My uncle swore the moon landing was fake and gave me a weird book to prove it

Over Thanksgiving in Akron, my uncle Bob, who's a really nice guy but a bit out there, pulled me aside. He handed me this old, beat-up paperback called 'We Never Went' and told me to look at the flag photos. He said, 'The shadows are all wrong, kid, that's how you know.' I was bored that weekend, so I actually read the thing and then spent like three hours online looking at NASA's official pictures. Turns out, the flag thing has a super simple science answer about light on the moon's surface. I called him back and tried to explain it, but he just laughed and said I was 'looking at the wrong websites.' It was a wild ride from family dinner to a deep dive on lunar regolith. Anyone else have a relative who's totally convinced by one of these old-school conspiracies?

3 comments

3 Comments

michael_green442mo ago

That part about him telling you you're on the "wrong websites" really hits home. I see this all the time now, where facts just don't matter because someone has their own set of sources. It's like we all live in different worlds built from different search results. Once someone decides NASA or the news is lying, no amount of simple proof can change their mind. It turns a talk about space into a fight about who you can trust, and that's way harder to fix.

samflores2mo ago

It's that shift from arguing about a fact to arguing about where facts come from. My dad does this with news channels, where his source is just "more real" than mine. You end up talking in circles because you can't agree on the basic rules for what counts as proof.

cooper.drew2mo ago

My uncle swears by this one talk radio host for all his news. He'll dismiss a whole newspaper article by saying "they never talk about that on the show." It's like his radio is the only window to the real world.