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.
Which is all well and good, if you’re not someone who has to spend every day living with the great director’s legacy. That’s the case for his daughter, Vivian Kubrick, who released a statement this week, addressing and denouncing the rumor that her father helped propagate the supposed international hoax.
That seems pretty definitive, so we can probably consider the matter closed. Except… Wait a second! That last phrase, “A GROTESQUE LIE”—that’s an anagram for “A LIEGE TORQUES.” As in, a spinning king! As in, the Earth itself, around which the moon revolves! As in, that’s probably where the moon landing was faked! Come on everybody, pile on in to our dream-powered Truth Mobile! The game is afoot!
