As mentioned, “Fly Me to the Moon” suggests that the United States wanted to fake the moon landing to beat the Soviet Union in the space race. America didn’t want its rival perceived as the superior superpower, and its communist government better than democracy. And many who believe the moon landing was faked would likely say something similar (or that it was meant to divert attention from the disastrous Vietnam War).
Peter Knight, author of “Conspiracy Culture: From the Kennedy Assassination to ‘The X-Files,'” points to Bill Kaysing’s self-published 1976 book — “We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle” — as the origin of the theory. Kaysing claims that NASA couldn’t make President John F. Kennedy’s pledge to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, so it faked the moon landing. A former U.S. naval officer with connections to the U.S. space program, however questionably (he was a technical writer), was the perfect conduit for such claims at the time. Conspiracies about JFK’s assassination had already made headway in the 1960s, and the end of the decade marked the beginning of a time when trust in the U.S. government began to decline amid the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal.
But the movie deviates slightly from Kaysing’s theory. He claimed NASA didn’t have the technology to reach the moon, so it filmed a fake moon walk in a film studio. Afterward, it sent astronauts into orbit and broadcast the footage. The movie instead portrays the alleged scheme as more of a fallback — should the mission fail, they have footage to broadcast to cover up its botched attempt.
