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Conspiracy Theory

© Laurence B. WInn

In the months before the latest plot to kill Americans in large numbers, we ran across a conspiracy to hoax the world about the Apollo moon shots - and found it interesting because it denies the possibility of a high frontier. Hoax proponents are fond of "proving" that NASA faked its exploration of the moon.

They received great press back in February and March when Fox TV aired "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Really Go to the Moon?", an entertainment that unleashed a lively cabal of cooks and NASA-bashers to spray the audience with mean-spirited venom about past glories, now all too defunct. Polls suggest that perhaps 6% of Americans believe in the authenticity of these claims. The polls do not reveal the believers' IQs. For details about why the hoax theorists' ideas do not make sense, see "Apollo Moon Hoax".

It may be much more reasonable to suppose that the American government's real capabilities in space exceed anything we have heard about, or can easily believe.

Why hide these accomplishments? It has been difficult to argue for a conspiracy because no theory has offered a sufficiently convincing motive. Frontier theory provides two.

Simply put, resistance to the creation of a space frontier originates with the insecurities of Western leaders. First, it is clear that everything changes with the emergence of a frontier. Established power structures are usually shaken, not reinforced. (If this is not clear, try reading Walter Prescott Webb's The Great Frontier, particularly the last chapter, and Divided We Stand: The Crisis of a Frontierless Democracy by the same author.)

Second, there is the issue of sharing wealth. The Third World wants to redistribute wealth in its favor, and it pursues this end by a combination of moral persuasion and threats of terrorism using weapons of mass destruction. A frontier could make such threats less persuasive. The Third World reaction to a space frontier initiative is unpredictable and possibly violent. This makes pioneering a taboo for Western governments. And that's why they would keep it secret.

The conspiracy that Fox missed (well, they do miss a lot) is called by its adherents "Alternative 3". Its promoters are shadowy individuals like Bill Cooper, a formal US Naval Briefing Team member with access to state secrets, who claims that an advanced American space presence is a reality. In Behold a Pale Horse, he reports that "A moon base, Luna, was photographed by the Lunar Orbiter and filmed by Apollo astronauts ... I can say that 'Alternative 003' (a British TV documentary on this subject) is at least 70% true from my own knowledge and the knowledge of my sources."

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