10 Conspiracy Theories That People Are No Longer Believing

To be clear, there will forever be people who believe we never landed on the moon, that it was produced in a studio somewhere.

This was a shockingly persuasive theory, with a book to back it up. Navy Officer Bill Kaysing published We Never Went to the Moon: American's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle in 1976, less than a decade after we successfully did so.

Kaysing's doubt sparked director Peter Hyams, who had viewed the footage of the moon landing and realized it was conceivable. Hyams then wrote and directed Capricorn One, a thriller in which three astronauts fake a mission to Mars to drum up fading interest in the space program, only to be hunted by the government when they try to tell the truth.

Hyam's film, along with the overall paranoid atmosphere surrounding Watergate and a profound distrust in both media and politics probably propped this idea up more than it wanted to. The only difference now is the interest generated in internet posts and YouTube videos about the conspiracy, which fell by the wayside, the same way NASA and space exploration lay dormant for decades in the public sphere.

That space travel is now in the domain of independently wealthy eccentrics seems to have offset things.

That doesn't make folklorist Linda Deigh's words any less pressing:

The mass media catapult these half-truths into a kind of twilight zone where people can make their guesses sound as truths. Mass media have a terrible impact on people who lack guidance.