FACT CHECK: Do 89% Of Americans Under 45 Believe The 1969 Moon Landing Never Happened?
An Instagram post with more than 43,800 likes claims 89 percent of Americans under the age of 45 believe the 1969 Apollo moon landing never happened.
Verdict: False
The Daily Caller News Foundation found no sources supporting the claim. Polling data shows only a minority of Americans in any age group believe the moon landing never happened.
Fact Check:
On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the surface of the moon. (RELATED: Did NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft Take This Picture Of Saturn?)
The conspiracy theory that the 1969 moon landing never happened has existed for over 50 years. Social media websites have given conspiracy theorists platforms to advance their views, with one Instagram page claiming, “To this day, 89 percent of Americans, under the age of 45, believe we never went to the moon.”
But belief in this theory is not nearly as pervasive as the Instagram post suggests. Polls about the moon landing have consistently shown only a minority of Americans in all age groups believe it never happened.
Polls conducted on the conspiracy theory in the 90s show that, overall, only a small percentage of Americans believe the government faked the moon landing. One conducted by Gallup in 1999 found that only six percent believe the conspiracy theory. That percentage was the exact same as a Time/CNN survey done four years prior, according to Gallup.
Ipsos polled the issue in 2019, the year of the moon landing’s 50th anniversary, and found that only six percent of all respondents believed it was staged. Among millennials, who are under the age of 45, 11 percent indicated their belief in the conspiracy theory. That percentage is slightly higher than those of Generation X respondents (six percent) and Baby Boomer respondents (three percent), according to the polling data.
Another 2019 poll, conducted by YouGov, found that 29 percent of respondents 50 years old or younger expressed some belief that the U.S. government “faked the 1969 Apollo moon landing,” with eight percent answering “definitely true” and 21 percent answering “probably true.” Among respondents over the age of 50, only one percent answered “definitely true” and nine percent answered “probably true,” according to the poll.
The DCNF found no polls supporting the post’s claim that 89 percent of Americans under the age of 45 believe the moon landing never occurred. We rate this claim false.
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