Kennedy had promised to send a man to the moon within the decade. As soon as the first capsules were in orbit, some began to dismiss the images as phony and the testimony of the astronauts as bullshit. The stories of a hoax predate the landing itself. To understand America, you can start with Apollo 11 and all that is counterfactual that’s grown around it that’s when the culture of conspiracy, which is the culture of Donald Trump and fake news, was born. History itself began to read like a fraud, a book filled with lies. Having learned the habit of conspiracy spotting, these same people came to question everything else, too.

Instead, they tried to prove it never happened, convince themselves it had all been faked. Because a man on the moon was too fantastic to accept, some people just didn’t accept it, or deal with its implications-that sea of darkness.

It’s not the birth of the space age we should be acknowledging on this fiftieth anniversary, but the birth of the paranoia that defines us. Where are the moon hotels and moon amusement parks and moon shuttles we grew up expecting? But it did lead to something: a new kind of mind. The moment is an unacknowledged hinge in human history, unacknowledged because it seemed to lead nowhere. It wasn’t just the astronauts: everyone who saw the images and watched the broadcast got a little dizzy. It’s a radical shift in perspective, to see the earth from the outside, fragile and small, a rock in a sea of nothing. Or maybe the experience of going to the moon-standing and walking and driving that buggy and hitting that weightless golf ball-would make anyone crazy. Maybe it was simply the truth: maybe they had been touched by something. Many astronauts came back with a belief in alien life. He said he’d been wrapped in a warm consciousness his entire time in space. I asked about the space program, but he talked only about UFOs. When I sat down with Edgar Mitchell, who made his landing in the winter of 1971, he had that same look in his eyes. When questioned about the reality of the landing-he was asked to swear to it on a Bible-he slugged the questioner. Buzz Aldrin, who was the second off the ladder during the first landing on July 20, 1969, almost exactly fifty years ago-he must have stared with envy at Neil Armstrong’s crinkly space-suit ass all the way down-has run hot from the moment he returned to earth. They had one important thing in common when I looked into their eyes: they were all bonkers. I’ve met three of the twelve men who walked on the moon. The story of the moon landing will become a little harder to believe.

It will not be exactly like the moment the last conquistador died, but will lean in that direction. Within a decade or so, the last will be dead and that astonishing feat will pass from living memory into history, which, sooner or later, is always questioned and turned into fable. Have you ever met a person who’s been on the moon? There are only four of them left.

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