Why is it that people believe the Moon landings were hoaxes, despite ample evidence that they really happened?

Ignorance, weak brain, idiot people. 2012 = hoax Moon landing = true ! People 2012: true ! dead is coming ! Moon landing: what an hoax ! There are the people today !

I think it starts with conspiracy theorists who will automatically contradict officialdom, whether it be NASA or the Government. If there were a government statement that Friday follows Thursday, they would argue that it was wrong. They seem to live in a fantasy world where they are the Will Smith character in the movie 'Enemy of the State', battling to reveal the truth against the powerful forces of government. The combination of the internet and free speech enables these people to spread their nonsense and it gets picked up by kids who will believe anything, and ends up being repeated in endless questions on here.

1) Science is too complicated -- they see that with suspicion, as if it's being hidden by an "elite" in order to control the "less smart". Yes, science takes effort -- but so does every other major human enterprise. I remember reading somewhere (I forgot where, but I think it was in a biography) that when Feynman was asked by a journalist if he could explain Quantum Electrodynamics in 4 minutes, he basically said something along the lines that if QED could be explained in 4 minutes then he wouldn't deserve the Nobel prize. 2) It's done by "official entities" -- and most people are very reluctant of accepting anything coming from "official sources" (they blame it on "the government"). It doesn't help when journalists come out with proof of "official reports" adultered to conceal the "real facts". 3) They see anyone who comes out with "surprising news" that are denied by the official authorities as heroes -- and that they're denied because the "official entities" are trying to cover up "the truth". This reinforces the feeling of "us against them". If you put in a sense that those news are exclusive, and that they should be careful to reveal it to as little people as possible because "they" can find out and silence it -- and, as incredible as it looks, it turns out to make it more believable. 4) People are naturally impressible. They are very visual. And they trust most everything which is PUBLISHED. You publish anything that looks very clean and polished and BAM! instant validation -- no one would take the time and patience to print something so beautifully laden with pretty pictures if it weren't true, right?! In this respect you can see for example phishing sites, where people are (easily) tricked into giving their bank credentials to fake sites. Also: remember the War of the Worlds incident with Orson Welles on the radio? (Twice!)

Limited brain activity.

It's because ignorance is bliss

You have figured out, of course, that some of the stories about events that occurred before the present generation of youth was born, as well as some of the stories about what might happen in the future, are true, whereas others are false. The task of every questioner is to sort truth, speculation, and lies into their proper categories in his or her mind. Authority is useful in that respect, but it is not always correct. There are propaganda manufacturers who very much want people to believe in one or in a few essential false ideas, and to lend those ideas credibility they will be embedded in publications such as reference books in which 99.9% of the statements are true. The truth of most of the material builds trust in the reader of the reference material, so that when the reader encounters the essential lie which the propagandist wants him to believe, he will recall that he was reliably informed by the same source many times in the past, and so he will regard this claim as being most likely also true. What most people believe is occasionally useful, but likewise is often incorrect. Not only is public opinion subject to manipulation by propagandists with media leverage, it would otherwise still be the case that truth is not something which can be found by the method of voting on what the truth is. I have the opinion that the Holocaust is at least 90% fiction and that the "Nazi gas chamber" part of the story is 100% false. Not only have no gas chambers ever been found, but also no dead person was ever found who could be proved to have died of hydrogen cyanide inhalation. During the trial of Ernst Zundel in Canada, a Jewish "witness" testified about the appearance of someone who he had seen gassed, describing the color of the victim's corpse as blue. In fact, the bodies of people who die of hydrogen cyanide inhalation turn beet-red, not blue. The Jew was lying. Other Jews have been caught in various other lies during courtroom testimony—the fire-and-ashes from the chimney testimony was false, for example. The story about Jewish fat made into soap was false, too. How many lies do you need to discover before you begin to suspect that the Holocaust itself, or most of it, is probably a hoax? It is well known that there was an outbreak of typhus in Europe during the latter part of the Second World War, and this disease is quite capable of producing the numbers of dead people found in the Nazi run concentration camps in both Germany and Poland. Why would the Jews lie about how the Germans treated them during WW2? The answer is obvious. The concentration camp horror stories began as Soviet propaganda invented by Ilya Ehrenberg, himself a Jew, in order to foment anti-German hatred in Russia and in East Europe. The horror stories were embellished by the Zionists in order to cast Israel as a "victim state." The Holocaust story gave Israel a moral carte blanche, by which Israel's vicious war-crimes, such as the Deir Yassin massacre and hundreds of similar atrocities, wouldn't be criticized as they deserved to be. Subsequently, the Holocaust story became useful to the Jews as a way of extorting money from other countries, using the threat of trade sanctions by the United States if such-and-such country did not quickly hand over several billion dollars to Israel. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's memoirs make no mention of the Holocaust, and I doubt that this is because it slipped his mind. Anyway, you will have observed that authority sometimes promotes hoaxes, provided that the hoaxer has gained sufficient leverage over that authority that the authority is inclined to play along. In the case of the Holocaust, the Jews' leverage over the US government—as well as over the governments of Canada, the UK, Germany, and other countries—is control of the financial system, upon which the government depends for loans to cover operating expenses, and the Jews' leverage over individual office-holders is their control of the mass media, which gives the Jews the power to determine how the public will regard any of those office-holders. Let one of them say the wrong thing, and they'll get the "Pat Buchanan" treatment. (For Hollywood entertainers, the same phenomenon is called the "Mel Gibson - Marlon Brando" treatment. For academics, it's the "David Irving - Fredrick Töben" treatment. For journalists, it is called the "Helen Thomas" treatment. Whatever you call it, you've seen it—vindictive demonstrations of Jewish political power—repeatedly. Whether you allow yourself to REMEMBER that you have seen it depends on how strong your character is.) In the case of the Apollo Moon landings, the events took place prior to the birth of many of the young people who use Yahoo Answers today. It is a curious feature of human nature to regard one's own times as the most significant time in human history, and so how could anything so significant as moon landings have happened before Joe the College Freshman was even born? It offends his sense of importance. He has a psychological incentive to disbelieve that the people who came before him knew how to do things that the people of his generation cannot do.

People, like Bart Sibrel, who think the moon landings were hoaxes have lack of knowledge of photography and basics of physics understanding of inertia, gravity and behavior in an airless environment. Also, they weren't yet born at the time, so they don't have memories of the publicity.

Sometimes they are influenced by the articles the read, some stupid tv shows, radio, internet, friends and other sort of unreliable information. They need to be talk through, show them some of the evidence that you know.

Some people just don't believe what the human brain is capable of doing. There were many things influencing in those thoughts at the time, in my opinion. Competing against Russia for the same reasons (power/politics), the boom in technology were even now a days some are prone not to accept, I can't imagine back then (ignorance). Others just don't think or don't instruct themselves... And 2012 is not exactly one day in specific nor the year (as its estimated in others by 2013), calculations vary but, its believed that Mayan calendar tied to Precession of the Equinoxes. This will cause weather/climate changes, if correct. Humans predict to be able to prepare...