On December 7, 1972, Apollo 17 was launched. It was the final manned trip to the moon and the last time man set foot on the lunar surface…or was it?
Officially, NASA had cancelled the remaining Apollo missions but according to the new movie ‘Apollo 18’, the Department of Defense contracted NASA to send two astronauts for one more covert moon mission. What they found there is the reason we have never gone back.
‘Apollo 18’ is from producer Timur Bekmembetov (‘Wanted’) and is filmed in the style of ‘Paranormal Activity’ and ‘The Blair Witch Project’. Apparently, the film is made up of “found footage” from the actual secret flight and shows what the astronauts encountered in this last mission that the government has been trying to keep classified. Last February, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Dimension Films head Bob Weinstein explains, “People intrinsically know there are secrets being held from us… Look at WikiLeaks. There are secrets that are really true to the world. It’s not bogus.” When asked if the movie was a work of fiction, he says, “We didn’t shoot anything, we found it. Found, baby!” Previous teasers have been released earlier in the year but yesterday, a new full trailer hit the internet.
In actuality, there really was an “Apollo 18” but it wasn’t officially called that. It was called the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project and was a joint mission between the US and Russia which entailed the docking of an American Apollo spacecraft with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft. The American portion of this project would sometimes be referred to as Apollo 18.
So, did something really happen to the astronauts on that flight? What could possibly have been recorded that affected the government so strongly that a mission was never sent back to the moon? Is this really found footage of what was seen? You can decide for yourself when ‘Apollo 18’ hits theaters on Friday, September 2. In the meantime here’s the lastest trailer. Let me know if you think this is fact or fiction.
