Howling at the moon

It's easy to come up with a new conspiracy theory. Just think of an event or a big institution, add in a hated (at least by some) group of people and throw in a suspicious motive for good measure. Greed usually will do, but sometimes the need to cover up or save face works better. Mix it all liberally with large doses of "evidence." You can find this in a lot of convenient places. Generally it will be in the form of truth that easily can be manipulated to mean something else.

Slap it all together on a web site or a talk radio show or any other public forum and presto! Next thing you know, honest, intelligent people are scrambling to do what is nearly impossible — prove beyond a doubt that something didn't happen.

Americans are good at this. That's why so many people believe the United Nations is out to take over the world, the Oklahoma City bombing was really the work of federal agents and the Deseret News has purchased the Tribune.

But now, NASA is doing the unthinkable. It is trying to tackle the conspiracy nuts head-on. The space agency is spending $15,000 to argue that yes, indeed, the Apollo program landed men on the moon.

Oh, you hadn't heard? An annoying cadre of pseudo scientists and other assorted hacks has compiled mounds of "evidence" that the moon landings never happened. They were all staged in movie studios because the nation really couldn't afford such a grand venture while fighting the Cold War, and yet it had to save face in the race against the Soviets.

We could tell you more, but then NASA's job would be that much harder. In these cases, fiction is generally more intriguing than truth, even when the truth involves traveling to the moon. After all, we've all heard the "official" story many times. That gets boring after 33 years.

But we will share one of the conspiracy nuts' most disgusting claims. It is that the tragic fire aboard Apollo 1 that killed astronauts Roger Chaffee, Ed White and Gus Grissom was no accident. NASA knew Grissom was about to tell the media about the hoax, so it had to arrange his death.

No wonder former moon astronaut Buzz Aldrin was agitated two months ago when one of the conspiracy theorists asked him to swear on a Bible that the moon mission was real.

Like most grand conspiracy theories, this one is too ridiculous to take seriously. And that's the point. NASA is wasting its time, and taxpayer funds, by engaging these folks. No matter what someone from NASA says, they won't believe it. After all, NASA is the big, bad government agency with blood on its hands.

Science has its limits. It can land a man on the moon, but it can't rid the earth of fools.