My uncle swore the moon landing was faked until I showed him a photo from his own 1969 Navy cruise
He was on the USS Hornet that picked up the capsule, and when I pulled up the deck log from July 24 1969 with his own handwriting on it, he just went quiet and muttered 'well I'll be damned' - so here's my question, how many of these theories fall apart when someone actually digs up the paperwork?
Plenty of them fall apart with paperwork, but I would not say that proves most of them are dumb. The guy believed it for decades even with his own service record sitting right there, which tells me facts alone rarely change a mind once it is made up. People keep the belief because it does something for them, and a deck log does not fix that.