Is there a ‘true’ story behind the fake Apollo moon landing in ‘Fly Me to the Moon?’

Actors portray a fake lunar landing in the new film “Fly Me To The Moon.”
(Image credit: Columbia Pictures)

Everybody loves a good old-fashioned conspiracy theory and the granddaddy of them all is the belief that NASA somehow faked the Apollo 11 moon landing on a secret sound stage and that astronauts never really walked on the lunar surface.

Despite an avalanche of evidence and data to the contrary, this wild yarn has been perpetuated for decades. The shaky reasoning behind the Apollo 11 moon landing has been easily debunked one-thousand times by NASA officials, scientists, astrophysicists, engineers, billionaire geniuses, and historians. However, there’s still a cabal of hardcore conspiracy theorists who still cling to the idea that it was all a clever ruse orchestrated by Hollywood and NASA to beat the Soviet Union in the Space Race.

Columbia Pictures’ “Fly Me To the Moon” is a new romantic comedy released on July 12, 2024 directed by Greg Berlanti that depicts this conspiracy theory, centering its story around a clandestine plan to shoot a fake moon landing as a precautionary backup should the Apollo 11 Moon mission go awry. Scarlett Johansson stars as Kelly Jones, an ace ad executive assigned to Cape Canaveral, Florida who strikes up an intimate relationship with Channing Tatum’s straight-laced NASA launch director named Cole Davis while this bumbling classified production called Project Artemis is filmed.

While this feature film is definitely a work of fanciful fiction, could there be more than a thread of truth behind the purported artificial act and any rumored discussion of NASA hedging their bets with an orchestrated effort to pull off a bit of moviemaking misdirection? The answer is a resounding “no,” as there is zero proof of any fraudulent proposal put forth by NASA or the U.S. Government to concoct a facsimile of any Moon landing. The theory is all smoke and mirrors.

So where and when did this lame-brained idea, which postulates that filmmakers and special effects artists fooled millions of people worldwide for decades by creating a substitute lunar landing, come from and what are the logical fallacies at its paranoid heart? Let’s take a deeper dive into this somewhat murky puddle of misinformation and see what it’s truly all about.

Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin salutes the American flag. (Image credit: NASA)

“I think the fact that NASA was always going to participate in this movie to the degree that they did always made me know that we were honoring actually what happened,” Berlanti told The Hollywood Reporter. “When you see the movie, without giving away the ending, you realize that so much of it is about why the truth is important. And so I think I was fine to take on an OG conspiracy theory, knowing that in the end, what we were really trying to say why the truth matters.”

Human beings are skeptical by nature, which is an evolutionary trait meant to perpetuate our survival, but even in the face of tens of thousands of NASA images, films, videos, lunar dust and rock samples, and scientific data to prove we did indeed land on the moon, the conspiracy theory has never completely died.  We’ve even taken images of footprints, rover tracks, abandoned equipment and even bounced lasers off Apollo 11’s Lunar Laser Retro-Reflector left behind by Buzz Aldrin!

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One trigger point for these unfounded beliefs was director Peter Hyams’ 1978 sci-fi thriller “Capricorn One,” which centered around a plot to record a fake Martian landing after it’s discovered that the astronauts would have died when their life support systems failed. 

“The Shining’s” Danny Torrance clad in his Apollo 11 sweater. (Image credit: Warner Bros.)

Another amusing aspect of the crackpot theory speculates that director Stanley Kubrick of “2001: A Space Odyssey” fame was recruited by NASA for the staged hoax for its six moon landings, something that most definitely did not happen. Kubrick, the master cinematic perfectionist, even pokes fun at that absurd idea by having Danny Torrance, the clairvoyant child character in 1980’s supernatural horror classic, “The Shining,” prominently dressed in an Apollo 11 sweater.

It took the combined effort of more than 450,000 living breathing souls to deliver humankind to our lone satellite in the heavens, an almost unimaginable accomplishment when considering the state of computers, aerospace engineering, rocket propulsion, navigation tools and microcircuitry of the age. 

But even more unimaginable is the notion that nearly one-half million of these proud contributors could have remained silent for the past 55 years if these hoax allegations were true to the slightest degree.

Sure, we’ve heard the head-scratching reasoning for the continued madness: Apollo 11’s U.S. flag waves in the wind without the existence of wind on the moon; the absence of stars in any of NASA’s moon landing photos; Apollo astronauts couldn’t have survived Earth’s dangerous Van Allen radiation belt; and non-parallel shadows in the moon landing images undeniably show they were faked.

All these inane claims have been easily disproven with simple explanations for decades, yet the desire to perpetuate the conspiracy is stronger than mere logic and so it remains embedded in an irrational corner of our imaginative global zeitgeist.

Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum in “Fly Me To The Moon.” (Image credit: Columbia Pictures)

Had there been some fatal Apollo 11 mission mishap, there was however a contingency speech President Richard Nixon might have delivered to the nation titled, “In Event of Moon Disaster.” This somber address would have been read had Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin been stranded on the lunar surface due to the lunar module’s ascent stage not propelling them back into orbit. Luckily that never happened and the entire Apollo 11 crew splashed down safely July 24, 1969.

“Fly Me To The Moon” might draw upon silly conjecture that the moon landings were faked or that a misguided backup plan was discussed behind closed doors, but however far-fetched it seems to disbelievers, NASA did actually place 12 men on the moon from 1969-1972, proving that the weight of truth still reigns supreme.

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Jeff Spry is an award-winning screenwriter and veteran freelance journalist covering TV, movies, video games, books, and comics. His work has appeared at SYFY Wire, Inverse, Collider, Bleeding Cool and elsewhere. Jeff lives in beautiful Bend, Oregon amid the ponderosa pines, classic muscle cars, a crypt of collector horror comics, and two loyal English Setters.

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