunder. Often they leave marks in the earth signals
Speaker 1: and they're passing. I watched In Search Of as a
Speaker 1: kid with my mom. I have zero data on whether
Speaker 1: fans of the show believed in Bigfoot or the Lockness Monster.
Speaker 1: I can only report that my mother and I did not,
Speaker 1: and that was the fun of it. It was like
Speaker 1: believing but also not at all believing in the Tooth Fairy.
Speaker 1: But now that I've grown up to be a historian,
Speaker 1: I want to know what was the meaning of this
Speaker 1: rage for goofy unsolved mysteries in the nineteen seventies. In
Speaker 1: one way, I think of In Search Of as an
Speaker 1: update of Ripley's Believe it or not. Ripley had called
Speaker 1: his stuff curiodities, But somehow what started out as curiodities
Speaker 1: became conspiracies because at the same time that my mom
Speaker 1: and I were watching In Search Of, a lot of
Speaker 1: other people started arguing and believing that the Apollo will
Speaker 1: even mission never happened, that we'd never landed on the Moon,
Speaker 1: that the whole thing had been covered up by a
Speaker 1: vast conspiracy. Good afternoon. This is May Brussel in Carminal, California.
Speaker 1: It's September the nineteenth, nineteen seventy seven. I jotted down
Speaker 1: dialogue conspiracy number two hundred and eighty six, but I
Speaker 1: think it's two hundred and eighty seven. I keep track
Speaker 1: each week, but I forgot to write down. I believe
Speaker 1: it's number two hundred eighty seven. May Brussel. She came
Speaker 1: to be known as the Queen of Conspiracy. At the
Speaker 1: time of this broadcast, she was fifty five years old.
Speaker 1: She'd once studied at Stanford, mother of five, housewife. After
Speaker 1: Kennedy was shot, she became convinced that the government was
Speaker 1: hiding a vast conspiracy. The more she looked into it,
Speaker 1: the bigger that conspiracy became. These people in the wall
Speaker 1: of secrecy, the news media being silent, and the pats
Speaker 1: he's locked up in, the psychological profiles, and the writings
Speaker 1: on the wall or the diaries, the incriminating evidence or
Speaker 1: the source of weapons for all his assassinations or conspiracies
Speaker 1: will eventually be traced back to the same sources, which
Speaker 1: is the intelligence community in this country. She launched her
Speaker 1: radio show in nineteen seventy one from KLRBFM, a community
Speaker 1: radio station. Then came Watergate, which made a lot of
Speaker 1: cockamami theories about secret government conspiracies look suddenly plausible. Her
Speaker 1: audience grew. She sent out mail ordered cassettes of her
Speaker 1: show to people far away. She called her fans Brussels sprouts.
Speaker 1: Don't become a Brussels sprout. I know it would be
Speaker 1: so easy if the deep state were running everything. You
Speaker 1: wouldn't have to think about anything. You could just always
Speaker 1: blame the deep state. But that's not how history works.
Speaker 1: I'm going to talk about a book today that I've
Speaker 1: had a while called We Never Went to the Moon
Speaker 1: by build Casing and Randy read. It's called America's thirty
Speaker 1: Billion dollars Swindle. It's a fascinating book. We Never Went
Speaker 1: to the Moon is a seventy eight page self published
Speaker 1: piece of nonsense. May Brussel incorporated its central theory that
Speaker 1: NASA faked all the Apollo missions into all of her
Speaker 1: other theories and these other zombies that have been controlled
Speaker 1: by hypnosis and government drugs, and will also go into
Speaker 1: the possibility that the astronauts were controlled by the government
Speaker 1: psychological department. Brussel was a researcher. Old school conspiracy theorists
Speaker 1: are meticulous about research, and she saw her work as
Speaker 1: giving her listeners a body of previously hidden evidence. She'd
Speaker 1: read newspaper stories out loud, always providing citations. I'm just
Speaker 1: here sharing the evidence. This sort of person always says,
Speaker 1: you decide believe it or not. You are feeling very sleepy.
Speaker 1: Herzog that has been described in The New York Times
Speaker 1: September the eleventh, nineteen seventy seven. If you want to
Speaker 1: go the library in it, radio can work as a
Speaker 1: loudspeaker in amplifier. Reading something obscure out loud on the
Speaker 1: radio gives it a new audience. In this broadcast from
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven, Russell mainly read long passages of Bill
Speaker 1: Casing's moon lending conspiracy theory book out loud. Hardly anyone
Speaker 1: had read Casing's book or even heard of it. Russell
Speaker 1: helped to break it out, but she also tried to
Speaker 1: set it in a much bigger context. Now, the Moonshot
Speaker 1: took place in July of nineteen sixty nine, that great moonshot,
Speaker 1: and many of you may remember, or you may not remember,
Speaker 1: that that was the night that Ted Kennedy had the
Speaker 1: accident in chapter critic. Now, if you can accept some
Speaker 1: of the facts in this book that I'm going to
Speaker 1: be shared with you, you have to have a view
Speaker 1: of history, an overall view of what was happening in
Speaker 1: July nineteen sixty nine. This was by way of introducing
Speaker 1: one of her favorite theories, which involved a conspiracy led
Speaker 1: by the military industrial complex to get Richard Nixon elected president,
Speaker 1: which required getting out of the way all of the
Speaker 1: Kennedy brothers, first Jack, then Bobby, then Teddy at chap
Speaker 1: aquittic somehow. Honestly, don't even ask me. This thing is
Speaker 1: so convoluted. Getting Nixon elected president also entailed faking the
Speaker 1: moon landing. Why were all transmitters easily faked? Why was
Speaker 1: there nothing to see other than the launch? Is there
Speaker 1: any real assurance that the astronauts were aboard the Apollo?
Speaker 1: Is there any proof that they really flew a full
Speaker 1: load of fuel? And he goes into the statistics of
Speaker 1: the fuel. She went on and on and on. It
Speaker 1: was all leading ominously somewhere. Then came the whopper, the
Speaker 1: simulated moon landing. It's very complicated, but it starts with
Speaker 1: Stanley Kubrick. He made a film everyone Knows two thousand
Speaker 1: and one, a Space Odyssey. It was released in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight. The filming took two and a half years.
Speaker 1: The original budget was six million, and then they patted
Speaker 1: it with another four and a half million, a ten
Speaker 1: and a a half million budget. There were two hundred and
Speaker 1: five special effects shots, and then he said, they went
Speaker 1: into the university's, the industrial seventy industrial and aerospace corporations, universities, observatories,
Speaker 1: weather bureaus, laboratories, institutions to ensure that the film would
Speaker 1: be technically accurate. Brussels conspiracy theory has it that Kubrick
Speaker 1: made the film two thousand and one to cover up
Speaker 1: another film that was being made in Nevada for NASA,
Speaker 1: which was footage of a landing on the Moon that
Speaker 1: never happened, faked news newsbender style, and the Apollo Space
Speaker 1: program could use the two thousand and one as a cover.
Speaker 1: He claims that that movie in nineteen sixty eight prepared
Speaker 1: the American people for the film version of space exploration
Speaker 1: that would take place in nineteen sixty nine. I see
Speaker 1: why people are attracted to conspiracy theories. I get it.
Speaker 1: Cornel alogy is important. I love lining up a bunch
Speaker 1: of random news stories on a timeline, tacking them up
Speaker 1: to a wall with pushkins, and looking for a pattern.
Speaker 1: That actually is how historians work, at least it's how
Speaker 1: I work. We collect evidence, organize it chronologically, and look
Speaker 1: for patterns. For instance, if you've been listening to this
Speaker 1: episode carefully, and if you've seen Kubrick's nineteen sixty eight
Speaker 1: film two thousand and one, you might have noticed this
Speaker 1: seemingly uncanny coincidence. Two thousand and one is a story
Speaker 1: about how ancient astronauts came to Earth millennia ago and
Speaker 1: left things behind like a big black monolith. It tells
Speaker 1: the same story as in Search of Ancient Astronauts. That's
Speaker 1: not a conspiracy though, that's just a popular idea. So
Speaker 1: I asked the Brussels sprouts. Is there evidence that NASA,
Speaker 1: aided by Stanley Kubrick, faked the Moon landing? No? None,
Speaker 1: But is there evidence that Americans became really vulnerable to
Speaker 1: conspiratorial thinking? And then I seventies Yes, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of it. Here are some pieces of evidence. I might
Speaker 1: tack him my wall with pushpins first. In addition of
Speaker 1: time magazine in nineteen sixty six with a dark cover
Speaker 1: that asked, is God dead? The nineteen sixties where a
Speaker 1: decade of rising secularism. People were looking for other explanations
Speaker 1: for why bad things happened. Second thing on my Wall
Speaker 1: a New York Times front page from nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 1: when the paper announced that it was publishing a leaked
Speaker 1: report later known as the Pentagon Papers, a report they
Speaker 1: revealed that the US government had been lying to the
Speaker 1: public about what was going on in Vietnam. God was
Speaker 1: dead and the government was lying to Third I'd pin
Speaker 1: up news stories about how Americans learned that the FBI
Speaker 1: had been conducting secret, illegal surveillance on civil rights leaders
Speaker 1: and other activists in infiltrating their organizations. For instance, the
Speaker 1: FBI had spied on Ralph Abernathy, the civil rights leader
Speaker 1: who the protest at Cape Canaveral the day before the
Speaker 1: launch of Apollo eleven. We has a civilized nation have failed.
Speaker 1: Last thing I'd pin up on my wall the long
Speaker 1: burning coverage of the Watergate break in and all the
Speaker 1: lies on the part of the Nixon administration. No wonder
Speaker 1: Americans in the nineteen seventies had a tendency to submit
Speaker 1: to conspiratorial thinking. Oh no, wait, I've got one last
Speaker 1: piece of evidence to pinto my wall. In the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: Hollywood made a gazillion movies about vast government conspiracies, including
Speaker 1: one about a faked space mission. Capricorn One, hit theaters
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy eight. Good Morning, Ladies and gentlemen. At
Speaker 1: the present time, all systems are go, all lights are green.
Speaker 1: Capricorn One is like a movie version of Bill Casing's
Speaker 1: book We Never Went to the Moon. The film's advertising
Speaker 1: campaign featured the line would you be shocked to find
Speaker 1: out that the greatest moment of our recent history may
Speaker 1: not have happened at all? In the movie, NASA fake
Speaker 1: submission to Mars by sending an empty rocket off into
Speaker 1: space and filming a Mars landing in an abandoned military
Speaker 1: facility that's been converted into a movie studio. I do
Speaker 1: really think you're going to get away with us? Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's a chance. Maybe it's not a
Speaker 1: very good one. It's a chance. That's the Hollywood version
Speaker 1: of We Never Went to the Moon, the for profit
Speaker 1: version of May Brussel True Believer. But then how does
Speaker 1: the stuff break out and into the real world? To
Speaker 1: the twenty first century and modern conspiracy theories, the nine
Speaker 1: to eleven Truthers, the Birthers, the Q and honors. You
Speaker 1: really need only to stop and pause at the strange
Speaker 1: and unsettling Quebrickian year of two thousand and one. The
Speaker 1: following program deals with a controversial subject. The theories expressed
Speaker 1: are not the only possible interpretation. Viewers are invited to
Speaker 1: make a judgment based on all available information. This is
Speaker 1: from a Fox special from two thousand and one called
Speaker 1: Conspiracy Theory, Did We Land on the Moon? I think
Speaker 1: of it as a missing link that gets us from
Speaker 1: stuff like May Brussel and a radio show to the
Speaker 1: mainstreaming of conspiracy theories. Unlike in Search of his episode
Speaker 1: about ancient astronauts, it offered no substantial equivalent to a
Speaker 1: Carl Sagan. Instead, a NASA spokesman appears on screen every
Speaker 1: now and again, attempting to make clear that these claims
Speaker 1: are just baseless nonsense, but Fox quickly pivots back to
Speaker 1: sell the conspiracy theory for ratings. There are those who
Speaker 1: claim that believing in Man's one small step requires one
Speaker 1: giant leap of faith. Bill Casing was an analyst and
Speaker 1: engineer at Rocket Dyne. No, he wasn't an analyst and
Speaker 1: an engineer. Casing was a technical writer. In the footage
Speaker 1: of the stage going up, what you don't see is
Speaker 1: an exhaust plume coming out of a rocket engine nozzle.
Speaker 1: A ride ride. So in February of two thousand and one,
Speaker 1: Fox was broadcasting news bindery stuff like that, suggesting huge
Speaker 1: events of the past. We're maybe not real that September,
Speaker 1: a terrifying event took place in the present. Terrorists flew
Speaker 1: airplanes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center,
Speaker 1: New York. And this time someone was ready right away
Speaker 1: to call it a hoax, even while it was happening,
Speaker 1: Even as firefighters and police and rescue workers were trying
Speaker 1: to find survivors in the flames and the rubble. Alex Jones,
Speaker 1: the made Brussel of the twenty first century, was on
Speaker 1: the air saying the whole thing was fake. Well, I've
Speaker 1: been warning you about it for at least five years.
Speaker 1: All terrorism that we've looked at, from the World Trade
Speaker 1: Center of Oklahoma City to Waco has been government actions.
Speaker 1: They need this as a pretext to bring you and
Speaker 1: your family martial law. We've come a long way from
Speaker 1: the hypnotists of the nineteen fifties, but listen to the
Speaker 1: way this guy is trying to hypnotize you, to relieve
Speaker 1: you of the obligation of thinking anything through of analyzing
Speaker 1: the evidence, by offering instead a species of historical explanation
Speaker 1: that the world is even more terrible than it appears,
Speaker 1: and that only Alex Jones can make sense of it.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you the bottom line, ninety eight percent chance
Speaker 1: this was a government orchestrated control bombing. I've been telling
Speaker 1: you this was going to happen just two weeks ago.
Speaker 1: I put the caller the moon landing the old New
Speaker 1: York Sun in search of the twilight zone capricorn. One.
Speaker 1: May Brussel do all these bits and pieces I've got
Speaker 1: here in the last archive line up together to form
Speaker 1: a conspiracy, a conspiracy to turn Americans into conspiracy theorists. No,
Speaker 1: because it wasn't a conspiracy. It was just the of
Speaker 1: history and of politics, the expression the exertion of power.
Speaker 1: Conspiracy theorists and historians do have a lot in common,
Speaker 1: but somewhere we diverge. Historians believe history is driven by ideas,
Speaker 1: by economic forces, by technological change, and even by biological
Speaker 1: and environmental factors. Historical evidence for this kind of change
Speaker 1: over time, it's everywhere. Conspiracy theorists believe that the course
Speaker 1: of history is driven by terrifying higher powers that control
Speaker 1: everything and then conceal the traces of that control by
Speaker 1: hiding the historical evidence. The conspiracy theorist always believes in
Speaker 1: an unseen reality. The historian always believes in reality, hiding
Speaker 1: in plain sight, in the actual evidence of the historical record.
Speaker 1: This is apollow control. At one hundred forty eight hours,
Speaker 1: seven minutes and about twenty four seconds from now, the
Speaker 1: spacecraft will pass the imaginary line enter the Earth sphere
Speaker 1: of influence. Ban By for remark leaving the lender of influence.
Speaker 1: Men flew to the Moon in nineteen sixty nine and
Speaker 1: then they fell to Earth? Or did they next time?
Speaker 1: On the Last Archive, how Americans never really left that
Speaker 1: lunar sphere of influence. The Last Archive is written and
Speaker 1: hosted by me Joe Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane,
Speaker 1: mckibbon and Ben Natt of Hafrey. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Speaker 1: And Our executive producer is Mia Lobel. Martin Gonzalez is
Speaker 1: our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by
Speaker 1: Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Sympinett. Our research
Speaker 1: assistants are Olivia Oldham and Oliver Riskin Cuts. Our full
Speaker 1: proof players are Yoshiamo, Raymond Blankenhorne, Mathis Bosse, Dan Epstein,
Speaker 1: Ethan Herschenfeld, Becka A. Lewis, Andrew Parella, Robert Riccotta, and
Speaker 1: Nick Saxton. The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: At Pushkin thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain, John Schnar's,
Speaker 1: Carl Magliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 1: Maya Kanig, and Daniella Lacan. Many of our sound effects
Speaker 1: are from Harry Janette Junior and the Star Jenette Foundation.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Simon Lake. If you like the show,
Speaker 1: please remember to rate, share, and review. To find more
Speaker 1: Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you listen at podcasts. I'm Jill Lapour