Remember when Stanley Kubrick ‘faked the moon landings’?

Everyone loves a good conspiracy theory – and the claim that the US government faked the 1969 moon landings is a particularly persistent one. (It’s also absolutely ridiculous when looked at in any detail – but that’s a different article/ different section of the internet altogether.)

This week, Oxford physicist Dr David Grimes announced a formula for calculating just how unlikely it is that such a big secret could stay hidden for so long. According to his workings (which assume that everyone employed at NASA was in on the secret), the fake-moon cat would have been out of the bag within four years.

Irrespective of this, last year some very silly grist was added to the conspiracy mill after a video emerged in which 2001: A Space Odyssey director Stanley Kubrick apparently “confesses” to faking the moon landings video for Nasa and the US government (a story already popular among some moon landing conspiracy theorists).

What Kubrick did with the man from Nasa

Purportedly shot ahead of the director’s death in 1999, and suppressed for 15 years, the online “documentary” was made and released by a man named T Patrick Murray.

In it, Murray claims that he had been trying to interview Kubrick for years – only to be astounded by the director’s deathbed revelation.

A trailer for the film appeared on YouTube in August 2015, but it wasn’t until later in the year, when more footage arrived, that “Shooting Stanley Kubrick” really started attracting attention.

In the interview footage, a bearded, bespectacled “Kubrick” outlines how he was approached by the US government and asked to make the film.

“I perpetrated a huge fraud on the American public, which I am now about to detail, involving the United States government and NASA, that the moon landings were faked, that the moon landings ALL were faked , and that I was the person who filmed it,” he says.

He then goes on to state that he perpetrated the hoax after being “bribed”, and that he considers the moon landings footage his “masterpiece”.

He also explains that he was asked to make the hoax video after officials noticed his impressive visual effects work in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“2001 was very ambitious, but that’s not to say that faking the moon landing was not ambitious,” he says. “But I learned things from making 2001, and that’s why I got this gig in the first place.”

How did people know it was fake?

Perhaps the biggest giveaway is the fact that man in the video quite clearly isn’t Kubrick. While there is a superficial resemblance, a comparison between a video of Kubrick from 1997 and the man in the hoax film, made by the website Snopes, makes it obvious that they are two different people.

The Snopes article also points out that some unedited video from the interview, released on YouTube, actually shows Murray addressing the actor as “Tom”, and instructing him on how to perform certain scenes (skip to 14 minutes in).

A date shown on a title card at the beginning of the film also raises some red flags; while the interview is said to have taken place in May 1999, Kubrick in fact died in the March of that year.

And the late director’s widow has stated, through a spokesperson, that the film is definitely a hoax.

“The interview is a lie, Stanley Kubrick has never been interviewed by T Patrick Murray the whole story is made up, fraudulent and untrue,” she told the website Gawker.

The video below, which appeared on YouTube two days ago.

Who is T Patrick Murray? 

T Patrick Murray, the filmmaker behind the fake Kubrick interview, is a bit of a mystery.

His IMDB page shows that he was responsible for making a TV documentary titled The Last Game back in 2002, which achieved some limited acclaim. Since then, he’s made a few other documentaries – all of them pretty obscure.

A YouTube channel apparently belonging to Murray contains several rather disjointed pieces of footage, some of which appear to be linked to other planned documentaries, as well as some music videos.

So far, Murray has not publicly commented on his documentary, and on whether it was intended as a deliberate hoax or as more of a mockumentary/joke.

*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from Telegraph.co.uk can be found here ***