Don't Tell Mozzie - or the real story of the April's Fool joke that turned into a conspiracy
On April 1st, 2004, was shown on the very serious French/German channel Arte, a documentary named Operation Lune (The Dark Side of the Moon), which you can find in English here, and in French here.
As the airing date should have suggested, this was a very elaborated April's Fool joke. The documentary tells the "real" story behind the Moon landing and how Stanley Kubrick filmed the images of the landing in a studio in London, using the set of 2001, Space Odyssee.
If the documentary starts rather believably, it escalades rapidly into a mountain of (hilarious) nonsense, spreading clues here and there that it's all a joke (inacuracies, names from movies, unbelievable details...).
You can read a bit more about it on Wikipedia.
But, to Arte's big embarrassement, this joke, taken out of context, was later taken seriously by a lot of conspirationists, and its fabricated arguments about the fake moon landing are often cited as proof that it was all staged. I have even heard fellow scientists - people that work in planetary science! - telling me very seriously that, yes, Stanley Kubrick himself directed it! I hadn't heard about that fake documentary at the time, I thought that was just silly.
And years later you have Mozzie watching "Moon Landing: fact of fiction"... LOL
Note that the fake documentary doesn't go as far as saying the landing didn't happen, but just that the images were staged.
We did bring rocks back from the Moon, and they've been thoroughly studied for 40 years, so it's hard to say the landing didn't happen...
But that's okay, Arte, it was a AWESOME joke!
As the airing date should have suggested, this was a very elaborated April's Fool joke. The documentary tells the "real" story behind the Moon landing and how Stanley Kubrick filmed the images of the landing in a studio in London, using the set of 2001, Space Odyssee.
If the documentary starts rather believably, it escalades rapidly into a mountain of (hilarious) nonsense, spreading clues here and there that it's all a joke (inacuracies, names from movies, unbelievable details...).
You can read a bit more about it on Wikipedia.
But, to Arte's big embarrassement, this joke, taken out of context, was later taken seriously by a lot of conspirationists, and its fabricated arguments about the fake moon landing are often cited as proof that it was all staged. I have even heard fellow scientists - people that work in planetary science! - telling me very seriously that, yes, Stanley Kubrick himself directed it! I hadn't heard about that fake documentary at the time, I thought that was just silly.
And years later you have Mozzie watching "Moon Landing: fact of fiction"... LOL
Note that the fake documentary doesn't go as far as saying the landing didn't happen, but just that the images were staged.
We did bring rocks back from the Moon, and they've been thoroughly studied for 40 years, so it's hard to say the landing didn't happen...
But that's okay, Arte, it was a AWESOME joke!