Visual History in the Two Ideological Waves of the Moon Landing Conspiracy

Conspiracy theories are often understood to have politically motivated reasoning (Smallpage, 2017); people are more likely to believe conspiracy theories targeting the opposing political party. However, even though the moon landing was spearheaded by Democratic president Kennedy, I demonstrate that early moon landing conspiracies (starting from We Never Went to the Moon by Bill Kaysing 1976) are rooted in leftist rhetoric. This trend is reflected by PPP polling data from 2013 which shows that respondents who self-identified as “very liberal” were much more likely to believe the moon landing is faked (Public Policy Polling, 2013). I argue that this political affiliation is explainable by studying the moon landing conspiracy theory through the visual history lens provided by Perlmutter and Dahmen (2008). Distrust in visual images traces back to the Cold War, when the US government presented ambiguous images as absolutes, which created what Curley (2013) describes as a Cold War visuality — I argue this visual ambiguity became the root cause of the moon landing conspiracy theory. This visual skepticism also explains why the rhetoric of second-wave moon landing conspiracies (starting from the 2001 Fox TV special “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?”) became more politically neutral. Since the rise of the Fox wave of moon landing conspiracy theories, I demonstrate political neutrality has become the dominant trend in most modern rhetoric around the moon landing conspiracy theory. The second wave of the moon landing conspiracy theory is also visible in the 2013 PPP polling data, which also indicated the emergence of a parallel, politically moderate, trend in the moon landing conspiracy theory (Public Policy Polling, 2013). In the visual skepticism framework, visual distrust transitioned from doubting the US government to the rise of digital manipulation online, a more democratized and politically neutral source, which created a new, internet visuality. This framework suggests that politically motivated conspiracy theories respond not only to the source of the action, but also the historical objections to the evidence and rhetoric used to present the truth. Finally, I argue that the internet visuality is more politically dangerous precisely because of its depoliticization: it provides an entry point into conspiracism for people across the political spectrum, which ultimately can become the gateway towards belief in much more dangerous conspiracy theories, such as Holocaust denial. In light of the emergence of Deepfake technology, which epitomizes our inability to trust images in the modern day, the risks posed by the internet visuality have become acute.

My work analyzes interpretations of visual imagery around the cold war and the moon landing conspiracy. My poster will include several key images, with their official and skeptical interpretation, and statistics summarizing ideological split of conspiracy theories.