NASA

"Never A Straight Answer," the doubters expand it. The live feeds do keep cutting out.

The agency's conspiracy file is mostly a mirror of its own habits: live feeds that cut on anomalies (documented, attributed to signal loss), the destroyed Apollo 11 telemetry tapes (confirmed — erased and reused in the 1980s shortage), the STS-75 tether footage debated frame by frame, and Clementine's dual-use military lineage. Add Paperclip's founding cohort, von Braun's résumé, and Parsons' occult JPL, and the lore writes itself: the space program's parents were the war's strangest people. None of this evidences cover-up of the phenomenon; all of it explains why the archive keeps the question open. 'Never A Straight Answer' is the joke; the tape erasure made it sting.