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Product Name: Good Timing

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If NASA had really wanted to fake the moon landings - we're talking purely hypothetical here - the timing was certainly right. The advent of television, having reached worldwide critical mass only years prior to the moon landing, would prove instrumental to the fraud's success; in this case, seeing really was believing. The magic of satellites, with their ability to enable live global (and interplanetary?) communication, fascinated and awed millions of people, much like anything atomic had caught the public's fancy in the previous decade. Also, space research and rocket science had advanced far enough to make a trip to the moon likely - or, at the very least, remotely feasible. "The structural nature of technology had changed to make the moon landing possible, but that also made it possible for people to doubt it," says Gary Fine, a sociology professor at the University of Georgia in Athens specializing in rumor and contemporary legend. Perhaps more importantly, Watergate hadn't happened yet, and people still trusted their elected officials. "A distrust of authority clearly plays into this whole thing," argues Fred Fedler, who teaches journalism at the University of Central Florida and has written a book on media hoaxes. "With Vietnam and Watergate, people have become less trusting, and to some people it doesn't matter what the government says; their immediate reaction is to disbelieve and to sometimes embrace the opposite view." The distrust continues to be fed by the mass media, especially in the film and TV business. It is rare to find a movie in which a government agency is actually depicted as a collection of fairly efficient, competent people who serve their country to the best of their ability. Dramatically speaking, an elite of sinister, evil bureaucrats is much more appealing. Linda Degh, a retired folklorist who taught at Indiana University in Bloomington, and who has recently published a book titled American Folklore and Mass Media, is reminded of the film Capricorn One. Released in 1978, Capricorn One tells the story of a staged flight to Mars. The astronauts grapple with the moral implications of the giant charade and fear they might be killed to keep them from blowing the whistle. Sure enough, they find themselves hunted down by bloodthirsty government thugs; only one of the astronauts makes it to freedom and reporters' microphones. Degh recalls that it was "quite a slanderous movie, pretending that the government had been killing people," and she believes that it must have given a powerful boost to the moon-landing hoax theory. "The mass media catapult these half-truths into a kind of twilight zone where people can make their guesses sound as truths. Mass media have a terrible impact on people who lack guidance."