Typically, when there's nothing on television, I find a true crime show and let it play. I don't always pay attention, but I find them interesting (except they feed my natural sense of suspicion and paranoia - this is the result of growing up with a dad who was a cop). Anyway, lately I've been trying to watch something different. There's a really good show on Discovery called "Mars Rising" and it's about the United States' plan to send a man to Mars. There have been a couple of other space shows on, and I love that kind of stuff.

So the other day, I was telling my aunt about it, and I posed the question that really does bother me. We put a man on the moon in 1969. 1969! That was almost forty years ago. We put a man on the moon in 1969, but now, in 2007, it doesn't even seem like we can get a ship off the ground without something falling off, or breaking, or some other horrible catastrophe happening that devastates the Space Program. When I was in elementary school, I watched Challenger blow up a minute and some change into take-off. That moment changed my life. And how can we forget Columbia, just a couple of years ago? The fallout from that landed in our backyard.

How is it that we can put a man on in the moon in 1969, with so little technology, and now we're having more problems than ever?

My aunt started laughing and said "You know, your uncle Ted thinks it was all a hoax. He doesn't think there ever was a man on the moon."

I laughed. It was such an outrageous idea. No man on the moon!? How can that be possible? This is something I have known my entire thirty-one years on earth. There have been men on the moon. But then… the doubts started to creep in and I started doing research.

Wikipedia is one of my favorite places online. I can spend hours there, following links. After doing a Google search and finding a few pages, I finally settled in to read Apollo Moon Landing hoax accusations. It's ridiculous, I know.

…right?

There are some compelling arguments. My first and biggest thing—how did we have the technology to put a man on the moon in 1969? I just can't imagine that we could, back then.

Some of the other reasons for the hoax that were mentioned in this article are:

The Race Between the United States and Russia - Russia was also trying to put a man on the moon, and some people speculated they were a little ahead of us, having quite a few firsts, including: first living creature in space, first man in space, first man to orbit the earth, and a few others. We were in the middle of the Cold War and we wanted to win.

Distraction - some people believe the US "went to the moon" to distract the citizens from the Vietnam War. It's also been pointed out that lunar activities ceased as soon as the US pulled out of the war. However, others say that the program had been cancelled before the war ended. This is really half a dozen, six of another – it could go both ways. Though it certainly is interesting.

Risk - at one point, it was said that the chances of successfully landing on the moon was 0.017%. Those odds don't sound too good to me.

To Save Face - In 1961, Kennedy announced to the world that we would be on the moon before the decade was out. And on July 20, in the last year of the decade, we set foot on the moon.

There are other things that make people believe it never happened: pictures, shadows, missing data – the article is very interesting, and I would highly suggest reading it if conspiracy theories interest you. Do I think we landed on the moon? Yeah, for the most part I do. I can't help the doubts that linger though, and have changed the way I look at the world.