"Apollo 18": The Moon Hoax Stood on its Head

I'm sure you're all familiar with claims of a "moon hoax:"  that we never went to the moon,  the Apollo program was a hoax, filmed on a movie lot, etc., etc. This has all been very ably refuted by many fine researchers - Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy, the Mythbusters, James Oberg, etc, and I won't go into the details of this nonsense. Suffice it to say that even Richard Hoagland, the promoter of the "Face on Mars" who believes every whacked-out space conspiracy you can imagine, agrees that the Apollo astronauts did indeed go to the moon.  If you want to know more about this stuff, start here: http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html  . 

But who says there's nothing new under the sun? Now a movie called Apollo 18 suggests a new Moon Hoax, but the opposite of previous ones: not only did we go to the Moon, but we went more times than we admitted to - because we found aliens there.

The last Apollo mission was Apollo 17, launched on Dec. 7, 1972. Several more missions had been scheduled, but were canceled due to cost concerns. After Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt blasted off the surface of the moon on Dec. 15, 1972, no human has set foot on the lunar surface, or even entered lunar orbit.

The premise of this movie - admittedly science fiction, but certain to be taken as fact by many - is that there was a "secret" moon mission after Apollo 17, which encountered aliens, and (as seen in the movie trailer), even brought back one to earth, presumably dead. I guess NASA would have to have already known that aliens were there, in order to run the Apollo 18 mission secretly. Maybe Apollo 17 is supposed to have found the alien evidence, but NASA didn't tell us, and went back in secret.

The movie trailer for Apollo 18 has to be one of the lamest things I've seen in a long while. It seems to show an astronaut blasting off from the Moon in a lunar lander, with what appears to be a dead humanoid aboard. The creature's head looks vaguely Mongolian, with a mustache, but it has female breasts. I'll refrain from making the obvious crude sexual comments here, although surely many won't. Indeed, they've already started on YouTube ("space boobs!!!").

The film is supposed to represent "found footage", as in the Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, etc. I don't know if the film attempts to explain how NASA could possibly launch an additional Apollo mission in secret. How did nobody notice the massive Saturn V launch from Cape Canaveral? How did thousands of people worldwide perform their necessary support tasks (which they had done several times before, under great media scrutiny), and the news not leak out?

Well, it's entertainment even if it's lame entertainment. But after the movie premieres on April 22, let's see how many conspiracy theorists insist that the story is actually true.