Moon landing conspiracy theories in popular culture

This article provides references to the alleged Apollo Moon Landing hoax theories in popular culture and parody.

Precursors In Other Media

James E Gunn wrote a science fiction story entitled the "Cave of Night" in which the U.S. Air Force fakes the launch and orbit of the first American astronaut. It was adapted for radio and broadcast as an episode of the popular program X minus 1 on February 1, 1956, A full five years before Yuri Gagarin. The Air Force is able to launch a craft on which is a transmitter relaying taped messages. The astronaut is said to have died in orbit where his body is left to remain. The conspiracy is nearly exposed by a radio reporter who is forced to destroy his evidence by the government. The mission was faked to spur funding for a real space program. This story neatly prefigures all of the major elements of later conspiracy theories.

In print

• President Clinton in his 2004 autobiography, My Life, states (on page 156): "Just a month before, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had left their colleague, Michael Collins, aboard spaceship Columbia and walked on the Moon, beating by five months President Kennedy's goal of putting a man on the Moon before the decade was out. The old carpenter asked me if I really believed it happened. I said sure, I saw it on television. He disagreed; he said that he didn't believe it for a minute, that 'them television fellers' could make things look real that weren't. Back then, I thought he was a crank. During my eight years in Washington, I saw some things on TV that made me wonder if he wasn't ahead of his time."
• Norman Mailer in 1969 wrote "The event (Apollo 11 Moonwalk) was so removed, however, so unreal, that no objective correlative existed to prove it had not been an event staged in a television studio—the greatest con of the century—and indeed a good mind, product of the iniquities, treacheries, gold, passions, invention, deception, and rich worldly stink of the Renaissance could hardly deny that the event if bogus was as great a creation in mass hoodwinking, deception, and legerdemain as the true ascent was in discipline and technology. Indeed, conceive of the genius of such a conspiracy. It would take criminals and confidence men mightier, more trustworthy and more resourceful than anything in this century or the ones before. Merely to conceive of such men was the surest way to know the event was not staged."
• In the book Great Lies To Tell Small Kids by Andy Riley one of the lies is, "All the Moon landings were shot on a set on Mars".

On film

• The 1978 film Capricorn One portrayed a fictional NASA attempt to fake a landing on Mars.
• In 1971, there was a brief sequence in the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever, in which the action takes place in a Moon setting where astronauts were being trained. Agent 007 steals what appears to be a Moon buggy from the model set, and drives it off to escape from an enemy compound. This scene may have helped to spread the idea of the Moon landings being a hoax.^{, p. 62}
• In 2002, William Karel released a spoof documentary film, Dark Side of the Moon, 'exposing' how Stanley Kubrick was recruited to fake the Moon landings, and featured interviews with, among others, Kubrick's widow and a number of American statesmen including Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld. It was an elaborate joke: interviews and other footage were presented out of context and in some cases completely staged, with actors playing interviewees who had never existed—and named, in many cases, after characters from Kubrick's films; this was one of many clues included to reveal the joke to the alert viewer.
• In the 2004 film Man on the Moon , Richard Fortunato fictionally explores the links between Apollo 11, the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon, and a Russian spy in an effort to explain the staged moon landing
• In the 1992 movie Sneakers, the Mother character, played by Dan Aykroyd, mentions "It's the same technology that NASA used to fake the Apollo Moon landings, so it shouldn't give us any trouble."
• In the movie Looney Tunes: Back In Action, as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are in Area 52 they browse the videotape shelf, one of the videotapes searched read "Moon LANDING DRESS REHEARSAL."
• In the movie RV, singer JoJo's character commented that the RV camp they were staying overnight was "where NASA faked the Moon landings."
• In the outtakes/end credits for the film Daddy Day Care, the cameraman is struggling to focus the camera. Eddie Murphy then says, "This is why I know we didn't land on the moon."
• In the movie National Treasure: Book of Secrets, the answer to the Apollo hoax was supposed to have been inside the book of secrets.
• In a World of Warcraft commercial Mr. T makes a comment about others believing his Night Elf Mohawk character is a hoax like the moon landing.
• In the movie "Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder", when Fry reads Richard Nixon's mind, he hears the president thinking that he really did stage the moon landing, but it took place on Venus.
• In Transformers: Dark of the Moon it wasn't the actual moon landing that was a hoax but the true reason for going to the moon. To investigate the wreckage of a crashed Autobot spacecraft known as The Ark.
• In an episode of Stargate SG-1, Jack O'Neill meets a conspiracy theorist who among other things claims to know the truth about the moon landings. When asked if he means that the landings were faked, he replies that the moon landing hoax itself was the coverup, and implied that it was made to hide something discovered during the Apollo missions from the general public.

On television

• In an episode of Da Ali G Show, Sacha Baron Cohen, dressed in character as Ali G, interviews Buzz Aldrin and asks him "Is it true that the moon doesn't really exist?"
• A television drama called The News-Benders, the key plot device of which stipulated that all major technological advances since 1945 had been faked in some way, aired in January 1968; it postulated a "Moon landing" falsified with models. It was written by British writer Desmond Lowden.
• In an episode of Fox TV's Family Guy, a flashback shows the ending of filming the hoax, with Neil Armstrong walking out of the studio and a pedestrian seeing him. When the pedestrian asks why he is not in space, Neil Armstrong stutters a feeble excuse about "solar winds" and "time delays" before killing the man. In the episode "If I'm Dyin', I'm Lyin'," Peter said that his "healing powers" were a fake, "like the Moon landings".
• In the ITV sitcom Believe Nothing an Illuminati type council kills one of their members after stating "we faked the moon landing" but their caterers can't supply "a decent prune Danish"
• In an episode of Friends, Joey asks Phoebe for a good lie, and she responds, "Okay, how about the whole 'man-landing-on-the-Moon' thing? I mean, you can see the strings, people!!"
• In an episode of Newsradio, Jimmy James pretends to fly a hot air balloon around the world, but this is actually a hoax being filmed in a television studio. When Lisa finds out about this and criticizes him, he says, "It's not like I was faking the Apollo Moon landings, now that was a big deal." Lisa says, "What?" Jimmy gets nervous and says, "Nothing, I gotta go."
• On the May 11, 1998 edition of the Late Show With David Letterman, actress Gillian Anderson read a Top Ten List entitled "Top Ten Things The Government Doesn't Want You To Know." Number three on the list was, "Due to a navigational error, Neil Armstrong actually landed in Wilmington, Delaware."
• In "Roswell That Ends Well", an episode of Futurama, when the crew is mysteriously flung back in time to 1947, President Harry S. Truman requests that the remains of Bender's (Futurama's robot) body, be taken to Area 51 for study. When informed that Area 51 is the location for the faked Moon landing, he replies, "Then we'll have to really land on the Moon. Invent NASA and tell them to get off their fannies!"
• In an episode of The PJs, Thurston said that if people can fake a Moon landing, anything's possible.
• In an episode of King of the Hill, conspiracy theorist Dale Gribble suggests that the Super Bowl is pre-selected and is filmed in an unidentifiable location where they filmed the fake Moon landing, months before the game ever began. On another episode, Dale discovers that the government report on the Kennedy assassination made sense and said, "If the government was right about this then maybe we really did go to the moon."
• Stephen Colbert has made a running joke about how his character doesn't believe in the Moon landing:
  • On the June 7, 2006 edition of The Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert said "Tonight's guest is a pioneer in Mars exploration. Hopefully tonight he'll explain how they faked a space landing there too."
  • On the July 27, 2006 episode of The Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert said "And here's the Smithsonian Institute's Air and Space Museum, where you can see the original rocks from the soundstage where they faked the Moon landing. It's a part of Hollywood history."
  • On the August 1, 2007 edition of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert said, "Unless you've been on the moon this week, you know I broke my wrist. And if you have been on the moon, congratulations, you are the first!"
• In February 2007, Craig Ferguson commented that the Lisa Nowak scandal was the biggest thing to happen to NASA "since they faked that moon landing thing in the sixties."
• In a Washington Mutual commercial, the spokesperson is confronted by rival branch members in a parking garage. Comparing the rates of Washington Mutual to other known banks, one of them mentions that the moon landing was staged.
• In an episode of The Whitest Kids U'Know, Trevor Moore tells a group of young schoolchildren that the Moon landings were faked.
• In the TV show Codename: Kids Next Door, The Kids Next Door say they faked the moon landing by redirecting the ship to a fake moon set on earth so the adults couldn't find their headquarters in the moon.
• In some episodes of My Name Is Earl, Darnell Turner (Crab Man) suggests that the moon landing is a hoax.
• In a Red Bull drink commercial, Neil Armstrong is shown to actually land on the moon, then drinks a Red Bull, causing him to start flying and never actually walk on the surface. Someone over a radio then says, "You drank a Red Bull, didn't you? Come back and we'll shoot it in a studio."
• On August 27, 2008, the Discovery Channel aired an episode of Mythbusters that tested and debunked some common claims made by moon landing conspiracy theorists. (MythBusters (season 7)#Episode 104 - NASA Moon Landing)
• On July 3, 2009, in an Episode of Coronation Street, character Tyrone Dobbs makes reference to the fact that he doesn't believed that the moon landings happened because of the "Van Halen Belt" (sic).

In video games

• The plot of Activision's 1998 computer game Battlezone is based largely on the idea that while the lunar landings did take place, both the United States and Soviet Union had already spent considerable time on the moon and were actively waging war against each other on the lunar surface using equipment based on alien technology and materials discovered there. In the game's universe, the Apollo landings were a hoax of a different kind, using only technology that had been admitted to the public, rather than the highly advanced and secret alien technology.

• In the 2005 first person shooter Area 51, one level is based on the idea that the lunar landing was faked. The room is filled with cameras, cranes, lunar vehicles, and recordings of radio transmissions, positioned in a way to portray a fake lunar terrain and a black wall in the back with a picture of the Earth in the distance. In an unlockable video, the character Dr. Cray says that they did land on the actual Moon, but makes a point that "the mysteries and horrors found there" would expose the alien conspiracy and, of course, would not be suitable for public release.

• In the 2006 Video game Destroy All Humans! 2, scanning a male Russian while in disguise, will cause him to sometimes say that he thinks that the moon landing was just a TV set in Newark. Whilst on the moon planet, one of the side-quests involves a delivery from a certain company; "It's being delivered by a courier company called... The North American Shipping Association."

• In the 2007 video game The Simpsons Game in the History Museum there are pictures on the wall (in the "history of man" section) with Neil Armstrong walking on the moon with TV cameras around him.

In music

• The Men From Earth song "I Faked the Moon Landing" tells an imaginary story of someone's deathbed confession to assisting with the hoax. Among the many references in the song to popular hoax accusations is the line "that wasn't Buzz next to the LEM / just a guy who looked like him."
• The group Looper have a song called "Dave the Moon Man" on their album Up a Tree. It features a character who does not believe in the Moon landings and repeats several of the major conspiracy arguments.
• The video for the Rammstein song "Amerika" depicts the band on a movie set wearing NASA suits and a theme of the video is the faking of the Moon landing.
• There is a song by metal band Margret Heater called "Apollo Conspiracy".
• Swedish hardcore punk band Refused recorded a song called "The Apollo Programme Was a Hoax" for their final full-length album, The Shape of Punk to Come.
• The song 'Fall Out' from the album Six by British band Mansun features the lyric, "Did Stanley Kubrick fake it with the moon?"
• The Solillaquists Of Sound song 'Mark It Place' includes the phrase "I saw the American flag waving proudly on its own without a care, but it was on the moon and there's no wind out there."
• Scottish Folk-Rock Group Runrig feature the lyric "There was the man who walked on the moon; something I never really believed" in their UK top 40 single Hearthammer.
• The Diamond Rio song "It's All in Your Head" includes the line "we never walked on the moon" as well as other conspiratorial references such as "Elvis ain't dead."
• The song Holloway Prison Blues by British Rock band Million Dead features the lyric "And I confess I helped fake the Moon Landings as well."
• The Mekons' 1988 single, "Ghosts of American Astronauts" mentions "a flag flying free in a vacuum" and a backlot in Texas, seemingly referring to popular arguments by conspiracy theorists.
• Quebec rock group Exterio made reference to the lunar conspiracy theories in their song "Le Complot".

Other references

• British weekly sci-fi comic 2000 AD published a story claiming the Apollo landings were faked to cover up the existence of an active Lunar base and mislead the Russians about how advanced American technology had become - a deliberate reverse of the usual hoax argument.
• Former Major League Baseball player Carl Everett has said in interviews with Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy that he doubts the validity of the Moon landings. Shaughnessy would go on to nickname Everett "Jurassic Carl" due to Everett's assertion that dinosaurs never existed.
• In Wandaba Style, boy genius Susumu Tsukumo is convinced that man never landed on the moon and regards the Moon landings as a hoax,hence his intention to fly to the moon without using fossil fuels.
• Episode 45 of the machinima Red vs. Blue involves the characters arguing about conspiracy theories, including "We never landed on the sun!"
• One strip of Wulffmorgenthaler features alien conspiracy theorists asserting that "the Earth landing has never happened."
• In one strip of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, two astronauts discuss that they have apparently missed the Moon and landed on Mars and that they don't know how to "break it to the public." The strip is followed by a caption underneath reading, "That's right, the moon landing was a fake!"
• The Onion spoofed the theory in an article reporting that Neil Armstrong admitted that the moon landing was a hoax. The joke article was mistakenly reported by a Bangladeshi newspaper as news.
• In the Smurfs album The Astrosmurf a moon-landing is faked.
• "Aldrin About The House", a 2003 Viz strip by Cat Sullivan, features a pair of young female flatmates farcically trying to conceal from their Apollo hoax-obsessed landlord Mr. Sibrel that their third flatmate is Buzz Aldrin (in EVA suit). The strip ends with Sibrel discovering Aldrin in bed with Sibrel's wife and exclaiming "I don't believe it! ... I mean, look at those shadows, which indicate multiple light sources even though only one lamp is on. And the indentations in that matttress aren't nearly enough to account for the mass of two bodies! No, I don't believe it at all!"