Unfortunately, the folks at NASA have a lot of time on their hands now that America has officially looked up at the glorious final frontier, shrugged their shoulders, and said “Meh.” So, they’ve been using some of their time to consult on movies. However, as the Los Angeles Times discovered, they chose not to participate in Apollo 18, a new movie that attempts to persuade audiences that a) NASA launched a secret mission in the middle of the Cold War, b) no one noticed, c) moon aliens attacked it, and d) this was all taped and those tapes have now been turned into a movie. In fact, NASA liaison Bert Ulrich helpfully takes time in the interview to explain that, no, none of that happened. Thank God! I was really worried about that one.

Advertising

From the Los Angeles Times:

“But after initially touting ‘Apollo 18′ as one of its upcoming fiction film collaborations, NASA — which, for the record, says the last manned mission to the moon was Apollo 17 in 1972 — has begun to back away from the

movie.’Apollo 18 is not a documentary,’ said Bert Ulrich, NASA’s liaison for multimedia, film and television collaborations. ‘The film is a work of fiction, and we always knew that. We were minimally involved with this picture. We never even saw a rough cut. The idea of portraying the Apollo 18 mission as authentic is simply a marketing ploy. Perhaps a bit of a ‘Blair Witch Project’ strategy to generate hype.'”

Ok, I’m going to digress a bit here. We can make fun of NASA for this quote all we want, but let me tell you about when I went to see the first Paranormal Activity. After the movie, I heard a bit of the conversation of the guy who was sitting behind us. He was eagerly telling the girl he was with, “No, that shit was real! You didn’t see any credits, did you?!”

This guy had just seen a movie released by a major motion picture company in which a demon haunts and tries to murder a couple and the simple fact that the studio had foregone a traditional credit sequence was enough to persuade him it was real. These are the same people who think that, were human beings to find undeniable proof that the afterlife exists, the footage would show up on a basic cable reality series rather than, y’know, the news. Hell, there are probably people out there who

still hold candlelight vigils to mourn the victims of the Cloverfield monster.

So, yeah, we may think making astatement that, no, The Weinstein Company doesn’t have actual footage of moon aliens is stupid but, you know what? People are stupid.

(h/t The A.V. Club)

Tags: NASA