NASA’s Apollo 11 director’s cut

Ooops! said Catherine Lyons in the Los Angeles Times. Forty years after Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the moon, NASA has concluded that it accidentally “taped over” its high-quality footage of their historic moonwalk. “But wait! There’s hope.” NASA has hired Lowry Digital—the outfit that restored such Hollywood films as Star Wars—to spruce up grainy, archived TV footage. (watch restored moonwalk video)

The same company that refurbished Star Wars? said Robert Mackey in The New York Times. “Conspiracy theorists, start your engines.” A steady 6 percent of Americans say they think the moon landing was faked on a Hollywood soundstage—surely, hiring “a Hollywood production company to clean up that footage will do little to reassure” them.

“I don’t doubt that the Apollo missions went to the moon,” but come on! said Fred Burks in Examiner.com. NASA expects us to believe that it casually misplaced never-seen footage of “one of the most important landmark events in human history,” then taped over it to save money, and now is paying Hollywood to step in? What don’t they want us to see? UFOs?

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It’s crazy that a “sizable number of Americans still scream ‘hoax’ when they hear about men on the moon,” said Kurt Soller in Newsweek. Dedicated space-travel enthusiasts have debunked the “Moon Hoax” arguments point by point. But ever since Fox aired a “straight-faced” program on the "alleged hoax" in 2001, the idea that NASA faked a moonwalk has “entered the ranks of ludicrous things people believe after watching television (see also: Nostradamus prophecies, Mayan calendar).”