Rare Book of the Day – We Never Went to the Moon, Bill Kaysing & Randy Reid. First Edition, self-published in 1976.

This one is pretty wild. Bill Kaysing is regarding as the initiator of the moon landing hoax movement, and in this book, We Never Went to the Moon, he introduced the world to those ideas. From 1956 to 1963 he worked for Rocketdyne, which was closely associated with the lunar projects and was where the Saturn V rockets where designed and built. He resigned to become a traveling vagabond of sorts, but his time at Rocketdyne lent his moon hoax arguments a veneer of credibility.

In the book, Kaysing says that he had been privy to documents pertaining to the Mercury, Gemini, Atlas, and Apollo programs, and that it was clear a hoax was being perpetrated. He argues that the whole thing was put together on a stage set in the Nevada desert by a cynical and ruthless US government in order to distract attention from the unfolding disaster of Vietnam, and to prove once and for all America's superiority over the Soviet Union. Here are several of the claims he makes in the book:

• NASA lacked the technical expertise to put a man on the Moon.
• The absence of stars in lunar surface photographs.
• Unexplained optical anomalies in the photographs taken on the Moon.
• The absence of blast craters beneath the Lunar Modules. He claimed that the rocket engines of the Lunar Modules should have generated an enormous dust cloud near their landing sites the final seconds of descent.
• The mysterious death of Thomas Ronald Baron, a quality control and safety inspector for North American Aviation.
• The Dutch papers had questions regarding the "authenticity" of the Moon landings.

Regardless of how you feel about his argument, the impact cannot be ignored and the moon landing conspiracy theories exist to this day. This is the first printing of his book, self-published in 1976:

If your curiosity is piqued, here's an unedited interview Kaysing gave that was never broadcast:

More info here: