Bart Sibrel

Bart Winfield Sibrel (born 1964 or 1965) is an American conspiracy theorist who has written, produced, and directed films arguing that the Apollo Moon landings between 1969 and 1972 were staged by NASA under the control of the CIA. He has created four independent films promoting the ideas, with the first having been the film A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon (2001).

In his works, Sibrel films himself asking various Apollo astronauts to put their hand on the Bible and swear that they walked on the Moon. In the case of the Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, whom Sibrel arranged to meet on a false pretense, outside the Luxe Hotel in Beverly Hills, the interaction resulted in Aldrin punching Sibrel, which brought him significant publicity. However, no criminal charges were filed against Aldrin.

Background

Sibrel has been a director of TV commercials and is sometimes identified as a maker of "documentaries" with respect to his self-released Moon landing denial films, though other sources point out the personal distribution, limited release, and style and content call into question placing Sibrel's work in this genre of filmmaking (e.g., with the St. Petersburg Times and The New York Times placing the word documentary in quotation marks in some of their reports). This concern relates in part to Sibrel's record of misrepresenting his identity to the subjects he attempts to interview, notably repeated attempts involving former astronauts including Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Alan Bean, Eugene Cernan, and Edgar Mitchell (where Sibrel posed as filmmaker associated with the History Channel).

As of 2002, Sibrel was operating a video production company in Nashville, Tennessee, and had "made a career out of perpetuating the notion that NASA's Apollo moon missions were hoaxes."

Sibrel's single most notable work is a 47-minute video work likewise calling into question the historicity of the Apollo Moon missions; entitled A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, Sibrel describes the Apollo program as a "Cold War CIA and Nixon administration deception." Amanda Hess, writing for The New York Times, alludes to the work as a pseudo-documentary, and describes the work in this way: "It mashed up moon footage with ominous shots from the Soviet Union and Vietnam, was narrated by a severe British woman and was sold on a [personal] website called MoonMovie.com." Sibrel confronted several Apollo astronauts in the preparation of his videos, all of whom responded indifferently or negatively when they realized that they were being challenged on their achievement of landing and walking on the Moon. The Bart Sibrel YouTube channel was later demonetized in 2019.

Moon landing denial

In a July 2019 HBO interview, Sibrel stated the following main reasons that he believed the Apollo missions were a fake:

Apollo's achievement with its 50-year-old technology cannot be reproduced in 2019 by any nation in the world, including the United States (only now is modern technology capable of faking the Moon landings).