An urgent old news flash

I open this morning with a post about a dated Apollo 18 film, released 2 Sept. 2011. I post this because the movie was really about the early-days gullibility of tens of millions who fell and still fall for Trump's abusively long contemporary shtick, which of course includes government conspiracies.

"The film, purporting to be produced from footage kept secret by NASA and leaked to the media, chronicles a NASA mission to the moon that went awry when astronauts encountered signs of alien life there." 

Fascinating! There was just one little problem with the film's subject. There was no Apollo 18 mission; it plus 19 and 20 were canceled for budget reasons. Yet the producer was hawking actual footage of a Moon trip that never took flight, and calling it a "documentary." 

Think Trump's somber "birtherism," which he revived in the film's year of 2011. Stated its poster: "There's a reason we've never gone back to the moon" — now the ideological home of said birthers and such. From Space.com, with "apologies to anyone whose bubble will burst."

Decades-old found footage from NASA's abandoned Apollo 18 mission, where two American astronauts were sent on a secret expedition, reveals the reason the U.S. has never returned to the moon," reads the movie's official tagline....

For its part, NASA said it trusts most members of the public to recognize the movie for what it is.

[Perhaps "most,' but immeasurable millions are convinced that JFK's assassination was ... take your pick of conspiracies, that there's a New World Order (likely headed by George Soros), that Roswell was real, and that Coca-Cola deliberately created the godawful New Coke (that's true) only to increase demand for the once-heavenly kind. In 2005, the company's president told Time magazine, "The truth is, we're not that dumb, and we're not that smart."]

NASA provided the producers with public domain footage from the actual moon missions and even allowed them to use its official "meatball" logo on the actors' spacesuits.... NASA officials didn't realize the moviemakers planned to portray the story as a real-life exposé.

I gather NASA's geniuses failed to notice vestigial pieces of tin foil — the motherlode, hurriedly removed outside its doors — on the producers' heads? 

Comments

[Anne J]

Some people make a deliberate choice to believe things that aren't true.