Category File
Space Conspiracies
2 documented theories filed under this subject.
- The Artemis II Moon Hoax TheoryWithin days of NASA's Artemis II lunar flyby in April 2026 — the first crewed Moon mission in more than fifty years — claims spread across social media that the flight had been staged with green screens or generated by AI. A viral "leaked" photograph, a text glitch on the mission mascot, and reports of a mysterious object on the lunar surface became the theory's core exhibits. Digital-forensics experts and NASA offered explanations for each, while the claims continued circulating under hashtags like #fakespace and #fakeNASA. The episode culminated in a conspiracy theorist confronting the crew in person on Capitol Hill.
- Solar Warden: The Secret Space FleetSolar Warden is the name attached to an alleged secret US Navy space fleet, a claim rooted in Gary McKinnon's 2001-2002 intrusions into 97 US military and NASA computers. McKinnon said he saw a spreadsheet of "non-terrestrial officers," logs of fleet-to-fleet transfers, and a satellite image of a large cigar-shaped craft, though he captured no screenshots. US prosecutors called his hacking the biggest military computer hack of all time and pursued extradition for a decade, until the UK blocked it in 2012 on human-rights grounds. The underlying claims have never been corroborated, acknowledged, or tested in any court.
- Soviet Lunik HoaxThis theory claimed that the Soviet Union’s 1959 lunar-impact success with Luna 2, often called Lunik 2 in Western reporting, was not a real space achievement but a staged film produced in a Soviet studio, sometimes specifically said to be in Siberia. The theory developed in the atmosphere of Cold War secrecy, propaganda, and technological rivalry, where Soviet claims were often difficult for Western audiences to independently verify in real time. It persisted because the mission was politically dramatic, visually limited by contemporary standards, and quickly absorbed into broader suspicions that early space triumphs could be manufactured for prestige.
- The Hitler and the Moon BaseThis theory claimed that the V-2 was never just a vengeance weapon but the visible part of a far more ambitious Nazi space program aimed at lunar travel and, in its most extreme versions, a Moon base. The theory took hold because the V-2 was indeed a revolutionary rocket and the first human-made object to reach space by later definitions, while Wernher von Braun later became one of the best-known advocates of Moon travel in the United States. These genuine links between Nazi rocketry and later spaceflight gave the theory an unusually strong historical scaffold even though the wartime V-2 program itself was built as a military missile, not as a practical lunar transport system.