Bill Kaysing (July 31, 1922 – April 21, 2005) was an American writer who claimed that the six Apollo Moon landings between July 1969 and December 1972 were hoaxes, and so a founder of the Moon landing conspiracy theories. Early life and education Kaysing was born on July 31, 1922 as William Charles Kaysing, to a German-American family in Chicago, Illinois. His father was Charles William Kaysing.While he was a boy, his family moved to South Pasadena, California. He is described as growing up:in South Pasadena, California... [with a childhood] like something out of Huckleberry Finn. He had a paper route, went rafting on the Arroyo Seco River, and ate apples he found behind the grocery store. He couldn’t wait to leave home. His violent and abusive father died when he was nine; his mother was emotionally absent; and he had very little to do with his older brother, who would later become an aeronautical engineer. Kaysing served in the United States Navy during World War II as a midshipman, and later attended Navy Officers Training School, and the University of Southern California. He went on, after the war, to receive a B.A. in English literature, in 1949, from the University of Redlands. Professional History Kaysing graduated high school at 17, and worked for "a single week... in a furniture factory when he decided it wasn’t for him... [then] made his way to San Pedro, where he got a job on a fishing boat and got paid in fish." After the Navy and college he "worked briefly as a salesman, an insurance claims examiner, and a cabinetmaker...", and in this post-university, pre-technical period, his writing career involved publishing on a variety of subjects. Kaysing then found work as a technical writer at Rocketdynes jet propulsion laboratory, a division of North American Aviation, in 1956, in the period prior to the development of the Apollo missions. In September 1956, he became a service analyst there, in 1958 a service engineer, and in 1962 a publications analyst. From 1956 to 1963 Kaysing served as head of technical publications for Rocketdyne. On May 31, 1963, he resigned for personal reasons. In the years that followed, Kaysing has been described as suffering from "chronic anxiety, which, over time, turned into full-blown disillusionment with modern life," leading him to get rid of the family television over the objections of his family, and to "tras[h] his