Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy weighed in Friday on reality star Kim Kardashian’s apparent belief in the theory that the 1969 moon landing was faked.
“Yes, @KimKardashian, we’ve been to the Moon before… 6 times!” Duffy wrote on X, referring to NASA’s six successful manned missions between 1969 and 1972, as part of the Apollo program.
Duffy, who also serves as secretary of the Department of Transportation, noted that the Trump administration plans to send astronauts back to the lunar surface.
“And even better @NASAArtemis is going back under the leaderships of @POTUS,” he added. “We won the last space race and we will win this one, too.”
“NASA’s Artemis II mission, tentatively slated for April 2026, will carry four astronauts on a 10-day lunar fly-by, marking the first time humans have ventured beyond Earth’s orbit since the Apollo program,” the New York Post reported.
Duffy’s X post included a clip of Kardashian’s contention from Thursday’s episode of her Hulu show, where the reality star discussed the conspiracy theory with actress Sarah Paulson.
“So I think it didn’t happen,” Kardashian told Paulson, after saying she’d been watching interviews of the second man ever to walk on the moon, Buzz Aldrin.
“Conspiracy” theorists say Aldrin admitted the landing “didn’t happen” during a Q&A at Oxford University ten years ago. Breitbart News posted the video of that event week.
Kardashian said, “This girl says, ‘What was the scariest moment?’ And (Aldrin) goes, ‘There was no scary moment, cause it didn’t happen. It could’ve been scary, but it wasn’t, cause it didn’t happen.’”
While Aldrin’s answer “It didn’t happen” could also be interpreted as saying a “scary moment” didn’t happen, conspiracy theorists contend he was talking about the mission itself.
Aldrin, now 95, infamously punched a documentary filmmaker in the face in 2002 outside a Beverly Hills hotel after the man argued the space missions were faked and challenged the retired astronaut to swear on a Bible that they were real.
The belief that the 1969 moon landing was faked is one of the earliest and most persistent “conspiracy theories” of the past 50 years. With the advent of the internet, it has only become more ubiquitous.
Theorists analyze everything from the American flag they say shouldn’t be waving in a windless moon environment to extensive analysis of the shadows and purported “studio lighting” in mission photographs.
Chief among the theories is that NASA hired iconic filmmaker Stanley Kubrick to fake the landing on a sound stage.
That theory even made its way into a compelling award-winning documentary in 2012 called Room 237. It explores the messages people believe are hidden in Kubrick’s horror film The Shining. The documentary presents the idea that the Shining contains hints that the iconic director was confessing to faking the landing.
Examples include a scene where the boy Danny is playing on a carpet that has the pattern of the Apollo 11 launch pad. When he stands up, a rocket with the lettering Apollo 11 is on his jumper as he walks slowly towards room 237 in the Overlook Hotel portrayed in the film. Conspiracy theorists point out that the distance from the earth to the moon is 237,000 miles.
The world’s best film directors – and Kubrick is no doubt one of them — are known for not letting anything appear on the screen that doesn’t have meaning or advance the story’s theme.
However, since the Shining was made in 1980 — more than ten years after the moon landing, and when the theories about the Apollo mission were already underway — Kubrick could also have been trolling theorists as his own inside joke by including the subliminal images.
The director was notoriously anti-Hollywood and known for thematic takedowns of institutions and social conventions in films such Dr. Strangelove and Barry Lyndon.
Like many “conspiracy” theories, the one claiming a fake moon landing appears aimed at diminishing America’s stature and manipulating people into thinking its most celebrated accomplishments aren’t real.
Social scientists who study “conspiracy theories” say some are seen as PSYOPS, or psychological operations, hatched by foreign government intelligence services to sow mistrust and confusion in a country’s populace.
In 1969, on Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins became the first humans on the moon. The flight was a defining moment in the space race between America and the Soviet Union.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel, who is also credited filmmaker, is the best-selling author of Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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