![]() New York Times science reporter John Noble Wilford remarked in December 1969 that “a few stool-warmers in Chicago bars are on record as suggesting that the Apollo 11 moon walk last July was actually staged by Hollywood on a Nevada desert.” The Atlanta Constitution led a story on June 15, 1970, with “Many skeptics feel moon explorer Neil Armstrong took his ‘giant step for mankind’ somewhere in Arizona.” While poll numbers questioning the moon landing in Detroit, Miami and Akron averaged less than 5 percent, among African-Americans in such places as Washington, D.C., a whopping 54 percent doubted the moon voyages. He disagreed he said that he didn’t believe it for a minute, that “them television fellers” could make things look real that weren’t.” President Bill Clinton recalled in his 2004 autobiography a similar story of a carpenter he worked with in August 1969, not long after the Apollo 11 landing: “The old carpenter asked me if I really believed it happened. At the time of his death, in 1984, Jeff Launius remained unconvinced. In his insular world, change came grudgingly, however, and a moon landing was certainly a major change. Caught up in the excitement of Apollo 11 that summer, I could not understand my grandfather’s denial. ![]() In his estimation such a technological feat was simply not possible. ![]() He didn’t believe that Americans had landed on the moon. My grandfather, Jeffrey Hilliard Launius, was a 75-year-old farmer from southern Illinois at the time of the first moon landing in 1969. ![]()
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