It's odd, but the reason to believe in some giant government hoax over Pearl Harbor, or the World Trade Center, is that the event in question is so terrible and hurts so badly there is a want to know "why" it had to happen. Somehow war or terrorists or whatever real explanation is too bloodless for some people. Perhaps they need someone closer at home to blame and hate?

There is always some cry of "someone must have known/it was all covered up/the government planned it all" from everything from a large wartime casualty to a big mine disaster.

The moon conspiracy, though, doesn't fall into that catagory. I am unable to fully understand its draw. Sure, there is a "secret club" aspect, the "only I and a few select friends know the truth." There is the religious aspect; rarely made explicit and quite possibly unconsious, but certain things including genetic manipulation, discover of hominid fossils, and escape from Earth into the domain of Heaven seem to get a knee-jerk reaction from some mainstream Catholics.

I like the suggestion made somewhere above that the Moon Hoaxers also enjoy the feeling of superiority me and the NASA-geek high school kids I used to hang with had. Aka, that they know better science then the unwashed -- or at least are privy to inside knowledge about the science and technology that has greater and greater presence in our lives.

But why this? Better to believe as the hard-line Creationists do, that every science teacher of grade school and above is in on the conspiracy. There is just too much volume of data about the Moon Landings. Too much built, photographed, reported, planned, discussed...it would take a team several times the size of the one the landings had to fake all that data, and they'd have a much harder time keeping it all internally consistent. Not to mention this would be an international team with connections deep in the news and entertainment industry as well as all over government, industry, and academia.

The Moon Hoax kills itself in its own explanations for me. It is hoist on its own petard; if Hollywood had done it, they would have done a "better" job. The majority of the "clues" the hoaxers point out with glee -- missing stars, isotrophic reflectivity, behavior of dust with no atmosphere, lack of visible jets -- would all have been done wrong but convincingly by Hollywood. It is, in fact, the non-intuitive strangeness of the actual conditions that I find most immediately convincing. Real data is like that. Only faked data fits so closely to one's preconceptions.