題圖：哈里森·施密特的阿波羅17號任務(wù)，1972年12月。

In September 2002, the astronaut Buzz Aldrin – the second man to walk on the Moon – was confronted in Beverly Hills by a camera crew led by Bart Sibrel. Sibrel, the creator of several documentaries alleging that the Moon landings never happened, shoved a Bible at Aldrin and demanded he swear on it that he wasn’t lying about walking on the Moon, before calling him “a coward and a liar”.

2002年9月，第二個登上月球的宇航員巴茲-奧爾德林在比佛利山莊遭遇了由巴特-西布雷爾率領(lǐng)的攝制組。西布雷爾是幾部聲稱登月從未發(fā)生過的紀錄片的制作人，他把一本《圣經(jīng)》塞給奧爾德林，要求他對著圣經(jīng)發(fā)誓自己在月球上行走的事沒有撒謊，還罵他是“懦夫和騙子”。

In response Aldrin, then 72, punched Sibrel in the face. Aldrin’s angry reaction didn’t reassure anyone, though, and just fuelled a new wave of conspiracy theories. The central claim: the Apollo landings were a gigantic scam, perpetrated on the whole world by the American government.

作為回應(yīng)，時年72歲的奧爾德林一拳打在了西布雷爾的臉上。奧爾德林憤怒的反應(yīng)并沒有讓任何人放心，反而助長了新一輪的陰謀論。其核心主張是：阿波羅登月是美國政府對全世界實施的一場巨大騙局。

Humans first landed on the Moon on July 20 1969. More than half a billion people watched on tele-vision as Neil Armstrong and Aldrin took their first steps on the arid surface. They left behind an American flag, a patch honouring the fallen crew of Apollo 1, and a plaque that read: “We came in peace for all mankind.” The sixth Apollo mission to land humans on the Moon concluded three years later. The Moon has not been visited by astronauts since December 1972.

1969年7月20日，人類首次登陸月球。5億多人通過電視觀看了尼爾-阿姆斯特朗和奧爾德林在干旱的月球表面邁出的第一步。他們留下了一面美國國旗、一塊阿波羅1號犧牲隊員的紀念牌，以及一塊寫著“我們?yōu)槿祟惖暮推蕉鴣怼钡呐曝摇Ｈ旰?，阿波羅計劃的第六次登月任務(wù)結(jié)束。自1972年12月以來，宇航員再也沒有訪問過月球。

By 1976, doubts were already creeping in. That year, Bill Kaysing, a former US Navy officer who had worked for one of Nasa’s rocket manufacturers, self--published a pamphlet titled We Never Went to the Moon: America’s 30 Billion Dollar Swindle. In it, -Kaysing pointed to unexplained optical anomalies – the absence of dust clouds or blast craters around the lunar module, and the lack of stars in surface photographs – to suggest that the footage was -created in a studio.

到了1976年，人們已經(jīng)開始懷疑。這一年，曾在美國國家航空航天局的一家火箭制造商工作過的前美國海軍軍官比爾-凱辛自費出版了一本名為《我們從未登上月球：美國300億美元騙局》的小冊子。在這本小冊子中，凱辛指出了一些無法解釋的光學異?，F(xiàn)象--登月艙周圍沒有塵埃云或爆炸坑，月表照片中也沒有星星--從而暗示這些鏡頭是在攝影棚里拍攝的。

Such hypotheses have proliferated into a body of literature that shades into hallucinatory weirdness: theories on the demonic nature of UFOs, astral projection, ancient aliens genetically engineering the human race, and other oddities.

這些假說已經(jīng)泛濫成災(zāi)，形成了一套幻覺怪異的文學作品：關(guān)于UFO的惡魔本質(zhì)、星體投射、遠古外星人對人類進行基因改造以及其他怪異事物的理論。

The hoax is of such a vintage that it’s become a staple of popular culture. Already in 1971, James Bond was depicted stumbling upon a Nasa film set made to look like the lunar surface, before giving chase in a Moon buggy, in Diamonds Are Forever. In this month’s Fly Me to the Moon, Scarlett Johansson plays a marketing genius hired by Nasa to film a fake landing in case the Apollo 11 mission fails.

這些騙局年代久遠，已成為大眾文化的主要內(nèi)容。早在1971年，詹姆斯-邦德就在《鉆石恒久遠》中被描繪成偶然發(fā)現(xiàn)了美國國家航空航天局制作的酷似月球表面的電影場景，然后乘坐月球車進行追逐。在本月的電影《飛月情海》中，斯嘉麗-約翰遜飾演一位受雇于美國國家航空航天局的營銷天才，拍攝了一部假的登月影片，以防阿波羅11號任務(wù)失敗。



插圖：斯嘉麗和查寧塔圖姆在《飛月情?！分信臄z了一場假登月。

With that kind of pedigree, the Moon-landing hoax can’t just be explained away as a form of modern-day “fake news” that blooms and fades on social media. Scepticism about the Apollo space programme was swirling long before the advent of the internet, beginning almost immediately after the landings themselves.

有了這樣的背景，登月騙局就不能僅僅被解釋為一種在社交媒體上若隱若現(xiàn)的現(xiàn)代“假新聞”。早在互聯(lián)網(wǎng)出現(xiàn)之前，對阿波羅太空計劃的懷疑就已經(jīng)開始蔓延，幾乎就在登月之后。

In turn, a great deal of effort has been expended over the decades trying to use evidence to dispel the conspiracy -theories. But attempting to debunk them logically is to misunderstand what such claims are communicating.

反過來，幾十年來，人們花費了大量精力，試圖用證據(jù)來消除陰謀論。但是，試圖從邏輯上推翻這些說法，就會誤解這些說法所傳達的信息。

Today, one in eight Americans think the Moon landings were staged – as do one in 11 Britons. Why won’t we all just accept the facts? Perhaps because most people aren’t -interested in or persuaded by facts alone. We need only recall how, when Covid broke out, the educated classes demanded officials discard the existing pandemic action plan to see this extends well beyond those routinely accused of ignorance and emotional reasoning. Conspiracy theories make most sense when understood not as factual claims but as emotional stories – allegories – that exist in oblique relation to empirical reality. They convey diffuse, and sometimes prophetic, intuitions about the world.

如今，每八個美國人中就有一個認為登月是偽造的，每十一個英國人中也有一個這樣認為。為什么我們不能接受事實呢？也許是因為大多數(shù)人都對事實不感興趣，也不會僅憑事實來說服自己。我們只需回想一下，當新冠病毒爆發(fā)時，受過教育的階層是如何要求官員放棄現(xiàn)有的疫情行動計劃的，就會發(fā)現(xiàn)這遠遠超出了那些經(jīng)常被指責為無知和情緒化推理的人的范圍。陰謀論最有意義的地方在于，它不是事實主張，而是情感故事--寓言--與經(jīng)驗現(xiàn)實存在間接關(guān)系。它們傳達了對世界分散的、有時是預言性的直覺。

The pandemic illustrates this again. Among the many conspiracies that circulated concerning the Covid vaccination programme, one common claim was that vaccines were really a covert programme to inject each of us with a microchip that would allow Bill Gates to track our whereabouts or even control our minds.

疫情再次說明了這一點。在有關(guān)新冠疫苗接種計劃的眾多陰謀論中，有一種常見的說法是，疫苗實際上是一項秘密計劃，目的是給我們每個人注射一個微型芯片，讓比爾-蓋茨能夠追蹤我們的行蹤，甚至控制我們的思想。
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This is, we can safely say, not true. Conversely, though, the vaccination programme really was acc-om-panied by the international rollout of digital “vaccine passports”, which lix vaccination -status to other biomedical data, as well as official state iden-tifiers. And while it’s no longer in active use, this architecture now enables states potentially to track individuals’ move-ments, and to index freedoms previously taken for granted – such as travel or access to public spaces – to co-operation with who-knows-what future mandatory medical interventions.

我們可以肯定地說，這不是真的。相反，疫苗接種計劃確實伴隨著數(shù)字“疫苗護照”的國際推廣，該護照將疫苗接種情況與其他生物醫(yī)學數(shù)據(jù)以及國家官方標識符聯(lián)系在一起。雖然現(xiàn)在已經(jīng)不再使用，但這種架構(gòu)使國家有可能追蹤個人的行動，并將以前理所當然的自由--如旅行或進入公共場所--與未來不知道會發(fā)生什么的強制性醫(yī)療干預合作聯(lián)系起來。

However, this probably isn’t a -sin-i-ster plot, whatever the conspiracists may say. It does nevertheless prompt us to read the conspiracy differently – poetically – -interpreting “Bill Gates” as -personifying a fusion of tech and governance interests, and the “microchip injection” as symbolic shorthand for the discomfiting sense that unknown technologies wielded by this figurative “Bill Gates” increasingly intrude into our physical, embodied lives. It’s fancifully expressed, but is it really so far from the truth?

不過，不管陰謀論者怎么說，這可能并不是一個險惡的陰謀。不過，它確實促使我們以不同的方式--詩意地--解讀這一陰謀，將“比爾-蓋茨”理解為技術(shù)與管理利益的融合，將“注射芯片”理解為象征性的簡寫，讓我們感覺到這個形象化的“比爾-蓋茨”所掌握的未知技術(shù)正日益侵入我們的肉體生活。這種表達方式很奇特，但它真的與事實相去甚遠嗎？

The Moon-hoax conspiracy also makes sense as allegory, when we consider what the Moon landings symbolised in mid-century American culture and international politics. The “space race” between America and Russia stood, symbolically, for the competition between capitalist West and com...st East: that is, between two ways of organising a mass industrial civilisation. Which social frxwork was better at delivering rapid, ambitious advances in real-world engineering and technological progress? The race to reach the Moon served as a proxy for this competition, by virtue of the sheer immensity of the goal, as well as its technical demands. For a living human being to leave the Earth’s protective envelope for the emptiness of space and walk on the surface of a celestial body took extraordinary financial, organisational and technical resources, not to mention tremendous courage and ambition.

考慮到登月在本世紀中葉的美國文化和國際政治中的象征意義，登月騙局陰謀作為一種寓言也是合情合理的。美國和俄羅斯之間的“太空競賽”象征著西方資本主義和東方共產(chǎn)主義之間的競爭：即兩種組織大規(guī)模工業(yè)文明的方式之間的競爭。哪種社會框架更能在現(xiàn)實世界的工程和技術(shù)進步中實現(xiàn)快速、雄心勃勃的進步？登月競賽是這場競爭的一個代表，因為它的目標和技術(shù)要求都非常艱巨。要讓一個活生生的人離開地球的保護圈，前往虛無的太空，在天體表面行走，需要非同尋常的財政、組織和技術(shù)資源，更不用說巨大的勇氣和雄心了。
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Winning the space race, then, served as proof positive that the Land of the Free was a more fertile home for this kind of ambition and innovation than any command-and-control socialist regime. Putting the first man on the Moon wasn’t just a “giant leap for mankind”, as Neil Armstrong famously said. It was also a watershed moment in the Cold War.

因此，贏得太空競賽可以證明，自由之國比任何指揮控制型的社會主義政權(quán)更能孕育這種雄心和創(chuàng)新。送人類去到月球的不只是尼爾-阿姆斯特朗所說的“人類的一大步”。它也是冷戰(zhàn)的分水嶺。

What, then, to make of the sceptics who appeared in the midst of that mid-century American triumphalism to cast aspersions on its veracity? It perhaps reflects an early intuition that America’s long, slow drift away from the material and sociocultural conditions that enabled the space race had already begun at the moment it was won.

那么，如何看待那些在20世紀中葉美國的勝利主義中出現(xiàn)的懷疑論者對其真實性提出質(zhì)疑呢？這或許反映了一種早期的直覺，即美國在贏得太空競賽的那一刻，就已經(jīng)開始長期、緩慢地偏離促成太空競賽的物質(zhì)和社會文化條件。

To build the lunar landers, the Apollo programme drew on American engineering talent and heavy industry that has since been shredded by globalisation, outsourcing and changing educational priorities. By the last Apollo flight, this process was well under way: US manufacturing was already declining from its 1957 peak of more than a quarter of American GDP – and today it languishes at about 11 per cent.

為了建造月球倉，阿波羅計劃利用了美國的工程人才和重工業(yè)，但這些人才和重工業(yè)后來都被全球化、外包和不斷變化的教育重點所摧毀。到最后一次阿波羅飛行時，這一過程已經(jīng)開始：美國制造業(yè)占美國國內(nèi)生產(chǎn)總值的比例已從1957年高峰期的四分之一下降到今天的11%左右。

Meanwhile, the sense of common American purpose that drove the project has also fractured. In a 2001 interview, Armstrong praised the mission’s low rate of engineering failure, which he attributed to a sense of common endeavour and striving towards excellence spread across the “hundreds of thousands” of engineers, makers and fitters involved in the mission. Among this number, he said, “every guy in the project, every guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that’s setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, ‘If anything goes wrong here, it’s not going to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it.’”

與此同時，推動這個項目的美國共同目標意識也出現(xiàn)了裂痕。在2001年的一次采訪中，阿姆斯特朗稱贊這次任務(wù)的工程失敗率很低，并將其歸功于參與任務(wù)的“數(shù)十萬”工程師、制造者和裝配者的共同努力和精益求精的精神。他說，在這些人中，“項目中的每一個人、在工作臺前制造東西的每一個人、每一個裝配工、每一個檢查員、每一個設(shè)置測試、搖動扭矩扳手的人等等，無論男女，都在說，‘如果這里出了任何問題，都不會是我的錯，因為我負責的部分只會做得比要求我制造的質(zhì)量更高’”。

Since the Moon landings, though, the sense of civic unity that enabled this degree of co-ordinated striving towards excellence has become increasingly contested. No longer taken for granted as core American attributes, instead national pride and cultural homogeneity have come increasingly to be seen as actively inimical to American values. And this has occurred, the historian Christopher Caldwell argues in The Age of Entitle-ment (2020), as a consequence of the many state-mandated measures to impose equality by fiat, which have mushroomed since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Though he does not endorse the segregation the act sought to dismantle, in Caldwell’s view its ratification in effect created a “rival Constitution”, which implicitly treats civic unity and patriotism not as necessary preconditions for high civilisation, but as obstacles to radical equality.

不過，自登月以來，這種協(xié)調(diào)努力、追求卓越的公民團結(jié)意識越來越受到質(zhì)疑。民族自豪感和文化同質(zhì)性不再被視為理所當然的美國核心特質(zhì)，反而越來越多地被視為與美國價值觀背道而馳。歷史學家克里斯托弗-考德威爾在《權(quán)利的時代》（2020）一書中指出，之所以出現(xiàn)這種情況，是因為自1964年《民權(quán)法案》頒布以來，許多由國家強制推行的強制平等措施如雨后春筍般涌現(xiàn)。盡管他并不贊同該法案試圖廢除的種族隔離制度，但在考德威爾看來，該法案的批準實際上創(chuàng)造了一部“對立憲法”，它暗含的意思是，公民團結(jié)和愛國主義不是高度文明的必要前提，而是激進平等的障礙。
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Other distractions have displaced the 20th-century drive for industrial innovation: though there are exceptions, such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, there has been a notable shift away from trying to reach outer space towards a preoccupation with virtual worlds. Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor, argues that this has been enabled by the digital revolution, whose advances serve, in his view, as a distraction from the stagnation and decline of -real-world technological progress. In his notorious formulation: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

其他干擾因素取代了20世紀的工業(yè)創(chuàng)新動力：雖然也有例外，比如埃隆-馬斯克的SpaceX公司，但人們已經(jīng)從試圖探索外太空轉(zhuǎn)向了對虛擬世界的關(guān)注。硅谷投資人彼得-蒂爾認為，這得益于數(shù)字革命，在他看來，數(shù)字革命的進步分散了人們對現(xiàn)實世界技術(shù)進步停滯和衰退的注意力。用他臭名昭著的說法就是“我們想要飛行汽車，卻只得到了140個字符”。

Understood against this backdrop, the eruption of scepticism about the Moon landings can be read as an early intuition that even at America’s crowning civilisational moment, the enabling conditions for that moment were already under threat. Deindustrialisation had already begun; the germinal form of “diversity, equity and inclusion” was already written into American law; the precursors of the internet were spreading.

在這一背景下，對登月的懷疑情緒的爆發(fā)可以被理解為一種早期的直覺，也就是即使是在美國最輝煌的文明時刻，這一時刻的有利條件也已經(jīng)受到威脅。去工業(yè)化已經(jīng)開始；“多樣性、公平和包容”（DEI原則）的雛形已經(jīng)寫入美國法律；互聯(lián)網(wǎng)的前身正在傳播。

Earlier this year, Bart Sibrel himself appeared on the wildly popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast. It’s not difficult to see how modern America might struggle to believe that their forebears were capable of the kind of engineering inventiveness, courage and large-scale co-operation required to make the Apollo missions a reality.

今年早些時候，巴特-西布雷爾本人也出現(xiàn)在了大受歡迎的“喬-羅根體驗”播客節(jié)目中。不難看出，現(xiàn)代美國人可能很難相信，他們的先輩能夠擁有完成阿波羅任務(wù)所需的工程發(fā)明、勇氣和大規(guī)模合作能力。

At its peak, Apollo involved some 400,000 people, across thousands of institutions. Even the rockets were built across multiple locations. It was an extraordinary feat of co-ordination, achieved in an age before modern computer-design programmes or tools for instantaneous communication. By contrast, when in the 2000s California invited bids for construction of a high-speed rail line through the state, the French rail firm SNCF tendered a proposal – only to withdraw it in 2011 to work on a similar project in Morocco, whose government, the SNCF engineers declared, was less politically dysfunctional than California’s. Morocco’s high-speed railway began operating in 2018. California’s is still not completed.

在高峰時期，阿波羅計劃涉及數(shù)千個機構(gòu)約40萬人。就連火箭也是在多個地點制造的。這是一個非凡的協(xié)調(diào)壯舉，是在沒有現(xiàn)代計算機設(shè)計程序或即時通信工具的時代實現(xiàn)的。與此形成鮮明對比的是，2000年代，當加利福尼亞州邀請投標建造一條穿越該州的高速鐵路時，法國鐵路公司SNCF提交了一份投標書，但在2011年撤回了投標，轉(zhuǎn)而參與摩洛哥的一個類似項目。摩洛哥的高鐵于2018年開始運營。而加州的高鐵尚未完工。

It is unlikely that the America of today could muster the degree of co-ordination and industrial resources that put Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon in 1969. Were I an American raised on the conviction that progress moves only in one direction, I too might conclude that, logically, these feats could not have been achievable half a century ago.

今天的美國不太可能像1969年阿姆斯特朗和奧爾德林登上月球時那樣，擁有那么豐富的協(xié)調(diào)能力和工業(yè)資源。如果我是一個美國人，從小就堅信進步只能單向發(fā)展，那么我也會得出這樣的結(jié)論：從邏輯上講，這些壯舉在半個世紀前是不可能實現(xiàn)的。

The most comforting conclusion, in other words, might be that the Moon landings were a hoax. The alternative is far bleaker: that the achievements of mid-20th-century America were the achievements of a different civilisation, one now as distant and mysterious as the Moon.

換句話說，最令人欣慰的結(jié)論可能是登月是一場騙局。而另一種結(jié)論則更加黯然：20世紀中期的美國成就屬于另一個文明，這個文明如今和月球一樣遙遠而神秘。