Hey, I just did my bachelor's thesis and was researching the moon landing hoax theory. What I found is that during the early seventies people were rapidly loosing trust in their government due to actual conspiracies that took place around that time. The first that comes to mind here is the Watergate scandal. In the Gallup polls on government trust and support of the presidency we can see a sharp decline during the months the Watergate scandal unfolded in the media. However, there were also actual conspiracies involving the CIA. For example, in her book on conspiracy theories in the United States historian Kathryn Olmsted discusses that the CIA drugged unsuspecting citizens at bars and nightclubs to study the effect of LSD on humans. It also came out in 1972 that doctors from the 1930s till that year had used African-American people with stds to study the diseases by not giving them treatment, she writes in her book. These studies were shut down and the papers on them were leaked to various news outlets at the time. (These are just a few examples). So people had already started to distrust their government and the media information provided to them due to this. Another important aspect is that the United States government did not only act on conspiracies, but also believed in and made their own conspiracy theories. For example, Olmsted offers an example of the time just after JFK was shot. The government was afraid that the maffia could have been involved in some conspiracy here (due to the CIA working with and using the maffia in campaigns in Latin America). Either way, the combined distrust in government and the actual presence of conspiracies in American society and politics made it easy for people to doubt everything the government told them. And with the presence of the Cold War and what for a lot of people seemed like the impossible, the moon landing was also something that was prone to conspiracy theories. During my research I also analysed the main source on this conspiracy theory, a book called "We Never Went to the Moon" by Bill Kaysing. I did this withthe help of "You Talkin' to me?" by Sam Leith and discovered the following. Kaysing's argumentive structure is especially important in making people of that time believe in this theory. On of the my main arguments there is that Kaysing refers back to earlier actual conspiracies a lot to remind people that the government often lies to them, thereby making it likelier that the government lied about the moon landing too. In short the conspiracy theory was likely a result of the political climate in the United States of that time, which made people used to seeing conspiracies everywhere they looked. Hope this helped answer some questions :).