2001: A Space Odyssey (film) - Mock Hoaxes and Conspiracy Theory

Mock Hoaxes and Conspiracy Theory

In 2002, the French film maker William Karel (after initially planning a straight documentary on Stanley Kubrick) directed a hoax mockumentary about Kubrick and the NASA moonlanding titled Dark Side of the Moon. He had the cooperation of Kubrick's surviving family and some NASA personnel (all of whom appear using scripted lines) and using recycled footage of members of the Nixon administration taken out of context. The film purported to demonstrate that the NASA moon landings had been faked and that the moonlanding footage had been directed by Stanley Kubrick during the production of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In discussing the film, director Karel said

Navigating carefully between lies and truth, the film mixes fact with pure invention. We will use every possible ingredient: 'hijacked' archive footage, false documents, real interviews which have been taken out of context or transformed through voice-over or dubbing, staged interviews by actors who reply from a script...
This is not an 'ordinary' documentary. Its intent is to inform and entertain the viewer, but also to shake him up, make him aware of the fact that television can get it wrong (intentionally or not). We want to achieve this aim by using a universally known event (the landing on the Moon) that is surrounded by question marks (which is a fact) and spin some tale around it, that sounds plausible but isn't a fact (although there are elements in it that are real!).

When the film was shown to a group of undergraduate sociology students taking a course on conspiracy theories, many of them mistakenly believed that this was an earnest and serious film. Furthermore, moon-landing hoax advocate Wayne Green cited the film as evidence for his views apparently believing the excerpts of interviews with Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, etc. (taken out of context in the film) were really talking about a moonlanding hoax. Nonetheless, the second half of the film contains several giveaways that the entire film is a hoax in jest, including a film producer named "Jack Torrance" (the name of Jack Nicholson's character in Kubrick's The Shining) an aging NASA astronaut named "David Bowman" (the astronaut in 2001) and increasing use of footage that does not match or support the narration. Australian broadcaster SBS television aired the film on April 1 as an April fools' joke, and again on November 17, 2008 as part of Kubrick week.

A 1995 article promoting a similar mock hoax about Kubrick faking the Apollo landing also deceived many readers (in the sense of their believing the author was a bona fide conspiracy theorist). The article was posted originally on the Usenet humor news group 'alt.humor.best-of-usenet', but later reproduced in other venues not devoted to humor. The original article (with correct attribution) can be read at "www.clavius.org", a website devoted to debunking moon landing hoax theories. Websites which have reproduced it as an earnest advocacy effort include the website of the flat earth society. Conspiracy theorist Clyde Lewis lifted several passages from the mock article verbatim (without attribution) in support of his moonlanding hoax theories. Lewis and the flat earth society seem to ignore closing passages of the article stating the final Apollo scenes were actually filmed in the Sea of Tranquillity (an area on the moon's surface) to which Kubrick did not go personally due to his chronic fear of flying, passages meant to give away that the article is a tongue-in-cheek mock hoax.

An entirely sincere documentary film making the same claim that Morel's "mockumentary" did in jest was released in 2011 by occultist and conspiracy theorist Jay Weidner entitled Kubrick's Odyssey: Secrets Hidden in the Films of Stanley Kubrick; Part One: Kubrick and Apollo. The film was self-released on DVD by Weidner's company "Sacred Mysteries". Weidner claims that Kubrick used the same front-projection sequences used in the Dawn of Man sequence and the lunar landing sequence in Space Odyssey to simulate the Apollo landing and the NASA footage of the astronauts on the surface of the moon. Weidner also claims Kubrick's film The Shining contains coded messages about Kubrick's involvement in faking the moon-landing. The science magazine Discovery reviewed an earlier article by Weidner upon which the film was based as "bunk" but "oddly compelling" and "strangely fascinating". This theory is again discussed in the 2012 documentary Room 237.

In actual front screen projection it is impossible to do wide camera pans and zooms of the kind that are frequently seen in Apollo moon footage, and are notably absent from the relatively static camera movement in the Dawn of Man sequence in Space Odyssey. The Dawn of Man sequence contains anomalies such as the glowing eyes of the cheetah which give away the existence of front-screen projection. Nothing comparable is seen in the visors of the astronauts in Apollo moon footage.