''A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon'' is a 2001 film written, produced and directed by

Nashville Nashville, often known as Music City, is the capital and List of municipalities in Tennessee, most populous city in the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is the county seat, seat of Davidson County, Tennessee, Davidson County in Middle Tennessee, locat ...

-based filmmaker

Bart Sibrel Bart Winfield Sibrel (born ) is an American conspiracy theorist who has written, produced, and directed films arguing that the Apollo program, Apollo Moon landings between 1969 and 1972 were Moon landing conspiracy theories, staged by NASA unde ...

. Sibrel is a proponent of the

conspiracy theory A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that asserts the existence of a conspiracy (generally by powerful sinister groups, often political in motivation), when other explanations are more probable.Additional sources: * ...

that the six Apollo Moon landing missions between 1969 and 1972 were elaborate hoaxes perpetrated by the

United States government The Federal Government of the United States of America (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the Federation#Federal governments, national government of the United States. The U.S. federal government is composed of three distinct ...

, including

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...

. The film is narrated by British stage actress Anne Tonelson.

Overview

Sibrel claims that the Moon landing was a hoax, making claims about supposed photographic anomalies; disasters such as the destruction of

Apollo 1 Apollo 1, initially designated AS-204, was planned to be the first crewed mission of the Apollo program, the American undertaking to land the first man on the Moon. It was planned to launch on February 21, 1967, as the first low Earth orbital ...

; technical difficulties experienced in the 1950s and 1960s; and the problems of traversing the

Van Allen radiation belt The Van Allen radiation belt is a zone of energetic charged particles, most of which originate from the solar wind, that are captured by and held around a planet by that planet's magnetosphere. Earth has two such belts, and sometimes others ma ...

s. Sibrel proposes that the most condemning evidence is a piece of footage that he claims was secret, and inadvertently sent to him by NASA; he alleges that the footage shows

Apollo 11 Apollo 11 was a spaceflight conducted from July 16 to 24, 1969, by the United States and launched by NASA. It marked the first time that humans Moon landing, landed on the Moon. Commander Neil Armstrong and Lunar Module pilot Buzz Aldrin l ...

astronauts attempting to create the illusion that they were from

Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to Planetary habitability, harbor life. This is enabled by Earth being an ocean world, the only one in the Solar System sustaining liquid surface water. Almost all ...

(or roughly halfway to the Moon) when, he claims, they were only in a

low Earth orbit A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an geocentric orbit, orbit around Earth with a orbital period, period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an orbital eccentricity, eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial object ...

. The film also asserts that NASA's early inexperience in rocket technology and inconsistencies in NASA's records could point to a possible hoax, and that the

Space Race The Space Race (, ) was a 20th-century competition between the Cold War rivals, the United States and the Soviet Union, to achieve superior spaceflight capability. It had its origins in the ballistic missile-based nuclear arms race between t ...

was actually a race to develop armaments with the huge budget allocated to the Apollo missions. The film's premise is that NASA perpetrated a fraud because of the perception that if the United States could land men on the Moon before the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

, it would be a major victory in the

Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...

, since the Soviets had been the first to achieve a successful space launch (''

Sputnik 1 Sputnik 1 (, , ''Satellite 1''), sometimes referred to as simply Sputnik, was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 as part of the Soviet space program ...

'' in 1957), the first crewed space flight (

Vostok 1 Vostok 1 (, ) was the first spaceflight of the Vostok programme and the first human spaceflight, human orbital spaceflight in history. The Vostok 3KA space capsule was launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome on 12 April 1961, with Soviet astronaut, c ...

in 1961), and the first

spacewalk Extravehicular activity (EVA) is any activity done by an astronaut in outer space outside a spacecraft. In the absence of a breathable atmosphere of Earth, Earthlike atmosphere, the astronaut is completely reliant on a space suit for environme ...

(

Voskhod 2 Voskhod 2 () was a Soviet crewed space mission in March 1965. The Vostok-based Voskhod 3KD spacecraft with two crew members on board, Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov, was equipped with an inflatable airlock. It established another milestone ...

in 1965).

Criticisms

Amanda Hess of ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'' characterized the film as a "quasi-investigation". She referred to the film as a documentary, in

scare quotes Scare quotes (also called shudder quotesPinker, Steven. ''The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century''. Penguin (2014) or sneer quotes) are quotation marks that writers place around a word or phrase to signal ...

, and to Sibrel as a "sincere kook", writing: " 'A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon''mashed up moon footage with ominous shots from the Soviet Union and Vietnam, was narrated by a severe British woman and was sold on a website called MoonMovie.com." Jim McDade, writing in ''

The Birmingham News ''The Birmingham News'' was the principal newspaper for Birmingham, Alabama, United States in the latter half of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st. The paper was owned by Advance Publications and was a daily newspaper from its ...

'', wrote that ''A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon'' is "full of falsehoods, innuendo, strident accusations, half-truths, flawed logic and premature conclusions." According to McDade, the "only thing new and weird" in the film is that the claim that video views of Earth were actually filmed through a small hole to give the impression that Apollo 11 was not in low Earth orbit. "Bart has misinterpreted things that are immediately obvious to anyone who has extensively read Apollo history and documentation or anyone who has ever been inside an

Apollo Command Module The Apollo command and service module (CSM) was one of two principal components of the United States Apollo (spacecraft), Apollo spacecraft, used for the Apollo program, which landed astronauts on the Moon between 1969 and 1972. The CSM functi ...

or accurate mockup", says McDade.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, A 2001 films American documentary films Films about Apollo 11 Moon landing conspiracy theories Conspiracist films 2000s English-language films 2000s American films English-language documentary films

Overview

Criticisms

See also

References

External links