Bill Kaysing

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William Charles Kaysing (July 31, 1922 – April 21, 2005) was a writer who is best known for claiming that the six Apollo moon landings that took place between July 1969 and December 1972 were hoaxes. He was regarded as the father of the moon hoax movement.

1 Education and employment history
2 Charges that the Moon landing was a hoax
3 Conspiracy against Kaysing?
4 Books by Kaysing
5 See also
6 Notes
7 References
8 External links

[edit] Education and employment history

In 1940, Kaysing joined the Navy as a Midshipman and eventually was sent to Officer's training school which led to his attending University of Southern California ^[1]. In 1949, Kaysing received his Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Redlands Afterwards, he worked for a time as a furniture maker. From 1956 until 1963, Kaysing worked at Rocketdyne (a division of North American Aviation and later of Rockwell International), where the Saturn V rocket engines were built. Kaysing was the company's head of technical publications but was not trained as an engineer or scientist. Kaysing's critics believe that Kaysing lacked the technical knowledge to make an informed opinion, and have denounced his conclusions.

His employment record at Rocketdyne shows:

February 13, 1956 - hired as a Senior Technical Writer
September 24, 1956 - classification changed to Service Analyst
September 15, 1958 - classification changed to Service Engineer
October 10, 1962 - classification changed to Publications Analyst
May 31, 1963 - resigned for personal reasons. (Kaysing 2002:80)

[edit] Charges that the Moon landing was a hoax

Main article: Apollo Moon landing hoax accusations

Kaysing asserted that during his tenure at Rocketdyne he was privy to documents pertaining to the Mercury, Gemini, Atlas, and Apollo programs, arguing that one does not need an engineering or science degree to determine that a hoax was being perpetrated. Even before July 1969, he had "a hunch, an intuition, ... a true conviction" and decided that he didn't believe that anyone was going to the moon (Kaysing 2002:7). Kaysing wrote a book entitled We Never Went to the Moon, which was self-published in 1974, listing Randy Reid as a coauthor (Plait 2002:157). It was republished in 2002 by Health Research Books, with no coauthor listed. In his book, Kaysing introduced arguments that proved, according to his standards of evidence, that the moon landings were faked. Claims in the book and subsequent sources include:

NASA simply lacked the technical expertise to put a man on the Moon.
The absence of stars in lunar surface photographs. (Kaysing 2002:20,21,22,23,24)
The film used by astronauts on the moon should have melted due to the supposed high levels of radiation.^{[citation needed]}
Unexplained optical anomalies in the photographs taken on the moon.(Kaysing 2002:23,25)
The undulating flags seen in video clips seem incompatible with a vacuum.^{[citation needed]}

Kaysing also claims that NASA staged both the Apollo 1 fire and the Challenger accident, deliberately murdering the astronauts on board. His suggestion is that NASA might have learned that these astronauts were about to expose the conspiracy and needed to guarantee their silence. A vocal advocate of conspiracy theories, Kaysing believed that there is a high level conspiracy involving the CIA, Federal Reserve, IRS and other government agencies to brain wash the American public, poison their food supply and control the media. ^[2] He also implies that the death of NASA safety inspector Thomas Ronald Baron in a traffic accident with a train a week after he testified before Congress, and the disappearance of his 500-page report, was not an accident. He was also a participant in the Fox documentary Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?, which aired on February 15, 2001.

In 1997, Kaysing filed a lawsuit against astronaut Jim Lovell for libel when Lovell called Kaysing's claims "wacky" in the San José Metro News, July 25-31, 1996.^[3]

The guy is wacky. His position makes me feel angry. We spent a lot of time getting ready to go to the moon. We spent a lot of money, we took great risks, and it's something everyone in this country should be proud of. — James Lovell

The case was dismissed in 1999 (Plait 2002:173) following the granting of a Motion for Summary Judgment filed by San Francisco attorney John Hardy, representing James Lovell. The judgment was affirmed on appeal on First Amendment grounds.

[edit] Conspiracy against Kaysing?

Kaysing believed that there was a conspiracy against him. Some of the items of evidence he gave for that are:

On December 7, 1975, Kaysing was on a three-hour radio program on KOME in San Jose. In the middle of the program, the transmitter went off the air. Kaysing claims that the FCC and police initially said that someone burned the transmitter with a helicopter. Later no police reports or newspaper accounts indicated a fire, and KOME said that a relay went bad (Kaysing 2002:74, 81).

Kaysing got a phone call from a woman in Portland, Oregon who said that she met a hooker in Reno, Nevada in 1970 who told her that two NASA engineers had told her that the moon trips were a hoax. Kaysing contacted the hooker in February 1976 and she denied knowing anything about the engineers or a hoax. Afterward, two police questioned Kaysing, saying that he had threatened her (Kaysing 2002:74).

In 1975, Kaysing was on the NBC's The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder. On December 10, 1975 NBC wrote him a thank-you letter and said that they "received a great deal of mail" about his appearance, and they forwarded one of those to him. Kaysing wonders why only one such letter was forwarded (Kaysing 2002:78).

Kaysing had a contract with Price Stern Sloan Publishers to publish his book, and they paid him a small advance. After receiving the manuscript, they wrote back:

I'm afraid we disavow it. You need to read it objectively and critically and perhaps ORGANIZE IT. As it is it wanders all over the landscape. Several interesting paragraphs but they don't hold together, link together. You've also wandered from third to first person. It needs a lot of work. You don't really have a manuscript here - seemed more like random notes about what you WOULD write about if you got around to it. What I mean, it reads like notes to the AUTHOR.

Kaysing wonders why the publisher didn't want to have anything more to do with the book (Kaysing 2002:74, 85).

[edit] Books by Kaysing

Kaysing is the author of many books, including:

We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle
Eat Well for 99 Cents a Meal
The Senior Citizen's Survival Manual
The 99 Cent a Meal Cookbook
Great Hot Springs of the West
Bill Kaysing's Freedom Encyclopedia
Privacy: How to Get it, How to Enjoy It
The Ex-urbanite's Complete & Illustrated Easy-does-it First-time Farmer's Guide
Great Hideouts of the West: An Idea Book for Living Free
Fell's Beginner's Guide to Motorcycling
Eat Well on a Dollar a Day

and others.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

^ [1] a brief biography of Bill Kaysing from the Bill Kaysing tribute Site
^ http://www.nardwuar.com/vs/bill_kaysing/index.html
^ http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/01.23.97/polis-rpt-9704.html

[edit] References

Kaysing, Bill (2002). We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. Health Research Books. ISBN 0-7873-0487-5.

Plait, Philip (2002). Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misues Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax". John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-40976-6.