Neil Armstrong Sets Straight an Internet Truther Who Accused Him of Faking the Moon Landing (2000)

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Peo­ple have been grad­u­at­ing from col­lege this year who are as old as the role of inter­net truther. It is a ven­er­a­ble hob­by (some might call it a cult) lead­ing increas­ing num­bers of peo­ple to bizarre con­clu­sions drawn from dubi­ous evi­dence prof­fered by spu­ri­ous sources; peo­ple con­vinced that some wild alle­ga­tion or oth­er must be true because they saw it on the Inter­net, shared by peo­ple they knew and liked.

Twen­ty years ago, one pio­neer­ing truther wrote Mr. Neil Arm­strong to put him in his place about that bug­bear, the faked moon land­ing. The author of the let­ter, a Mr. Whit­man, iden­ti­fies him­self as a “teacher of young chil­dren” charged with “a duty to tell them his­to­ry as it tru­ly hap­pened, and not a pack of lies and deceit.” His let­ter shows some dif­fi­cul­ty with gram­mar, and even more with crit­i­cal think­ing and stan­dards of evi­dence.

Mr. Whit­man makes his accu­sa­tions with cer­tain­ty and smug­ness. “Per­haps you are total­ly unaware,” he writes, “of all the evi­dence cir­cu­lat­ing the globe via the Inter­net,” which he then sum­ma­rizes.

He also sends Neil Armstrong—an astro­naut who either walked on the Moon or engaged in per­haps the great­est con­spir­a­cy in history—a URL, “to see for your­self how ridicu­lous the Moon land­ing claim looks 30 years on.” Whit­man sent Arm­strong the let­ter on the astro­naut’s 70th birth­day.

Armstrong’s response, via Let­ters of Note, can be read in full above. Per­haps Mr. Whit­man learned some­thing from the exchange—or had a moment of clar­i­ty about his meth­ods of inves­ti­ga­tion. One can hope. In any case, Armstrong’s unspar­ing reply serves as a tem­plate for responding—should some­one be so inclined—to inter­net truthers armed with wild con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries 20 years lat­er. These let­ters have been col­lect­ed in A Reluc­tant Icon: Let­ters to Neil Arm­strong.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Stan­ley Kubrick Faked the Apol­lo 11 Moon Land­ing in 1969, Or So the Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ry Goes

Watch the Orig­i­nal TV Cov­er­age of the His­toric Apol­lo 11 Moon Land­ing: Record­ed on July 20, 1969

Every Har­row­ing Sec­ond of the Apol­lo 11 Land­ing Revis­it­ed in a New NASA Video: It Took Place 50 Years Ago Today (July 20, 1969)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness