Guy at the bus stop told me the moon landings were faked and I couldn't let it go

It was maybe three weeks ago, standing at the 72 bus stop on Elm Street in downtown Portland. This older dude in a faded flannel starts talking to me about how NASA supposedly lost the original moon landing tapes, and he said that's the proof right there. I mean, I'm no expert, but I asked him why would thousands of people from different countries keep quiet for 50 years and he just said 'money talks.' He didn't have a good answer for the whole retroreflector thing that you can still bounce lasers off today. That conversation stuck with me because it made me realize how some people build their whole belief system around one missing detail. Has anyone else here had a random stranger drop a conspiracy on you that you still think about?

2 comments

2 Comments

patkelly1d ago

Gotta jump in on this because the exact same thing happened to me last year at a gas station in Salem. Some guy filling up his truck told me the government faked the moon landings to win the space race against the Russians, and I was like "but what about the footage from the other countries that tracked it?" and he just waved his hand and said "they all lied too." Idk, it really got to me too because it's just so wild how someone can dismiss all that evidence from independent sources. The part that stuck with me was when he said the Van Allen radiation belt would've fried the astronauts, but like, the Apollo missions went through the thinnest part and NASA had all that data from earlier unmanned flights. I still think about that conversation sometimes when I drive past that gas station.

wendy_garcia161d ago

Yeah man I had almost the exact same thing happen at a bar in Portland. Guy next to me started going on about how the moon landings were staged in a desert. I just kinda nodded for a bit. Then I asked him real simple like "okay so where did all the moon rocks come from then?" He got real quiet. Told me they were just normal rocks from Earth. I said "well they tested them and they're different from Earth rocks." He just shrugged and changed the subject. That's the thing with these guys. They don't have answers. They just have this one thing they heard and they repeat it. The Van Allen belt thing always comes up too. What worked for me was just asking one simple question they can't dodge. Most of them don't actually know the science behind their own claims.