The How 3: Return of the How; We Never Went to the Moon pp. 67-70

 We left off with a surprisingly detailed section on where the conspiracy was pulled off. There are details incorrect and information missing, but we did just come off the Cooper and Protocols double feature so in comparison, this is much better. Kaysing claims that everything took place in an Airforce town and the program itself he calls “ASP.” It’s not just the Asp though. He claims that deep withing the caverns on the facility, was built a soundstage named “Copernicus.” He writes, “It soon earned the name ‘Cuss’ because of problems in lighting and sound.”

And…nope. This isn’t what happened. I’ve done sound and lighting for television. Sure, you can have problems with it; but what sound do we need to fake the Moon Landing? Everything would be recorded and edited in afterwards. He even writes later on the same page, “A plus for the project was the advantage of filming silent.”

I also feel like our conspiracy theorist picked the name “Copernicus” because it sounds cool and then realized that it’s a bit tedious to write that every time, so he had to come up with a shorter name.

As a bonus: our first mention of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” happens. This is important because everything was filmed a soundstage. Just like all of those scenes in 2001 that took place on the Moon, those scenes in Star Trek, and the Bond film “Diamonds Are Forever.”

“The term ‘hardware’ became a standard term in the aerospace industry for anything that was not stored in a file cabinet or recorded on tape.” —This reads like he’s trying to say that the term “hardware” was invented by the aerospace industry. But, no, it’s like when conspiracy theorists try and claim that the Church committee invented the term “conspiracy theory.”

The chapter continues with a bunch of technical information about switching out one booster for another, and how the cluster of b-1 engines was more powerful than the single F-1 even though an F-1 generated more thrust. It’s very confusing, and it’s supposed to be—this technical information is just there to confuse the reader into thinking that the author has technical know-how and therefore is trustworthy. What I don’t quite understand, and what Kaysing needs to answer, is whether he thinks any human being has been to space. The book has been concentrating on the Apollo landing, but prior to the Apollo program there were Gemini and Mercury as well.

The book bounces from subject to subject which makes it flow better but it doesn’t help us understand the conspiracy. We’re led to believe the that rocket cluster is proof of the conspiracy, but he never explains why this is the case.

Then the book gets weird. There’s a strange divergence where Kaysing returns to an earlier thought that there is no Cold War. He writes, “an agreement was obtained by the DIA and ASP representatives with and through the semisecret Council on Foreign Relations.”

This agreement is that the Russians would not sabotage the entire thing by merely claiming that there is no radar signature of the launch and flight. This is something that the Russians would have been tracking for their own security. However, Kaysing claims that the Council on Foreign Relations brokered this deal, “This agreement being a reciprocal one that would ensure silence on any revelatory Apollo information by major foreign powers.”

The Council on Foreign relations is a think tank which publishes a quarterly magazine that you can buy at the store. You can be a subscribing member. There is nothing secret about the group. To be a contributor, or to sit at the table requires a bit more effort; but all of that aside this group was the conspiratorial boogeyman in the 1970s. GOP candidate Barry Goldwater and the John Birch Society both blamed them for the downfall of America. The Council on Foreign Relations is just today’s Deep State—something for right wing politicians to use as a scapegoat.

What’s weird is that this is brought up and then dropped to talk about visually faking the launch. This is important for the conspiracy, and his claim is that an empty rocket was launched while a C-5 Galaxy then dropped the re-entry module from the sky.

This is absolutely silly. The empty launch, that makes sense. I mean that latter part. Why go that much trouble? The C-5 is a large plane, it has a very large radar cross-section, it can be easily tracked. Even if all the nations in the world turn their radar off, or just ignore the signal, there’s still a logistical problem. The C-5 requires pilots and crew to maintain it. The conspiracy wants us to believer that it would have been easier to have an entire air crew fuel and prep one of these mammoth planes for flight, load up the entire re-entry vehicle, and no one is coming forward on this. It’s not like the re-entry happened in the middle of Chicago; it happened in the Pacific. The conspiracy could just pretend it happened. Make up a Naval Ship that did the recovery. Shoot the whole thing on a sound stage, there is no reason to go to this much trouble.

Conspiracy theorists always make this mistake. They “over lie.” There is a certain efficiency to the official story that makes it believable. Throwing up the fake rocket makes sense because people gathered to watch the launch. The rest of it doesn’t need to happen. You can show film of the Astronauts being pulled out of the water, but that can happen in Lake Erie for all anyone knows. This is an important reason why the conspiracy theory is less believable than the truth.