In 1968, the film director Stanley Kubrick was secretly approached by Nasa officials. They asked him to direct the first three moon landings from a special set. As a result, Kubrick worked for 16 months at a specially-built sound stage in Huntsville, Alabama, creating footage of the Apollo 11 and 12 missions. In July 1969, a Saturn V rocket with Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins on board was launched into a low orbit and remained there while Kubrick's footage was released to the media. The three men made a perfect splash down in the Pacific after millions of television viewers had been captivated by the so-called moon landing. Months afterwards, he filmed the Apollo 12 mission in the same way
This, at least, is the theory of an American called Great North Wind, writing at www.galactic-guide.com, and you have to admit it makes a great deal of sense. After all, as many moon landing hoax theorists point out, Nasa had to do something. American pride had been twice humbled - by Yuri Gagarin in space and by Charlie Cong in Nam.
That said, there are holes in Great North Wind's theory. He continues: "Kubrick refused to direct the Apollo 13 mission, however, because Nasa officials rejected his screenplay in which the Apollo 13 mission fails. Ironically, Nasa later decided to use the failed-mission scenario, for which Randall Cunningham - a little known but highly respected British director - was recruited to direct.
Extensive research has found that Cunningham is not a highly respected British director but an occasionally brilliant former quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens. Mr (or possibly Ms) Wind is possibly hoaxing us with his moon landing hoax. But we may never know the truth: Kubrick is now dead, which makes it hard to check, and Great North Wind has not replied to my emails.
You may think Wind's theory is a little far-fetched, but if you are so clever, how do you explain the fact that OJ Simpson was framed for murder by the US government? If you accept the account set out at www.straightdope.com, it was because Simpson helped to expose the lie that Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon. How did he do that? By appearing in Peter Hyams' 1978 film Capricorn One. In that picture, Simpson, along with Sam Waterston and James Brolin, plays an astronaut forced to stage the first manned mission to Mars in a desert. But the men decide not to play ball, and go on the run pursued by government hit-men. But if this film was an embarrassment to the US government, why did it wait until 1995 to frame Simpson for murder? And why didn't Waterston, Hyams and Brolin get framed too? The people at Straight Dope haven't returned my calls.
This many-tentacled conspiracy becomes a topical issue now that alleged Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin has thumped a man who claimed that his moon landing was actually filmed in the Nevada desert. This man, one Bart Sibrel, has made documentaries called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon and Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land On the Moon? and confronted Aldrin, 72, in a Beverly Hills hotel earlier this week. Sibrel, 37, demanded that Aldrin swear on a Bible that he had really landed on the moon. Aldrin declined to do so, and then his fist really landed on Sibrel's face.
Sibrel claims to have uncovered 33-year-old footage that shows the Apollo 11 crew falsifying part of their photography. Which at least might get Kubrick off the hook. He claims that the Apollo 11 crew put a transparency of the Earth in front of their space-capsule window and then taped the transparency as they made a "journey" to the moon.
"Surrounding the Earth, beginning at an altitude of 1,000 miles and extending an additional 25,000 miles, lie lethal bands of radiation called the Van Allen radiation belts," Sibrel tells me. "Recently uncovered footage of the crew of the Apollo 11 staging part of their mission proves that the astronauts never made it beyond Earth orbit."
But the hoax didn't end there. Footage purportedly from the moon shows the US flag fluttering in the lunar breeze. "How could there be a breeze when there is no atmosphere?" Sibrel asks. Sibrel is one of many who believe the moon remains untouched by human space-boot. Ralph Rene, author of Nasa Mooned America, says that Nasa photographs, allegedly from the moon's surface, show scenes supposedly lit solely by sunlight, but they contain shadows that do not run parallel with each other, indicating supplemental artificial light. Sunlight would cast shadows that would never intersect, he claims.
But the best hoax theorist is Bill Kaysing, author of We Never Went to the Moon. He claims: "The astronauts would have been overwhelmed by the sight of trillions of stars. But not one picture has ever come back from the alleged trip to the moon showing the stars in all their magnificence, nor do any of the astronauts comment on the stars."
Kaysing reckons that the Challenger space shuttle really did blow up in 1981, but that it was no accident. It was exploded by Nasa because "Christa McAuliffe, the only civilian and only woman aboard, refused to go along with the lie that you couldn't see stars in space. So they blew her up, along with six other people, to keep that lie under wraps."
Murders, trick photography, the possible involvement of a secretive top film director, a massive fiction by hundreds of conspirators over more than 33 years - the moon landing hoax was a remarkable achievement. Almost as remarkable as landing a man on the moon.
The following apology was published in The Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Monday September 16 2002
We gave the impression that Straight Dope, an organisation with a reputation for debunking scientific fallacies, had accepted that the moon landings were a hoax. In fact, the Straight Dope article did not support the idea. It totally rejected it. In addition we allowed someone quoted in our article to say that [Sharon] Christa McAuliffe was the only woman killed when the Challenger shuttle blew up. In fact, Judith Resnik was also killed. Apologies.
