Manchurian Candidates: We Never Went to the Moon pp. 168-172

 This chapter begins with a quote from Buzz Aldrin, that Kaysing has as "Col. Aldrin.” This is a trick that dumb people use when writing—they use the titles unnecessarily. You can just say Buzz Aldrin, he doesn’t need the distinguishing addition of Colonel, because Aldrin was the second person on the Moon. This is just like how you don’t have to introduce a quote by Martin Luther King with Reverand Doctor Martin Luther King—he accomplished enough to transcend the titles. Kaysing, and conspiracy theorists do this because they have a recognition that what they are saying needs the addition of the title to remind people of the authority of the person speaking. In the conspiracy world it’s never Dr. Fauci but it’s always Dr. Wakefield.

The quote is Aldrin commenting about the feelings of the Moon landing, “There was a lack of reality about everything, a kind of euphoric strangeness to all that was going on.”

The chapter is titled “Were the Astronauts Manchurian Candidates?” and this cherry-picked quote is supposed to impress upon us that even Aldrin didn’t think it was real. Of course, the reason it didn’t seem real is because there was literally no reference point that the astronauts had to measure their experience by. No one else had set foot upon an extra-planetary body.

We are treated to a series of lines from Aldrin’s book “Return to Earth” expressing his experiences and emotions upon returning to the planet that had housed all of humanity. Kaysing points out that Aldrin had been assigned to the Edwards Air Force Base and was given “One Ritalin pill per day.”

Yes, but what does that prove? Nothing. Aldrin struggled with mental health issues and alcoholism. We aren’t given any kind of consideration or context for this “one Ritalin” comment. It’s just said, and we are left to our own thoughts. If you’re outside of the conspiracy world, it must seem mysterious to have something like this mentioned and then dropped. Inside the conspiracy theory world, this comment carries with it all of the hatred and disdain that conspiracy theorists have for the very concept of mental health. Anyone in therapy or taking therapeutic medication is actually being subject to thought control.

Kaysing attempts to make a very labored argument by analogy. The first half of the analogy is an extract of Buzz Aldrin discussing a time he was nervous about speaking in front of a large audience two years after the Moon landing. Aldrin writes about how nervous he was, how much he disliked being asked “what was the moon like,” and how he completely lost composure after speaking. The second half of this analogy is Kaysing comparing this part of Hamlet where Hamlet confirms the guilt of Claudius by using the play, “The play’s the thing…”

The idea is that Aldrin’s inability to speak, this one time, is the same as Claudius freaking out when he sees the king in the play get poisoned. There are two problems with this, the first, is that Hamlet is fiction. It’s not a psychological study of anything despite how badly Freud wanted it to be.

The second is a bit deeper. Kaysing writes, “If you, the reader of the book, have accomplished some major feat, are you not willing to discuss it?”

The entire paragraph is under this theme and here I have two personal reasons about how this is wrong. The first is that I have a very dear friend who actually does work with NASA and has met some people who have escaped this mortal coil. This person told me that when meeting one of them, they immediately said, “You get two questions about space and then we move on.” The second is that I have given a TEDx talk, when people ask me what it was like, I really don’t know how to answer it. Sure, it’s not nearly the same thing as going to space; but it is an achievement that people recognize and I don’t feel comfortable talking about it. I don’t know why this is as I am not a shy person.

Armstrong and Aldrin could have gone through the world bragging about how they landed on the Moon, but they would have been jerks to do so. Kaysing is thinking this, because he desires fame and notoriety—it’s why he’s writing a book like this. So when people who actually accomplish something real don’t go around attempting to use it to get laid and paid, he can’t understand it. The idea of being humble is so alien to Kaysing that he expressly points out how weird it is that they both retreated from public life. He asks, “if the moon landings actually took place, would both men exhibit all the characteristics of persons suffering from guilt?”

As long as you never explain what those symptoms of guilt are before you mention this, it sure seems suspicious. If, as Kaysing points out, that the astronauts were screened for mental fitness they would have been screened for their ability to carry the lie as well. The conspiracy, again, falls apart when you actually assume the counter factual. Every clue that Kaysing finds because of their behavior would have been accounted for within the screening process. It’s not like NASA took two of the best boy scouts in the world and then said, “ok, now you’re going to lie to the entire world hope you can handle it.”

The other problem is that of Michael Collins. The Apollo landing involved three people and Kaysing never mentions Collins. Collins is the guy orbiting the Moon while Aldrin and Armstrong are playing on it. Collins wasn’t insular nor did he sink into substance abuse. He became the director of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, wrote a bunch of books.

The chapter ends with Kaysing exhorting the reader to find someone that has psychological stress evaluation (PSE) equipment and place Amstrong and Aldrin’s talks through it to determine if they are lying. The problem with PSE is that they are so unreliable as “lie detectors” that they are nearly universally inadmissible in court. They rely on a fundamental assumption that lies are the only cause of stress. If you have someone like Aldrin who struggles with mental health issues, stress is always going to be present during interviews. The PSE Kaysing wants us to use would not even be on the person, but on a recording of that person. There are too many variables that could factor in to cause false positives making any result of the PSE (stress or no-stress) to be worthless.