Dear Magicians,

The cognitive dissonance was so profound it’s almost beautiful in its self-defeating elegance. I discovered that conspiracy theorists have essentially constructed a logical guillotine and proceeded to place their own necks beneath it.

Let’s dissect this with surgical precision: Moon landing deniers ( including luminaries like Candace Owens and Bart SIbrel) often invoke James Van Allen’s radiation belt discoveries as their smoking gun, claiming the Van Allen radiation belts made lunar missions impossible. They’ll say even Elon Musk knows about them and this is why we never went back to the moon in the past 56 years. They typically cite NASA’s own Explorer 1 and Explorer 3 data from 1958, quote Van Allen’s published papers on radiation intensity, and reference the agency’s technical specifications for spacecraft aluminum shielding requirements.

But here’s where the intellectual house of cards collapses: They’re using NASA data to prove NASA lied!

This is like claiming someone is a pathological liar while simultaneously using their testimony as your primary evidence. The logical structure is so fundamentally broken that it defies basic reasoning principles. If NASA possessed the scientific competence to accurately map radiation fields in space, design instruments capable of measuring particle flux densities, and publish peer-reviewed research on magnetospheric physics—all of which conspiracy theorists readily accept—then what exactly prevents this same organization from successfully navigating those same radiation fields?

The selective epistemology is breathtaking. Bart Sibrel and his ilk will enthusiastically cite NASA’s Apollo 8 radiation dosimetry data when it supports their narrative, then claim the entire mission was filmed on a soundstage. They’ll reference the agency’s precise calculations of trajectory windows through the Van Allen belts—calculations that required extraordinary mathematical sophistication—while maintaining that NASA lacked the basic competence to actually execute those trajectories.

The deeper pathology here reveals itself in the cherry-picking methodology. These aren’t people following evidence to conclusions; they’re reverse-engineering evidence to support predetermined beliefs. They’ve decided NASA faked the Moon landings, then scavenged through the scientific literature for anything that might superficially support that conclusion, completely ignoring the source credibility problem they’ve created.

What makes this particularly rich is that my appearance on various podcasts has highlighted how actual physicists approach these questions. Real scientists don’t selectively trust data sources—they evaluate methodologies, cross-reference findings, and maintain logical consistency in their evidentiary standards.

The Van Allen belt “gotcha” actually proves the opposite of what conspiracy theorists claim. The fact that NASA accurately predicted, measured, and documented radiation exposure during Apollo missions—with dosimeter readings that matched theoretical calculations—demonstrates precisely the kind of scientific competence required for successful lunar missions.

This isn’t just bad reasoning; it’s aggressively self-refuting reasoning that would earn a failing grade in any undergraduate logic course. The conspiracy theorists have essentially argued themselves out of their own position while thinking they’ve delivered a knockout blow.

The tragic irony? Van Allen himself supported the Apollo program and never suggested the radiation belts posed an insurmountable obstacle. But conspiracy theorists prefer their martyred version of his legacy to the actual man’s scientific conclusions.

The Van Allen paradox isn’t just a problem for Moon hoaxers—it’s a perfect case study in how conspiracy thinking systematically undermines its own foundations through logical incoherence.

Until next time, have a M.A.G.I.C. Week,

Brian