Since the idea of a moon landing was too fantastic to accept for some people who either could not believe it was possible or could not cope with its implications, they instead tried to prove that it never happened―that it had all been faked. 

There are precisely 143 minutes of video footage from the Apollo moon landing. According to NASA, that footage was captured by a host of state-of-the-art camera equipment that recorded every aspect of this historic event.

The belief that it was a fraud started before even the moon landing itself had occurred. As soon as the first capsules were launched, some asserted that the images were fake. Why would the U.S. government go to all this trouble? John F. Kennedy had vowed to place an American on the moon by the end of the decade, and the stakes involved with the Space Race between us and the Soviets held far-reaching implications for national pride and defense. 

There was a lot of motivation for the U.S. to land first on the moon. Even if that weren’t possible, making it appear like we had would still profoundly affect the world’s perceptions of our superpower status. But if this is what happened, how did it happen? 

The Moon Landing Never Happened

The conspiracy theory started with one man, William Kaysing, who suggested many of the mainstays of the moon-landing conspiracy theories in his book We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. 

These include the waving flag on the moon, the inconsistent shadows in pictures even though there is only one source of light there (the sun), the lack of a blast zone where the Apollo lander came down onto the moon’s surface, seeming special-effects props such as fake rocks and wires used to suggest weightlessness, the lack of stars in the images and the most important part―who filmed Neil Armstrong’s first steps onto the moon? 

Kaysing suggested that the astronauts, just before the rockets left Earth, were taken to a soundstage in Nevada, where special effects were combined with expert moviemaking to produce the footage of the United States “greatest accomplishment.” Who in 1969 could have staged such a believable moon landing? Director Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey had wowed audiences just the year before the Apollo landing. 

Through its realistic portrayal of outer space settings and the moon. Why couldn’t NASA’s “faked” moon landing footage look just as authentic? A skilled director like Kubrick had already done something similar for the cinema. This idea was so compelling that some conspiracy theorists wondered if the government had actually hired Kubrick himself.

Stanley Kubrick Directs “The Moon Landing”

Many conspiracy theorists believe this happened, and the proof came years later when Kubrick adapted Stephen King’s The Shining to the silver screen.

If this conspiracy is true, then this film also could be a confessional for Kubrick. Jack Torrance, the father character in The Shining, is a writer who they hired to care for the declining Overlook Hotel through a harsh, long winter. If the Overlook Hotel represents America and the winter symbolizes the Cold War, then Torrance might function as an alter-ego for Kubrick, who, by helping to fake the moon landings, served as a caretaker for America’s reputation at this time in world history. 

Enter The Shining

There is more fodder for this conspiracy in the details of The Shining. Jack writes over and over again, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” However, a few entries start with A11―as in Apollo 11. Danny, Jack’s psychic son, encounters the ghosts of dead twin girls in the hallway of the hotel.

Danny also wears an Apollo 11 sweater in the movie. As Danny stands up in one scene, he seems to launch himself toward Room 237, which happens to be the distance from Earth to the moon in thousands of miles. King had originally written the room number as 217. Why else would Kubrick change it? 

There’s no shortage of Reddit threads on this subject, and countless documentaries have been made about it. One thing is certain: the more we learn about our government and declassified space projects over the past few years, the more we understand how much they’ve kept us in the dark.

If the moon landing was faked, and such extreme measures were taken to cover their tracks, What else could they not be telling us?

For even more Moon Mysteries, READ THIS ARTICLE: Strange Moon Stories