Witnesses to the Conspiracy: The 1969 Moon Landing in the Mirror of U.S. Suspicion Culture

Like hardly any other media event, the first manned moon landing of 1969 is flanked by a halo of conspiracy theories until today. The paper is dedicated to the beginnings of conspiracy theory speculations about the moon landing in the USA and follows their development up to current YouTube videos. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, a climate of suspicion had been spreading in the United States since the 1950s, which—coupled with a distrust of the country’s own government that was strongly rooted in its history—provided the necessary breeding ground for conspiracy theories. From the perspective of conspiracists, the persuasive power of conquest images makes them appear all the more suspicious, which is why they target their iconoclastic efforts against such images, which are already firmly anchored in the collective memory through iconization. The accompanying media-rhetorical counter-strategy, in turn, is based on various models of testimony that perforate the deceptive surface of signs allegedly installed by the conspirators and reveal the view of truths supposedly hidden behind them. The fact that doubts about the moon landing prove to be so long-lived has not least something to do with a changed media culture, with the video platform YouTube emerging not only as a distribution channel but also as a platform of observational testimony for conspiracy theorists.