This conspiracy theory is surprisingly little known and many Americans and even more so people from other countries have never heard of it at all. According to the conspiracy theorists, this indicates the authorities' attempts to erase the incident from history.
The very first manned flight of the Apollo program took place in October 1968 on the Apollo 7 spacecraft. But initially this flight was supposed to take place a year earlier in February 1967 on the Apollo 1 spacecraft.
However, during preparation for the launch, a fire broke out in the module with the astronauts and all three astronauts first suffocated and then their bodies were damaged by fire. Their names were Virgill Grissom, Edward Higgins White and Roger Chaffee.
And two years after this accident, the Apollo 11 crew went to the Moon with astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. If the Apollo 1 astronauts had not died in the fire, one of them would definitely have been in the Apollo 11 crew.
So, according to the conspiracy theorists, even at the stage of preparation for the Apollo 1 flight, his crew was informed that in fact, no preparation for the lunar mission was being conducted, and the entire mission with the landing on the moon of the Apollo 11 crew would be filmed in film studios on Earth (see the article on the Lunar Conspiracy).
And Grissom, White and Chaffee did not like it very much, they felt deceived and perhaps even let slip that they would tell someone about it. And so they decided to remove them by setting a fire.
Such details add to the credibility of this version that, shortly after that fire, 10 more Apollo employees died under strange circumstances. These were mainly accidents, fires and car accidents.
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One of those fatalities was Apollo safety inspector Thomas Byron, who died in a car accident in April 1967, two months after the deaths of three astronauts. He was outside his home in a car with his wife and stepdaughter when a derailed train hit them and killed all three instantly.
And just a week before his death, Byron was summoned to Congress, where he was interrogated about the Apollo 1 incident.
It is also known that Byron personally prepared a large report on how the burned-out module and other NASA equipment was arranged, but how this report was received is unknown. It is possible that Byron found out that there was a deliberate murder of the astronauts and therefore they decided to remove him.
By the way, the reason for that terrible fire in the Apollo-1 module was never found. Which is really quite strange. Only versions were expressed about an accidental spark or short circuit in the wiring, but the official commission could not confirm or deny these versions.
At the same time, the death of the astronauts was almost instantaneous, they suffocated to death by the products of combustion in just 14 seconds. Humane death, almost euthanasia.
At one time, Grissom's relatives were dissatisfied with the results of the NASA investigation and are still confident that something is unclean here.
Many conspiracy theorists believe that it was Grissom who wanted to tell the whole world that NASA wants to remove the fake about the landing on the moon. They base these conclusions because of his tenacious character, impatience with even the smallest lies, and other personal traits.