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Survivors of the death camp.

A Reuters project sharing the extraordinary stories of people who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp.

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Espionage gadgets from the past.

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Neil Armstrong’s reply to a believer in the “Moon landing hoax”

For his 70th birthday, Neil Armstrong received a letter from a schoolteacher questioning whether astronauts had really landed on the Moon. I can’t be bothered to translate the whole thing, but it’s classic trolling from today’s Moon-hoax believers—you’ve probably seen plenty of it.

Armstrong first forwarded the letter to NASA, asking whether they were collecting material to debunk claims like these. Then he replied himself:

Mr. Whitman,

Your letter, expressing doubts based on claims made by skeptics and conspiracy theorists, has left me puzzled.

You seem to have been persuaded that the United States government carried out an enormous deception against its own people—and that not one of the 400,000 Americans involved in this supposedly secret project ever broke the silence to expose the fraud.

If you believe that, why are you writing to me, when I’m clearly one of those 400,000 liars?

I’m sure that as a teacher, you’re an educated person. It shouldn’t be difficult for you to contact qualified people who couldn’t have been involved in the alleged conspiracy.

Skeptics claim the Apollo missions never went to the Moon. You could speak with experts in other countries who tracked the missions using their own radar systems—at Jodrell Bank Observatory in England, for example, or with Russian academics.

Contact astronomers at Lick Observatory, who aimed a laser at a retroreflector on the Moon just minutes after I placed it there. If they don’t convince you, get in touch with astronomers at France’s Pic du Midi Observatory. They can tell you about researchers in various countries who still make measurements using those same reflectors. You can ask them, too.

Or you could search online for researchers at university laboratories around the world who study lunar samples brought back by the Apollo missions—some of which have never been found on Earth.

But don’t ask me. I’m clearly under suspicion, and you can’t trust a word I say.

Neil Armstrong

From the book A Reluctant Icon: Letters to Neil Armstrong.

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