I’ve heard some pretty far out theories about the faking of the moon landing over the years, along with JFK, 9/11 and every other major news event of the last century, but this one stands out above all else, for obvious reasons.
Discovery recently devoted an article to discussing how one man, Jay Weidner, believes that Stanley Kubrick was hired by the U.S. government to fake the moon landing, and secret clues in The Shining tell us how he did it. The clues? Check out the highlights below:
Room 237: In King’s novel, the haunted room is numbered 217. In the movie, it’s 237. Why? “Because the average distance from the Earth to the Moon is 237,000 miles.” It’s actually 238,857 miles, but close enough, right? Weidner proposes that the haunted room represents the filming of the faked moon landing itself. “It’s just like pictures in a book, Danny. It isn’t real.”
The Bears: The film features a large number of stuffed bears and, in one disturbing scene, Danny witnesses a man cavorting in a hotel room with a stranger in a horrifying bear suit. (Sheer nightmare juice!) Follow the conspiracy argument and all these bears, naturally, represent the looming Soviet threat.
The Typewriter: In one scene, the film reveals that Jack has been typing “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over again. In one of Weidner’s more, um, far-fetched moments, he proposes that “all” should actually be read “A11” for Apollo 11.
The Dead Guy: In King’s novel, Danny sends a psychic distress signal to the hotel’s elderly black chef Dick Haloran — and Haloran lives to escape the Overlook with the child and his mother. In the movie, however, the Overlook uses Jack to kill Haloran pretty much the second he arrives on the scene to save everyone. The reason for this alteration? Weidner insists that Kubrick wanted to tell the world that he had naively tried to tip someone off about his role in the moon landing hoax — and his doing so resulted in their murder. Worried for his own life and that of his wife, Kubrick had to reveal the secret both widely and clandestinely to protect himself.
Check out the full article over at Discovery and Weidner’s conspiracy web page here. Out of every conspiracy theory I’ve heard, and I think this is the one I’m most likely to believe. Not because it’s remotely plausible, but because it’s awesome, and I WISH history was actually this f*cked up.