Man on the Moon

If you believe they put a man on the moon, man on the moon

If you believe there's nothing up their sleeve, then nothing is cool

This is the repetitive, driving refrain that runs through REM's song "Man on the Moon". Should we believe that "they put a man on the moon"? Certainly the prevailing orthodoxy says we should. The question is in the news because an American basketball player, Stephen Curry, said he believed they hadn't. To quote from this online news source:

Curry was a guest on the Winging It podcast, hosted by Vince Carter and Kent Bazemore of the Atlanta Hawks. The Warriors guard was supposed to talk about the endless comparisons to dynamic rookie point guard Trae Young, but things veered off script. At one point, the players were talking about the sounds dinosaurs make when Curry abruptly changed the subject to his belief that human beings have never landed on the moon. 

"We ever been to the moon," he asked. 

The others agreed the answer was no. 

"They're going to come get us," Curry replied. "Sorry, I don't want to start conspiracies." 

If he's indeed serious, Curry joins an exclusive group of elite NBA ball-handlers who seem to believe the world has been spoon-fed science lies. The other star in that group: Boston Celtics flat-earther Kyrie Irving, who drew the ire of science teachers everywhere when he said he believes the world we inhabit is shaped more like a basketball court than an actual basketball.

Notice how Curry's querying the reality of humans landing on the moon is quickly linked to another basketball player's belief in a flat earth. NASA responded thus:

"We'd love for Mr Curry to tour the lunar lab at our Johnson Space Center in Houston, perhaps the next time the Warriors are in town to play the Rockets," a NASA spokesman, Allard Beutel, told the New York Times. "We have hundreds of pounds of moon rocks stored there, and the Apollo mission control. 

"During his visit, he can see firsthand what we did 50 years ago, as well as what we're doing now to go back to the moon in the coming years, but this time to stay." 

According to Popular Science, astronauts have brought back 842 pounds of moon rocks for study, including some that are 200 million years older than Earth's oldest rocks.

Well, the obvious retort to that is that you don't have to go to the moon to collect rocks from the moon. To quote from Wikipedia:

Moon rocks on Earth come from three sources: those collected by the United States Apollo program manned lunar landings from 1969 to 1972; samples returned by three Soviet Luna programme unmanned probes in the 1970s; and rocks that were ejected naturally from the lunar surface. The Apollo missions collected 2,200 samples weighing 382 kilograms (842 lb). Three Luna spacecraft returned with 301 grams (10.6 oz) of samples. More than 300 lunar meteorites have been collected on Earth, representing more than 30 different meteorite fall events (none witnessed), with a total mass of over 190 kilograms (420 lb). Some were discovered by scientific teams (such as ANSMET) searching for meteorites in Antarctica, with most of the remainder discovered by collectors in the desert regions of northern Africa and Oman. 

 Admittedly, the mass of lunar meteorites is only half the alleged mass of Apollo samples (420 pounds versus 842 pounds). Embarrassingly for the Russians, they collected less than a pound! Should we believe the Apollo astronauts collected this impressive weight of moon rock? The prevailing orthodoxy says we should.

And yes, it is almost 50 years since the first humans set foot on the moon. That's a long time. The landings took place at a time when Richard (Tricky Dicky) Nixon was President of the United States. He resigned in disgrace on August 9th 1974. No humans have visited the Moon since December 14th 1972. All the moon landings took place on his watch, at a time when the United States was losing the war in Vietnam and there was fiscal uncertainty due to the country abandoning the gold standard in 1971 and embracing the petrodollar in its place.

These facts hardly disprove that humans landed on the moon. However, like vaccinations, anthropogenic global warming or 9/11, there is no middle ground in the debate. You either believe the official story or you don't. There are certainly grounds for querying what really happened in the Apollo missions with a provenly corrupt President overseeing the operations. However, an impartial assessment of all the facts is certainly not what NASA wants. If you doubt the official narrative then you're no different from a flat earther denying that the world is a round. Even though NASA says that humans are going back to the moon "in the coming years", the fact is that it's almost exactly 46 years since the last humans allegedly landed on the moon.

It doesn't affect a basketball player's career to query the moon landings but that's not the case in other areas of employment. I would surmise that any teacher or academic who questioned the orthodoxy would not have her or his career prospects enhanced. Any scientist or person working in government departments, in the United States or elsewhere in the world, would be similarly disadvantaged. Notice I said "questioned" and not "challenged". To be branded a deviant thinker, a person simply needs to express doubt.

Of course, Stephen Curry is only one of many people around the world who do not believe the official narrative. Why should we believe what our politicians, scientists and government agencies tell us? Thankfully more and more are choosing not to or at least to question what they are being told. In doing so, it's important to avoid the dichotomy (belief or non-belief) that the powers-that-ought-not-to-be have cultivated. I really don't know if the Apollo astronauts landed on the moon or not but I have my doubts. That's all that's required: doubt. Doubt is healthy. Doubt begets doubt. It is a good thing to sow the seeds of doubt in others. Eventually it leads to people questioning the entire narrative.