We Never Went to the Moon: Recap

 I’m fond of describing works in both their qualitative and ethical attributes. A book can be bad qualitatively but neutral or good ethically. We have done five of these books. Some books, like the previous “Behold a Pale Horse” are bad on both accounts. Bad writing, and an unethical position especially considering his addition of the Protocols within it. Kaysing’s book made me realize that I need a third category for these kinds of books—success. “Was the book successful at making its case?”

None Dare Call it Conspiracy was a success. Not in its day, but now that we have president Trump (again) and he is the ideal president for the writer and audience of that book. With Kaysing, it’s not the same.

With “We Never Went to the Moon” we have a book that is qualitatively bad. The writing is just not well executed, and it feels rushed. This feeling is despite the fact that we know it wasn’t because Kaysing tells us in the appendix how many times he was interviewed about these ideas. He had time to work out his ideas and get them organized. The reason the book feels so terrible is because we know both this and that Kaysing was part of the program in that he worked at Rocketdyne.

The book is nowhere near as incoherent as Coopers’, but that’s only because Kaysing is the sole writer of 90% of the book with the other 10% being the transcripts and excerpts—which actually make sense in contrast to Cooper. Kaysing’s book is readable, he has a clear hypothesis, but he never makes the case that we should believe him. His goal was to convince us that the Moon landing never happened, while his evidence for that orbit around a few general concepts and ultimately an appeal to common sense on matters for which the common person would have no sense about. The general appeal though, is not the Moon, it’s the government. Kaysing thinks that an appeal to the lying government—its fake base in Nevada, the involvement of the mafia, the secrecy of the Moon landing project even though it was not a military project, etc. all points to the idea that we shouldn’t trust the post-Vietnam, post-Nixon U.S. government.

This is the emotional appeal of the conspiracy theory and it’s one that has some ample strength in both the time of the writing and now. However, what Kaysing is attempting to do is leverage that feeling into the conspiracy that the Moon Landing was fake. It doesn’t succeed.

Which is why I judge this book as amoral. It’s not even attempting to make an immoral claim like the Protocols, or whatever it was Cooper was claiming. I suppose that the Robison book has more in common with Kaysing in that it’s trying to expose something and like the Robison book it fails because the thing that it attempts to expose is imaginary.

There is quite a lack of physical evidence for this conspiracy theory. The physical evidence for the conspiracy theory only works if you never look into it. All of the science has an explanation and simple explanations at that. For the most part, the complete lack of atmosphere on the Moon is the answer.

The rest of the theory is just innuendo and Kaysing’s weird asides. He goes off on the energy crisis and food additives which are not at all related to his central idea. When Cooper did it, we barely noticed because his book lacked focus; but here it’s much starker.

As far as the conspiracy world is concerned, this book has not aged well. The conspiracy world has long moved beyond Kaysing’s issues with Rocketdyne and instead decided to focus on photographic anomalies while pretending to understand the physics of radiation.

The overall problem with Kaysing’s book, is that it undercuts itself. His main thrust is the position that manufacturer (Rocketdyne) was unable to produce equipment necessary. He leverages hard on the Apollo 1 accident, the investigation, the hearing, and the Baron report for this case. The problem is the other report, by the Airforce that he brings in as corroborating evidence actually disproves the other tine in the fork. The Airforce general, Phillips, agrees with the defects of Rocketdyne’s production and then he says that if they don’t bring up both the speed and quality of the work, they should lose the contract. The general wants to prevent a repeat of events and get the company to earn its money. There is no coverup, it was part of the investigation. Kaysing would be better to have left the Phillips report out, as it shows a government concerned that its goals will not be met. The Phillips report is evidence, just not evidence for Kaysing’s position.

Ultimately this book failed at its message, but it did so in two ways. First its evidence isn’t compelling. The second is that even if we didn’t have the outside evidence, the writing isn’t up to the task of making the case without it. There’s too much winking and implication. It fails, it’s not well constructed, but it does lack a call to action that would make such a conspiracy theory immoral. Yes, there is a problem that any book communicating misinformation possesses an intrinsic immorality, but this work doesn’t go beyond that.

That ends it.

Next week there will be formal post, as I will be grading finals. I will post a list of books to choose the next one from.