However, the landscape shifted over the next few years, due to a disenchantment with the US Government following the Vietnam War, as well as the Watergate scandal, which led to growing distrust in officialdom and figures of authority. The film’s writer and director Peter Hyams – known for his work on later sci-fi films Outland and 2010: The Year We Made Contact (in the process inadvertently setting up another link between Kubrick, 2001 and the Moon landings) first came up with the story in 1972, but his script had failed to gain any traction in Hollywood, as it was felt to be too far-fetched. It was 1978’s Capricorn One – released less than 10 years after Armstrong’s one small step for man – that took things one step further, by using it as the basis of a story where the first manned mission to Mars ends up being mocked up, out of necessity, as the astronauts would die en route due to a systems issue if the launch went ahead as planned. Perhaps one of he things which really popularised and also crystallised the idea for a mass audience was in 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever, when Sean Connery’s Bond breaks into a set showing astronauts on a reproduction of the Moon, helping (either inadvertently or otherwise) to seed the very concept in the public psyche. This has been such a prevalent concept in popular culture over time that it has been referenced in everything from Friends and Arrested Development (where the joke was that Ron Howard claimed that he and his brother Clint hid in the rafters of a studio to watch NASA faking the Moon landing on the set of Gentle Ben), to The X-Files (which seems like very natural territory for giving the notion an airing, and makes it even more surprising it didn’t feature until the latest mini-series revival of the show). The following year’s release Operation Avalanche told the fictional story of CIA agents filming a fake Moon mission in 1969, in order to try and preserve national pride, when it became clear that NASA wouldn’t be ready in time to beat the Russians to get a mission safely to the surface.
The idea has even been used for comic purposes, as the basis of the 2015 comedy Moonwalkers was the efforts of a CIA agent to recruit Kubrick to stage the lunar mission, but ends up hiring an imposter instead. In fact, this very notion was the basis of a 2002 fake documentary, Dark Side Of The Moon, which ‘revealed’ Kubrick’s involvement, through the clever use of out-of-context interview clips with Buzz Aldrin, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and even Christine Kubrick – Stanley’s widow – to support this premise.įurther to this, the 2012 documentary Room 237 – about Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel The Shining – uses analysis to try and draw connections between the film and the first Moon landing, along with a number of other events. One of the more popular ones posits Stanley Kubrick was actually behind staging Armstrong and Aldrin’s epic voyage in a studio, which some people feel is given credence by the high level of authentic-looking visual effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out the previous year. Gunn’s 1956 story Cave Of Night, which sees the Air Force setting up a phony mission to stir up funding for the space program, and faking the death of an astronaut in the process, only to have a reporter uncover the truth about what had happened.ĭespite NASA having done its utmost to try and debunk the various theories and stories about how the Moon landings didn’t happen, the idea still refuses to go away, and has been a recurrent theme in popular culture. In fact, the notion has been around for a very long time – the very earliest depiction of a staged mission to the lunar surface actually pre-dated the Eagle’s landing in the Sea of Tranquility by more than a decade, with James E. 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the very first Moon landing, and there’s been conspiracy theories about it having been faked ever since.
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