Uh oh, someone said the "occult" word ...
I'll offer a few words as to why such rumors get started in the first place. My way to deal with them, is via
Occam's Razor.
The issue starts with your politics --- or the arrangement between your 1) economics, your 2) legal system, your 3) resources, and 4) whomever's involved, in all parts big and small. Due to the stick measuring contest between international powers at the time, injecting amphetamines and cocaine (
federal money and resources), intravenously into a nation's circulatory economics, towards attempting the insane and previously impossible, was seen as the means towards an end, of that sort of situation.
Over the course of many years, an entire military-corporate block was imagined, and built from scratch, wherein pioneering technology based on explosive propulsion methods was the name of the game. This effort wasn't much of an extension of the ICBM technology either. If they had better concurrent, or alternate technology at the time, they would have surely used it -- instead we got the whole progression of the Mercury, Gemini, and eventually Apollo mission programs, which were quite lengthy.
Once those missions were over, the political willpower evaporated quickly, and funding kept being redirected towards other priorities. That deals with the start. The end of the issue is that the nature of 3rd density space travel is something akin to an exponential curve in mathematics, as it relates to the amount of mass going to/fro anywhere. It's incredibly resource intensive even for small things, and the costs keep ramping up for any novelties included. This includes habitation, as without the Earth's biosphere, which we humans are suited for, we need to either bring suitable means, or construct alternatives wherever we might go. The tonnage values for these is another exponential curve which compounds on the second.
Hence, it was wonderful to accomplish the feat, but once we did it, we didn't need to keep doing it anymore. We have no purpose or need for the Moon, yet alone stay there for any extended duration.
The "occult" creeps into this true story in many ways, simply due to its nature. This stems from the Latin root's conjugate meanings and usages.
1) To hide,
to conceal,
to secrete (
to make hidden,
or to
synthesize something out of) are the usual interpretations.
2) To not be
revealed,
discovered,
seen, or
even be something that most would not be interested in,
make many things that are not in the everyday parlance and understanding of what is, or potentially could be, at play. Therefore, most of it is speculation. It sells magazines, books and news articles, and over time it makes a cottage industry of pundits and lunatics that are able to earn their daily wages for themselves and family.
It is quite entertaining indeed, if anyone has seen the likes of Iron Sky, or its sequel.
I cannot deny that #1 doesn't happen at all, since your representative governments and agents do fan the flames of speculation and conspiracy, especially towards those areas where there is little to none of it. It's like a magician using techniques of misdirection to dazzle your attention spans. They do this, so that they can maintain the benefits of careers, financial profits, and hierarchical control over all of their subjects, while making everyone pay, through taxes or financial vehicles of this or that kind, for all of their misdeeds and bad decisions. They won't care at all if 100% of its population thinks that the Moon landings were fake .... They will, however, care if its population thinks that the current political arrangements are fraudulent, and want equitable and just change, in ways that the same characters will not be able to weasel themselves back in after one or two generations.
However, #2 is more of the case. Many honest persons involved, have contributed significant effort in their lives in getting to know the myths, the legends, the fables, the mysteries of things written in literature. Their imaginations are fertilized by such things, and whenever there is any opportunity to attribute significance to this, or to that, they do willingly offer their creative input. Trevor Paglen expounds on such things, in his expose of the "occult" on questionable military iconography, in the video below -- it's very good:
Some of those really catch the imagination, don't they? Lol ...