Faking missions to moon too tricky

Whew! That was close. Last week, the space people at NASA said they were going to pay an aerospace engineer and author named James Oberg $15,000 to write a book discounting conspiracy theorists who claim the 1969 moon landing was a hoax.

There are people out there who think Neil Armstrong's one giant step for mankind was in a sound studio somewhere outside Miami.

Of course, there are also people out there who think Paul McCartney died in 1969 and the White Album proves it.

Anyway, it seemed like a dangerous precedent: writing books to restate the obvious. Couldn't this get out of hand? What would be next? "Elvis Did Too Die."

But then, as quickly as it announced the book deal, NASA backed off, telling Oberg to abort and they'd send him a $5,000 kill fee.

Too much ridicule in the media was the reason.

That's the same media that gave wings to the "We didn't land on the moon" story in the first place. Before the Fox TV Network aired "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" last year, few people in the mainstream ever gave the subject a thought.

So go ahead, blame the media. Twice.

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It would appear that the biggest beneficiary of all the exposure is one Bart Sibrel of Nashville, a conspiracist so zealous that he follows Armstrong and other 1969 moon-walkers around with a Bible, asking them to swear on it that they actually walked on the moon.

When Sibrel asked Buzz Aldrin to put his hand on the Bible last month in Beverly Hills, Aldrin, now 72, punched Sibrel in the mouth.

Sibrel pressed charges, but police declined to prosecute on account of 1) Sibrel set Aldrin up by luring him to a Beverly Hills hotel under the ruse that a film crew wanted an interview, and 2) He's Buzz Aldrin! He walked on the moon!"

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On his Web site www.moonmovie.com, Sibrel suggests that the moon landing never happened because, among other reasons, the president at the time was "Tricky Dick Nixon — king of cover-up, secret tapes and scandal."

Among his more scientific reasons is the mystery of why the famous moon photo of the American flag shows a flag seemingly waving in the breeze — on a place with no wind!

The scientific answer is that the astronauts shook the flag before planting it — and on a place with no atmosphere, wrinkles fall out about as fast as in your linen shirt.