But the grandest and strangest theories hold that the moon is itself a weapon. This notion was first put forward in 1970 by Michael Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, who argued that the moon is actually hollow, an artificial satellite put in our sky for reasons we can neither understand nor trust. Online, stories circulate about various ancient or distant peoples who can remember a time before the moon was towed into orbit; seven-day creation myths are meant to be a distant echo of the time when humanity saw the heavens being constructed right above them. The hollowness of the moon is supposed to be demonstrated by a episode from the 1969 Apollo 12 mission, in which the lunar module was deliberately crashed onto its surface after takeoff, and for half an hour the moon “rang like a bell.” In the cosmology of David Icke, the conspiracy theorist best known for his insistence that most world leaders and politicians are shape-shifting alien lizards, the moon is a vast artificial satellite put into orbit by alien forces, and causing something called the “Moon Matrix”: a powerful broadcast signal that blocks out humanity’s interdimensional capabilities and keeps us locked in the world of our five senses.

Why are people so afraid of the moon? Why will we declare it to be the seat of madness and witchcraft, or an alien world swarming with Nazis, or eventually resolve to nuke the thing? It might help to look at the first lie about the moon—Aristotle’s, in which the great philosopher declared it to be a perfectly smooth sphere, despite the fact that it’s quite plainly not. A lie this big usually means that there’s something being repressed. Aristotle loved unities and self-identities; he wanted to live in a rational, mathematical, and immutable universe; he believed that beyond the mess and contingency of human existence there was a perfect heavenly order to which we could aspire. The only problem is the moon. Other celestial bodies appear as perfect points of light, but the moon is clearly just an absurd ball of rock, as weary and beleaguered and broken as we are, carrying with it the scars of four billion years of astronomical senselessness. Hovering in the sky, it’s proof that we don’t really matter. The secret war against the moon is a war against imperfection, contagion, and disease; it’s the war against a universe that refuses to care about your ideas, and refuses to be understood.

But the moon also changes, transforming itself from a pointed sliver of light to a blankly accusing circle to a brooding absence and back again. Sometimes it glows an angry red, and sometimes, when its elliptical path brings it closest to the Earth, it blots out the stable masculine light of the Sun altogether. And all this transformative power doesn’t belong to mystical fire or abstract thought, but a perfectly ordinary rock. The secret of the moon is that the heavenly perfection we might mimic isn’t stasis, but a series of constant revolutions and transformations; its secret is that we could all be witches and werewolves. This is dangerous stuff for political power. No wonder patriarchal orders turned the moon into the symbol of everything they were trying to repress; no wonder moon-hate appealed to the Americans and the Soviets of the 1950s, two revolutionary societies that had ossified into a profound conservatism, terrified of chaos and paranoid about subversion. What else could they do, with a giant subversive rising over the horizon every night? Load up the rockets, and prepare to win the State’s first and oldest war once and for all.

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