A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon is a 2001 film written, produced and directed by Nashville-based filmmaker Bart Sibrel. Sibrel is a proponent that the six Apollo Moon landing missions between 1969 and 1972 were elaborate hoaxes perpetr…
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon is a 2001 film written, produced and directed by Nashville-based filmmaker Bart Sibrel. Sibrel is a proponent that the six Apollo Moon landing missions between 1969 and 1972 were elaborate hoaxes perpetrated by the United States government, including NASA. The film is narrated by British stage actress Anne Tonelson.
Sibrel's claims that the moon landing was a hoax making claims about photographic anomalies; disasters such as the destruction of Apollo 1; technical difficulties experienced in the 1950s and 1960s; and the problems of traversing the Van Allen radiation belts. 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 astronauts attempting to create the illusion that they were 130,000 miles (210,000 km) from Earth (or roughly halfway to the Moon) when, he claims, they were only in a low Earth orbit.
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 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, it would be a major victory in the Cold War, since the Soviets had been the first to achieve a successful space launch (Sputnik 1 in 1957), the first crewed space flight (Vostok 1 in 1961), and the first spacewalk (Voskhod 2 in 1965).
