Stanley Kubrick’s daughter debunks moon landing conspiracy theory (or did she?!?!)

The old internet chestnut that suggests legendary director Stanley Kubrick helped the U.S. government fake the Apollo 11 moon landing is one of those pop culture conspiracy theories that’s damnedly hard to shake. For one thing, it’s fun: who doesn’t want to picture the bearded genius stalking across a faux-moonscape, adjusting the lighting to capture that perfect shot of the American flag hanging loose in the supposed Apollo 11 landing site? It even makes a certain kind of cock-eyed sense—if you were planning a hoax this elaborate, wouldn’t you want the greatest technical director of his generation on your side, making things go smooth?

The theory has cropped up in a number of places since it first started making the rounds on the internet, roughly 20 years ago. Room 237 suggests, as one of its possible readings of The Shining, that the horror film was Kubrick’s way of working out his lunar guilt. The recent, forgettable comedy Moonwalkers, meanwhile, posited that the moon landing wasn’t faked by Kubrick, but by people pretending to be Kubrick, to add one more twist to the rabbit hole we all find ourselves falling down.