Moon Landing Conspiracy Theories - Public Opinion

Public Opinion

See also: Moon landing conspiracy theories in popular culture

There are subcultures worldwide which advocate the belief that the Moon landings were faked. By 1977 the Hare Krishna magazine Back to Godhead called the landings a hoax. The reason they gave is that the Sun is 93,000,000 miles away and according to Vedas the Moon is 800,000 miles farther away than that, making the Moon nearly 94,000,000 miles away. To travel that span in 91 hours would require a speed of more than a million miles per hour, "a patently impossible feat even by the scientists' calculations."

James Oberg of ABC News said that the conspiracy theory is taught in Cuban schools and wherever Cuban teachers are sent. A poll conducted in the 1970s by the United States Information Agency in several countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa found that most respondents were unaware of the Moon landings, many of the others dismissed them as propaganda or science fiction, and many thought that it had been the Russians that landed on the Moon.

A 1999 Gallup poll found that 6% of the Americans surveyed doubted that the Moon landings happened and that 5% of those surveyed had no opinion, which roughly matches the findings of a similar 1995 Time/CNN poll. Officials of Fox television said that such skepticism rose to about 20% after the February 2001 airing of Fox network's TV show Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? seen by about 15 million viewers. This 2001 Fox special is seen as having promoted the hoax claims.

A 2000 poll held by the Russian Public Opinion Fund found that 28% of those surveyed did not believe that American astronauts landed on the Moon, and this percentage is roughly equal in all social-demographic groups. In 2009, a poll held by the United Kingdom's Engineering & Technology magazine found that 25% of those surveyed did not believe that men landed on the Moon. Another poll gives that 25% of 18–25-year-olds surveyed were unsure that the landings happened.