from the Earth to the Moon, an exploration of conspiratorial spheres

FRANCE 5 – SUNDAY JUNE 16 AT 9 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY

“Fucking liar.” Get out, you bastard! » Charismatic and popular, Thomas Pesquet is the most followed astronaut in the world on social networks, with 5 million subscribers. But for some time now, the admiring messages from his fans have been mixed with insults.

In front of the camera, Thomas Pesquet evokes for the first time in “La Fabrique du lie” these comments from Internet users who accuse him of broadcasting false images of space. According to them, in fact, space does not exist and man has never walked on the Moon. Faced with this worsening conspiracy theory, the film attempts to understand its causes.

The long historical part is the most interesting. With the help of multiple archives, she returns to the Apollo-11 mission, in the tense geopolitical context of the Cold War. On the night of July 20 to 21, 1969, some 600 million people saw Neil Armstrong set foot on lunar soil on television.

A certain echo

The Russian daily Pravda then relays the information without calling into question the feat. It was not until 1976 that a former Navy employee, Bill Kaysing, published We Never Went to The Moon (“we have never been to the Moon”, untranslated).

While the United States is plagued by doubts, between the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, this theory of Moon Hoax (“Moon hoax”) has a certain resonance. At least that is the explanation provided by the speakers, including astrophysicists Eric Lagadec and Christophe Galfard – fantastic popularizer of science, through his numerous books, including his captivating children’s trilogy The Prince of Clouds (Youth Pocket, 2015).

These conspiracy theories will subsequently experience various revivals of interest, such that at the end of the 2010s, one in ten French people (according to the IFOP), one in six Britons (YouGov) and one in two Russians ( Russian Center for the Study of Opinion) believe that humans have never set foot on the Moon…

“Disenchantment of the world”

In the same way, the film then focuses on flatists – those who believe that the Earth is flat -, in particular giving voice to one of them, the influencer Mark Sargent, then on extraterrestrial beliefs. A second part that is much less convincing, as the ridiculousness sometimes prevails.

Rudy Reichstadt, founder of the site Conspiracy Watch, the Observatory of Conspiracyism, however sees a root cause, which appeared in the 20th^e century in reaction to the bankruptcy of the great collective, religious and secular narratives. Faced with this “disenchantment of the world”, theorized by the sociologist Max Weber, “in a certain way, this radical conspiracy re-enchants the world by bringing the extraordinary and the fantastic”.