Public opinion of the moon trip

 Public opinion of the moon trip

In a 1994 Washington Post poll, 9% of respondents said it was likely that astronauts would not have gone to the Moon, while 5% said they were not sure.[215] A 1999 Gallup poll found that 6% of Americans surveyed were skeptical that moon landings occurred and 5% of those surveyed had no opinion on the subject,[216][217][218][219][4 ] which roughly matches the results of a similar survey conducted in 1995 by CNN and Time magazine.[216] Fox officials said such skepticism rose to about 20% after the broadcast of their network's television show, Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?, which was watched by about 15 million viewers.[217] This particular program is seen as promoting hoax allegations.[220][221]

A 2000 poll conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation of Russia found that 28% of those surveyed do not believe that American astronauts have landed on the Moon, and this percentage is roughly equal across all sociodemographic groups.[222][223][224] In 2009, a poll conducted by the Journal of Engineering and Technology in the United Kingdom showed that 25% of those surveyed do not believe that man landed on the moon.[225] Another survey indicates that 25% of 18-25-year-olds surveyed were unsure about landings.[226]

There are subcultures all over the world that advocate the belief that moon landings are fake. By 1977, the Hare Krishna Society's Back to Guide magazine described the landings as a hoax, claiming that since the Sun is 150 million km (93 million miles) away, according to Hindu mythology the Moon is 800,000 miles away,[e] Therefore, the Moon would be approximately 151 million kilometers away; Traveling 91 hours would require a speed of over a million miles per hour, an impossible feat even by scientists' calculations.[227][228]

Spaceflight journalist and historian James Oberg of ABC News said that conspiracy theory is taught in Cuban schools and in all the places where Cuban teachers are sent.[173][229] A survey conducted by the American Information Agency in the seventies of the twentieth century in several countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa showed that most respondents were unaware of the moon landing, and many rejected it as propaganda or science fiction, and many believed that the Russians were the ones who landed on the moon.[230]

In 2019, Ipsos conducted a C-SPAN study to assess the level of belief that the 1969 moon landing was fake. 6% of respondents thought this was not true, and 11% of millennials (who reached adulthood in the early 2000s) thought the decline was not real.[231]