Only at the last minute, they’re pulled out of the capsule, and whisked away quietly and discreetly in a private jet, the Capricorn One now on its way to Mars as an unmanned mission. Charles Brubaker, Peter Willis and John Walker will be humanity’s first representatives to the red planet, and the intrepid astronauts have trained diligently for the moment that they will be launched on their four month voyage. Capricorn One is man’s first mission to Mars. And it’s not even about a mission to the moon. It’s a belief that grew out of the Watergate years, but in my mind, I don’t think the conspiracy theorists would have remained half as vocal, the theories half as long lived, were it not for this film, Capricorn One, which with great effectiveness showed just how and why such a hoax might be perpetrated. Some people still believe without a doubt that man has never walked on the moon, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Of all the hoaxes that the US government has been accused of, the moon landings have to be the most pervasive.
It wasn’t long before mistrust was the natural state of affairs between the citizenry and their elected leaders, and everything was brought into question, not least those very same moon landings that were so celebrated a few years previously. The confidence and positivity that culminated with the Apollo moon-landings, when it was believed that the US could do no wrong, was shattered by Watergate, by Vietnam, and by those little cracks that started to appear in the facade of a perfect America. The hopeful and optimistic and forward looking United States of the 1950s and 60s had to undergo a protracted period of re-evaluation and consideration when it turned out that the actual President of those very same United States, was a liar, and in all likelihood, so was the administration. The real passion for government conspiracies began twenty years earlier, with the real life conspiracy that was Watergate. It’s hard to remember now that the X Files was late to the party, that in many ways it really just re-invigorated and re-invented what was then just a moribund genre. Introduction I’ve recently been working my way through the X Files, probably the first name that springs to mind when it comes to government conspiracies in entertainment.
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