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Or it's like a Russian doll. Crack open one hoax an inside there's just another hoos hoax after hoaxing. But a hoax. It's a hoax because as soon as Teach was over, they needed something else to bring down shrump and they had to bring the economy down. And this is it and I'll tell you why. So wait, wait, James, you think that somebody conspired to have a virus to bring down the president? Yea a deep state? The deep state.

Conspiracy theorists look for patterns, they connect the dots. But that's also how historians work even here in a place that lies half hidden, in the shadow of doubt, where the sign on the door reads the last Archive. That's where I'm digging through my files to find the hook

story that started it all. Two minus one minute, thirty five seconds on the Apollo mission, The flight to land of the first men on the Moon, nineteen sixty nine, The dawn of the Age of Aquarius, the dawn of the age of the hoax, step through an airlock to Cape Canaveral, Florida. The Kennedy Space Center Launch time follow eleven. When NASA launched Apollo eleven in July nineteen sixty nine, that rocket fractured time and space. People who watched on

television live remember it. I was too little. But for most people this was a television event, not a big bang of an idea like Copernicanism or Darwinism. It was something you watched on a screen as if it were a TV show like Gunsmoke or Bonanza, a television episode. But it also was a dream, and it was a big idea. Since the dawn of humanity, people had lain awake in the chill and dark of night and looked up at the stars in the Moon and wondered what's

up there or who. Then at the start of the Kennedy administration, the President said it was time to find the answers. We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used or the progress of all people. The audacity of it staggers me. In the middle of the twentieth century, in the middle of an arms race, at the height of the techno swagger of the Cold War, the United States

decided to conquer the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon and districate and do the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that gold we'll serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win. We will win the moon.

We will win the race to the Moon. It began with a big idea in nineteen sixty one, but when it finally came off, when it happened it was broadcast live in nineteen sixty nine, it became a big idea disguised as a TV event, A miniseries beginning with the rockets launch on July sixteenth, at nine thirty two am Eastern five four three two one zero, all engine running, lipped off. We have a lipped off thirty two minutes

past the hour, ripped off on Apollo eleven. The United States had been launching people into orbit and beyond for nearly a decade at this point, but this launch it was hard to believe it was really happening, probably because of where it was going. Norman Mailer, the bad boy of mid century American letters, wrote a series of essays about it for Life Magazine. The event was so removed, so unreal, that no objective choral would have existed to prove it had not been an event stage in the

television studio, like the greatest connoist century. Here's what made mail are sure the Moon mission wasn't a con. Going to the Moon was hard, but faking it and the conspiracy required to cover up the fake would have been even harder. It would have been impossible if it were bogus, Mailer said, it would have been as incredible an accomplishment and mass hoodwinking as the actual mission was in technology.

It would take criminals and confidence been mightier, more trustworthy, and more resourceful than anything in a century of the ones before. So that makes sense to me. It'd be way too complicated to fake this. Why not just go to the Moon? All the same? A not small number of Americans began to think the Moon mission was a hoax, that there had really been a mass hoodwinking. But believe it or not, some people say it never happened. This

whole thing was a fake. Decide for yourself, as he explore, the vice or mid have orchestrated the deception of the century massa cop have pulled off the greatest coats of all time. Welcome to the Last Archive, the show about how we know what we know, how we used to know things, and why it seems lately as if we don't know anything at all. I'm Jillipour and this is

our season of doubt. What about going to the Moon led to the rise of the modern age of the hoax and to the idea that history itself couldn't be trusted. It had taken seven years from the day Kennedy said we choose to go to the Moon, to the launch itself the effort costs nearly two hundred billion dollars in twenty twenty one. Money, no bucks, no buck, rogers, NASA

guys told Congress. But Congress kept ponying up all that money, not so much because members of Congress were looking to the future, but because they were looking to the past, specifically to something that had happened in nineteen fifty seven. Until two days ago, that sound had never been heard on this earth. Suddenly it has become as much a part of twentieth century life as the horror of your

vacuum cleaner. It's a report from man's farthest frontier. The radio signal transmitted by the Soviet Sputnik, the first man made satellite, as it passed over New York earlier today. In nineteen fifty seven, the Soviet Union had launched the world's first satellite, Sputnik. At the time, Kennedy was a Massachusetts Senator. He publicly blamed President Eisenhower for what had been dubbed a missile gap, for falling behind the Soviets

in the space race. Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson warned that soon the Russians will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses. Historians have come to cease since there really was no missile gap, which is what Eisenhower had always insisted. Still, with some reluctance, Eisenhower agreed to establish NASA, the National

Aeronautics and Space Administration. It's easy to think American voters were super gung ho about NASA and about going to the Moon, but Americans were not gung ho about the Moon mission. At hardly any point between the day Kennedy announced the mission and the day American astronauts landed on

the Moon did a majority of Americans support the moonshot. Instead, critics called it a moondoggle for one thing, A lot of people thought, not unreasonably, that there are other better things to spend taxpayer money on the head of the National Urban League said it will cost thirty five billion dollars to put two men on the Moon. It would take ten billion dollars to lift every poor person in this country above the official poverty standard this year. Something

is wrong somewhere. The day before the launch, civil rights activists staged a protest at the Kennedy Space Center. Ralph Abernathy gave a speech that even now unsettles me from this day to the heavens beyond. But as long as racism, poverty, hunger, and won't prevail on the head, we as a civilized nation have failed. Among the skeptics of the Moonshot were

some of the astronaut's own wives. The wife of a member of the crew of Apollo ten said, if you think going to the moon is hard, try staying at home. This is strange sexual politics to the Cold War race to conquer space. A few people said this more squarely than the writer and scientist Rachel Carson, who, when the Soviets launched their first satellite, had been writing a book

she'd been calling men against the Earth. In pre spotnic days, it was easy to dismiss so much as science fiction fantasies. Now the most far fetched schemes seem entirely possible of achievement, and man seems actually likely to take into his hands, ill prepared as he is psychologically many of the functions of God. So yes, even before the Moonshot there were people who are skeptical about it, about men trying to become gods by flying to the skies. There were misgivings.

But how did we get from doubts and misgivings to a full on conspiracy theory. One answer to that question lies in the history of hoaxes. I started to have a hunch that hoaxes weren't about what certainly what the hoaxes said they were, but even what people sometimes wrote about that they were. Kevin Young is the poetry editor of The New Yorker and director of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. He's also the author of a very on the noose book, Oh, and my

book is Bunk. The Rise of Hoaxes, humbug play, dress phonies, post facts, and fake News. I called Young because it was in his book that I'd first read of the Moon hoax. Not the theory that American astronauts never went to the Moon in nineteen sixty nine, but a completely different hoax perpetrated in the nineteenth century by an American penny newspaper, The New York Sun. In eighteen thirty five, The Sun ran a series about some astounding new astronomical discoveries.

Recent discoveries in astronomy will build an imperishable monument to the age in which we live and confer upon the present generation of the human race, a proud distinction through all future time. In the eighteen thirties, astronomers had been debating whether life could exist on the Moon. The scientific consensus tended towards no, because astronomers had been able to determine that there is no atmosphere on the Moon. No atmosphere,

no life. Still, they weren't certain. There was room for doubt. So playing on this doubt, the Sun perpetrated a hoax on Herschel. The famous Scottish astronomer had just built an enormous telescope in South Africa. That was true, But then the Sun published what it claimed was a reprint of a journal article reporting to an eager public what Herschel had seen through that telescope. This was the hoax. No

such journal article ever existed. The Sun made it up, but in their coverage they reported that when Herschel put his eye to the eyepiece he saw life on the surface of the Moon. He was about to become the sole depository of wondrous secrets which had been hid from the eyes of all men that had lived since the birth of time. The eighteen thirty five moon hoax was brilliant. Readers were duped. It became the talk of the nation, was picked up all over the country, reprinted everywhere. Kevin

Young found it all fascinating. It has this beautiful casing, you know, and it starts with sort of, oh, I'm observing the moon, and oh. He reports that the first day he sees the moon, and then he gets better and better, closer and closer. It's almost sort of like the heavens parting each day. According to the fake report, Herschel was able to see more and more and more on the Moon as he focused his lens lakes, oceans, mountains, valleys, plants,

and then he spies animals. The first observed was a quadruped with an amazingly long neck, head like a sheep, bearing two long spiral horns. White is polished ivory, almost like a sheep, but not a sheep. Everything on the Moon was like that, a lot like things on Earth, but then not quite like things on Earth, somehow exotic. It resembles the beaver of the Earth in every other respect than in its destitution of a tail and its

invariable habit of walking upon only two feet. It carries its young in its arms like a human being man on the moon a beaver man. Then Herschel saw a higher order of human being. We scientifically denominated them as vespaculio, homo, oh man, bat man bat on the moon. Finally, the fake Herschel sees creatures even more amazing, whiter angelic. Certainly, they were like human beings, for their wings had now disappeared, and their attitude in walking was both erect and dignified.

Readers ate it up. They talked about it at dinner, they gabbed about it on the way to church where they really met on the moon. What was this all about? But I also think there was something lurking beneath all of these hoaxes. But that was slavery, and the questions and schisms of slavery, I think were often made allegorical through hoaxes. So how does that work exactly? Then? Like, what is it the people are seeing that they want to see on the moon that tells us what they

believe about slavery and race? I think of the moon hoax specifically, and the thing that I noticed is there's a hierarchy of being there, and it makes a lot of sense. So you know, these people are below these people, the biped beavers are this kind of person. You know, there's a real transplanting of racial hierarchies onto the moon,

onto these fictional creatures. And you see that in science fiction still, you know, there's usually a good set of aliens or a good set of people found under the earth, and then a bad set. Eventually, the Sun came clean and admitted that the whole thing had been a stunt. The newspaper printed a half hearted apology, weirdly suggesting that the whole stunt had had a useful effect in diverting the public mind from the bitter apple of discord the

abolition of slavery. One of the great things about a hoax is once it's revealed, you can tell what people really believe, because they wanted to believe this so badly, even it's so clearly fake. I mean, biped beavers on a moon. It's pretty hard in retrospect to see as credible. But I also think there was this real wish to find another place somewhere far away in which you could put your hopes in dreams. So it's like the cats

out of the bag. This hoax was about race. Young isn't surprised by that cat, though, because he found that same cat hidden inside quite a few bags of hoaxes. Many of the hoaxes that I turned up or that I vaguely knew about but learned more about. We're deeply invested in these kind of ideas and deep divisions in our country, and there were ways of sort of working

that out, however, terribly in the hoax. One of the things that's so striking to me about the eighteen thirties Moon hoax is that they're kind of on the side of scientific inquiry somehow, that they're celebrations of empiricism, even though he's completely bogus bunk. Is there some pivot point there where like earlier hoaxes are like, look, science is real, and now hoaxes they're like, look, science is a bogus.

I mean, I think there's a with the hoax questions of science and questions of religion or questions of truth get worked out. And it's almost in times when these things are uneasy that it might go one way or the other. And I do think you're absolutely right that's starting in the twentieth century. Early part it flips from you know, I'm going to tell you how things are,

and part of the hoaxes it's authority. And then I think starting in the twentieth century, it really erodes, and I think that fear and pain become the topics of the hoax. So jump ahead to the moonshot in nineteen sixty nine. Okay, plainly it's a story inseparable from racial injustice and the question of whether we're all in this together or not. You have a poem here, it's called Whitey on the Moon. That's the poet in musician Gil Scott Heron with his indictment of the Moon mission killing it.

I can't pay no doctor bills, but white He's on the moon. Ten years from now, I'll be paying still while white He's on the moon. You know, the man just up my red last night because Whitey's on the moon. No hot water, no toilets, no lights, But Whitey's on the moon. White He headed to the Moon on July sixteenth, nineteen sixty nine, the day after civil rights leader Ralph

Abernathy let a protest at the Kennedy launch site. I can't say this moment in time isn't about whether all humans are one here together, on Earth because it is leaving the Earth for the Moon. Brought all sorts of matters into the blinding, flashing light of Apollo eleven's launch thirty seconds san conning past NAT's report, it feels good. Team. On twenty five seconds that day, three men gained escape velocity and left the Earth behind. Soon out among the gods.

The men in that spaceship looked back at Earth. Are you going to a rap rate right now? And it took four days to get there, all the way to the Moon. And then everyone back on Earth turned their televisions on to watch in just fifty minutes from now, well within the hour, the Moon is due to have visitors from another planet. On the afternoon of July twentieth, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite narrated the greatest single scientific

expedition in the history of humanity. Apollo eleven's lunar module Eagle and two of the mission's three astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldron. We were about to land on the Moon. Landed rocket quin crank Quility. We caught the on the ground. He got a bunch of guys about the turn blue. We're breathing again. Thank a lot. Man on the moon. We're cutting it down, eagle, Oh boy, thank you, you're looking good here. You hardly ever see Cronkite get excited.

The man holds it all in, but here he's like a little boy, so tickled, so thrilled. The astronauts get ready to go outside. It took hours, but you wouldn't want to miss it, would you. Nine Armstrong opens the hatch. He starts climbing down the ladder rung by rung ten fifty six pm. He plants his foot on the surface of the Moon. Find the fall fast for land, buy a plat. In the studio, Cronkite gathered himself up for his historic reaction. Malan's dream and a nation's pledge have

now been fulfilled. The lunar Age has begun. The lunar Age had begun, but another age began that day. Something else was launched. The lunar Age would undermine the very institution and values at Cronkite so iconically stood for the integrity and credibility of the news in the lunar Age. The more extraordinary scientific research and technology got, the more difficult it became to keep sight of the line between

fact and fiction, between the believable and the unbelievable. On the first season of The Last Archive, I talked a lot about the era of mystery in the Middle Ages and how it gave rise to the age of the fact and then the age of the number, but also how with the development of the main frame computer in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties, mystery returned in the form of data, because data is a kind of knowledge that can only be really reckoned with by computers, not

by people on their own. But consider other forces of history. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, beginning with Sputnik in nineteen fifty seven, or even really beginning with the dropping of the atom bombs in nineteen forty five, science got so powerful that it could do things well beyond what nearly everyone except a handful of scientists could know, or experience or understand. The more extraordinary the scientific accomplishments,

the harder it became to believe. The news missiles that could annihilate the population of the entire planet in an instant, men going to the moon. Eventually it became kind of commonplace, a little sheek, a little George Orwell meets Marshall mcluin to wonder whether all the news was fake. In nineteen sixty eight, the BBC broadcast a play called The News Benders. We'd like you to help Plan the News for nineteen seventy three. In the play, an acclaimed director goes to

meet with a corporate bigwig. The big wig wants to hire him to fake a bunch of film footage that will air in the future as news come again. Plan the news by nineteen seventy three. You didn't really believe there were all these things whizzing about up there? Did you spot nicks on rockets? Astronauts crossing their legs? For eighty day? How long has this been going on since Hiroshima? In the studio, there's a toy sized model of a

lunar lander sitting on a table covered with sand. Remember this play was produced in nineteen sixty eight, a year before the Apollo eleven Moon mission. The filmmaker picks up the model as he listens to an early cut of the news. They've created Fake news for a day five years in the future today. April fourteen, nineteen seventy three. First Historic Pictures by rad Star of the combined US Russian landing on the move. Shown here are Major's Webb

and Mikhailovitch taking their first steps into the unknown. The Nine Way Hotline finally triage it off. But this is going to happen in nineteen seventy three. You're going to make this happen. No, we are going to make models much cheaper than we photographed the models. Fake newsrooms, a fake newsmends, whoa dude? The news beenders was mind bending, a thought experiment, but it also got to the heart of a real problem. The actual news had gotten very

difficult to believe. Adam bombs rockets to the Moon news in the actual year in nineteen seventy three was way more dreary than the newsbender's plan for a fake landing on the Moon. There weren't even any more Apollo missions to report. Those ended in nineteen seventy two. Instead, TV viewers flocked to something else on the dial, something different, the Watergate hearings, which revealed that Richard Nixon had lied and lied, and so had a whole lot of his advisers.

You couldn't believe anything anymore. But if you didn't want to watch Watergate, you could still speculate about space space an endless tapestry of stars reaching to its infinity, scattered through its fastness, or one hundred billion planets on which life theoretically could exist. Yes, that is the sultry voice of Rod Serling. He probably knew him from twice Zone show he started in nineteen fifty nine. The Twilight Zone is where fact turns to fiction, history turns to mystery,

and mystery becomes conspiracy. In nineteen seventy three, Stirling hosted a documentary called In Search of Ancient Astronauts. If only one percent of that life is intelligent, there could be one million civilizations out there. Listen carefully to that voice, not even so much what he's saying, but how he's saying it. It's the voice of the news anchor, the authority. It's as if he's hypnotizing you into trusting him, and of that million, it is conceivable at one discover the

secrets of space travel. It is possible that ancient astronauts went in search of life beyond their own world and found it on the planet Earth. Why all this new spookiness just after men landed on the Moon. Here's what I think everyone can see the Moon, every last human being on Earth. It's ours, all of ours. It holds out a certain hope for unity, but then the moon holds out a certain mirror of division. Some have got and some have not. White, black, brown man, bat, beaverman, angels,

weighty on the moon. But there's something else too, something that really slays me. I think people like to have things around that are mind boggling, but then just out of reach. Conquering the moon deprived people of the Moon as a mind boggler. That one huge mystery was solved. There was no white haired god up there in the sky.

There was instead a giant, dusty rock. This intense change, I think got all balled together into a specifically nineteen seventies fetish for unsolved mysteries, because well, okay, the moon is a rock, but maybe there were still other mysteries. Bigfoot omni magazine and the news stand spoon bending Urigeller

on TV. And there was a weird snakeding its tail theory that ancient spacemen had visited the Earth thousands and thousands of years ago, and maybe they and not Adam and Eve, were our ancestors, or maybe they were the source of our beliefs about God. If we accept the premise that beings from another civilization visited here ages ago, then some of the mysteries of our past take on a new and startling light. I confess I love this stuff.

Ancient aliens came to Earth and built the pyramids. Okay, no, I don't believe that. I think it's crazy, but I love the hypnotic, fake mysteriousness of it, all, the junkie science, the completely preposterous historical analysis. If ancient astronauts did land here, what effect would they have had upon early Earthmen? Perhaps they were worshiped, feared, loved, Perhaps they brought gifts, a new world of not This stuff was all over the

place in the Spooky Kookie late nineteen sixties. In early nineteen seventies, Still in Search of was also interested in actual science. Doctor Carl Sagan is one of the directors of the Mariner mission exploring Mars, and he has a special interest in the possibilities of intelligent life in the universe. At the very end, in just the final seconds of this long documentary, Serling introduced a very young Carl Sagan.

This is seven years before Sagan became famous for his masterful series on PBS cause rous the question arises, might there have been a visit to the Earth in historical times. It's a kind of scientific justification of theological belief which people would rather believe in any case, it's kind of modern dress for old time religion. I can only say that you can't exclude the possible, but there's not a smidget of evidence that is compelling. Sagan nailed it believing

in ancient astronauts or extraterrestrials. It was like believing in God's God's in a godless world magic. After the Great Disenchantment in the US, In Search Of became a TV series. But the show's thesis wasn't everything is a hoax. The show's thesis was everything you thought was a hoax is real. The lockness monster, esp governments and scientists have just been concealing from you all the evidence, hiding it, locking it up in government archives. Nothing was a hoax. It's just

that a lot of things were hidden by conspiracies. Rod Serling had died and so the producers of In Search Of instead hired Leonard Nimoy from Star Trek to host the series. There are episodes about Amelia Earhart and Bigfoot, and of course UFOs. Sometimes they come in silence, sometimes quiet thunder. Often they leave marks in the earth signals and they're passing. I watched In Search Of as a kid with my mom. I have zero data on whether fans of the show believed in Bigfoot or the Lockness Monster.

I can only report that my mother and I did not, and that was the fun of it. It was like believing but also not at all believing in the Tooth Fairy. But now that I've grown up to be a historian, I want to know what was the meaning of this rage for goofy unsolved mysteries in the nineteen seventies. In one way, I think of In Search Of as an

update of Ripley's Believe it or not. Ripley had called his stuff curiodities, But somehow what started out as curiodities became conspiracies because at the same time that my mom and I were watching In Search Of, a lot of other people started arguing and believing that the Apollo will even mission never happened, that we'd never landed on the Moon, that the whole thing had been covered up by a vast conspiracy. Good afternoon. This is May Brussel in Carminal, California.

It's September the nineteenth, nineteen seventy seven. I jotted down dialogue conspiracy number two hundred and eighty six, but I think it's two hundred and eighty seven. I keep track each week, but I forgot to write down. I believe it's number two hundred eighty seven. May Brussel. She came to be known as the Queen of Conspiracy. At the time of this broadcast, she was fifty five years old.

She'd once studied at Stanford, mother of five, housewife. After Kennedy was shot, she became convinced that the government was hiding a vast conspiracy. The more she looked into it,

the bigger that conspiracy became. These people in the wall of secrecy, the news media being silent, and the pats he's locked up in, the psychological profiles, and the writings on the wall or the diaries, the incriminating evidence or the source of weapons for all his assassinations or conspiracies will eventually be traced back to the same sources, which is the intelligence community in this country. She launched her radio show in nineteen seventy one from KLRBFM, a community

radio station. Then came Watergate, which made a lot of cockamami theories about secret government conspiracies look suddenly plausible. Her audience grew. She sent out mail ordered cassettes of her show to people far away. She called her fans Brussels sprouts. Don't become a Brussels sprout. I know it would be so easy if the deep state were running everything. You wouldn't have to think about anything. You could just always blame the deep state. But that's not how history works.

I'm going to talk about a book today that I've had a while called We Never Went to the Moon by build Casing and Randy read. It's called America's thirty Billion dollars Swindle. It's a fascinating book. We Never Went to the Moon is a seventy eight page self published

piece of nonsense. May Brussel incorporated its central theory that NASA faked all the Apollo missions into all of her other theories and these other zombies that have been controlled by hypnosis and government drugs, and will also go into the possibility that the astronauts were controlled by the government psychological department. Brussel was a researcher. Old school conspiracy theorists are meticulous about research, and she saw her work as

giving her listeners a body of previously hidden evidence. She'd read newspaper stories out loud, always providing citations. I'm just here sharing the evidence. This sort of person always says, you decide believe it or not. You are feeling very sleepy. Herzog that has been described in The New York Times September the eleventh, nineteen seventy seven. If you want to go the library in it, radio can work as a loudspeaker in amplifier. Reading something obscure out loud on the

radio gives it a new audience. In this broadcast from nineteen seventy seven, Russell mainly read long passages of Bill Casing's moon lending conspiracy theory book out loud. Hardly anyone had read Casing's book or even heard of it. Russell helped to break it out, but she also tried to

set it in a much bigger context. Now, the Moonshot took place in July of nineteen sixty nine, that great moonshot, and many of you may remember, or you may not remember, that that was the night that Ted Kennedy had the accident in chapter critic. Now, if you can accept some of the facts in this book that I'm going to be shared with you, you have to have a view of history, an overall view of what was happening in

July nineteen sixty nine. This was by way of introducing one of her favorite theories, which involved a conspiracy led by the military industrial complex to get Richard Nixon elected president, which required getting out of the way all of the Kennedy brothers, first Jack, then Bobby, then Teddy at chap aquittic somehow. Honestly, don't even ask me. This thing is so convoluted. Getting Nixon elected president also entailed faking the moon landing. Why were all transmitters easily faked? Why was

there nothing to see other than the launch? Is there any real assurance that the astronauts were aboard the Apollo? Is there any proof that they really flew a full load of fuel? And he goes into the statistics of the fuel. She went on and on and on. It was all leading ominously somewhere. Then came the whopper, the simulated moon landing. It's very complicated, but it starts with Stanley Kubrick. He made a film everyone Knows two thousand and one, a Space Odyssey. It was released in nineteen

sixty eight. The filming took two and a half years. The original budget was six million, and then they patted it with another four and a half million, a ten and a a half million budget. There were two hundred and five special effects shots, and then he said, they went into the university's, the industrial seventy industrial and aerospace corporations, universities, observatories, weather bureaus, laboratories, institutions to ensure that the film would

be technically accurate. Brussels conspiracy theory has it that Kubrick made the film two thousand and one to cover up another film that was being made in Nevada for NASA, which was footage of a landing on the Moon that never happened, faked news newsbender style, and the Apollo Space program could use the two thousand and one as a cover. He claims that that movie in nineteen sixty eight prepared the American people for the film version of space exploration

that would take place in nineteen sixty nine. I see why people are attracted to conspiracy theories. I get it. Cornel alogy is important. I love lining up a bunch of random news stories on a timeline, tacking them up to a wall with pushkins, and looking for a pattern. That actually is how historians work, at least it's how I work. We collect evidence, organize it chronologically, and look

for patterns. For instance, if you've been listening to this episode carefully, and if you've seen Kubrick's nineteen sixty eight film two thousand and one, you might have noticed this seemingly uncanny coincidence. Two thousand and one is a story about how ancient astronauts came to Earth millennia ago and left things behind like a big black monolith. It tells the same story as in Search of Ancient Astronauts. That's not a conspiracy though, that's just a popular idea. So

I asked the Brussels sprouts. Is there evidence that NASA, aided by Stanley Kubrick, faked the Moon landing? No? None, But is there evidence that Americans became really vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking? And then I seventies Yes, there's a lot of it. Here are some pieces of evidence. I might tack him my wall with pushpins first. In addition of time magazine in nineteen sixty six with a dark cover that asked, is God dead? The nineteen sixties where a

decade of rising secularism. People were looking for other explanations for why bad things happened. Second thing on my Wall a New York Times front page from nineteen seventy one, when the paper announced that it was publishing a leaked report later known as the Pentagon Papers, a report they revealed that the US government had been lying to the

public about what was going on in Vietnam. God was dead and the government was lying to Third I'd pin up news stories about how Americans learned that the FBI had been conducting secret, illegal surveillance on civil rights leaders and other activists in infiltrating their organizations. For instance, the FBI had spied on Ralph Abernathy, the civil rights leader who the protest at Cape Canaveral the day before the launch of Apollo eleven. We has a civilized nation have failed.

Last thing I'd pin up on my wall the long burning coverage of the Watergate break in and all the lies on the part of the Nixon administration. No wonder Americans in the nineteen seventies had a tendency to submit to conspiratorial thinking. Oh no, wait, I've got one last piece of evidence to pinto my wall. In the nineteen seventies, Hollywood made a gazillion movies about vast government conspiracies, including one about a faked space mission. Capricorn One, hit theaters

in nineteen seventy eight. Good Morning, Ladies and gentlemen. At the present time, all systems are go, all lights are green. Capricorn One is like a movie version of Bill Casing's book We Never Went to the Moon. The film's advertising campaign featured the line would you be shocked to find out that the greatest moment of our recent history may

not have happened at all? In the movie, NASA fake submission to Mars by sending an empty rocket off into space and filming a Mars landing in an abandoned military facility that's been converted into a movie studio. I do really think you're going to get away with us? Well, I don't know. It's a chance. Maybe it's not a very good one. It's a chance. That's the Hollywood version of We Never Went to the Moon, the for profit version of May Brussel True Believer. But then how does

the stuff break out and into the real world? To the twenty first century and modern conspiracy theories, the nine to eleven Truthers, the Birthers, the Q and honors. You really need only to stop and pause at the strange and unsettling Quebrickian year of two thousand and one. The following program deals with a controversial subject. The theories expressed are not the only possible interpretation. Viewers are invited to

make a judgment based on all available information. This is from a Fox special from two thousand and one called Conspiracy Theory, Did We Land on the Moon? I think of it as a missing link that gets us from stuff like May Brussel and a radio show to the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories. Unlike in Search of his episode about ancient astronauts, it offered no substantial equivalent to a

Carl Sagan. Instead, a NASA spokesman appears on screen every now and again, attempting to make clear that these claims are just baseless nonsense, but Fox quickly pivots back to sell the conspiracy theory for ratings. There are those who claim that believing in Man's one small step requires one giant leap of faith. Bill Casing was an analyst and engineer at Rocket Dyne. No, he wasn't an analyst and

an engineer. Casing was a technical writer. In the footage of the stage going up, what you don't see is an exhaust plume coming out of a rocket engine nozzle. A ride ride. So in February of two thousand and one, Fox was broadcasting news bindery stuff like that, suggesting huge events of the past. We're maybe not real that September, a terrifying event took place in the present. Terrorists flew airplanes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center,

New York. And this time someone was ready right away to call it a hoax, even while it was happening, Even as firefighters and police and rescue workers were trying to find survivors in the flames and the rubble. Alex Jones, the made Brussel of the twenty first century, was on the air saying the whole thing was fake. Well, I've been warning you about it for at least five years. All terrorism that we've looked at, from the World Trade Center of Oklahoma City to Waco has been government actions.

They need this as a pretext to bring you and your family martial law. We've come a long way from the hypnotists of the nineteen fifties, but listen to the way this guy is trying to hypnotize you, to relieve you of the obligation of thinking anything through of analyzing the evidence, by offering instead a species of historical explanation that the world is even more terrible than it appears, and that only Alex Jones can make sense of it. I'll tell you the bottom line, ninety eight percent chance

this was a government orchestrated control bombing. I've been telling you this was going to happen just two weeks ago. I put the caller the moon landing the old New York Sun in search of the twilight zone capricorn. One. May Brussel do all these bits and pieces I've got here in the last archive line up together to form a conspiracy, a conspiracy to turn Americans into conspiracy theorists. No,

because it wasn't a conspiracy. It was just the of history and of politics, the expression the exertion of power. Conspiracy theorists and historians do have a lot in common, but somewhere we diverge. Historians believe history is driven by ideas, by economic forces, by technological change, and even by biological and environmental factors. Historical evidence for this kind of change

over time, it's everywhere. Conspiracy theorists believe that the course of history is driven by terrifying higher powers that control everything and then conceal the traces of that control by hiding the historical evidence. The conspiracy theorist always believes in an unseen reality. The historian always believes in reality, hiding in plain sight, in the actual evidence of the historical record.

This is apollow control. At one hundred forty eight hours, seven minutes and about twenty four seconds from now, the spacecraft will pass the imaginary line enter the Earth sphere of influence. Ban By for remark leaving the lender of influence. Men flew to the Moon in nineteen sixty nine and then they fell to Earth? Or did they next time? On the Last Archive, how Americans never really left that lunar sphere of influence. The Last Archive is written and

hosted by me Joe Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane, mckibbon and Ben Natt of Hafrey. Our editor is Julia Barton. And Our executive producer is Mia Lobel. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Sympinett. Our research

assistants are Olivia Oldham and Oliver Riskin Cuts. Our full proof players are Yoshiamo, Raymond Blankenhorne, Mathis Bosse, Dan Epstein, Ethan Herschenfeld, Becka A. Lewis, Andrew Parella, Robert Riccotta, and Nick Saxton. The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries. At Pushkin thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain, John Schnar's, Carl Magliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor,

Maya Kanig, and Daniella Lacan. Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior and the Star Jenette Foundation. Special thanks to Simon Lake. If you like the show, please remember to rate, share, and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen at podcasts. I'm Jill Lapour