he Apollo moon landing never happened. Or, if it did, the TV images you saw were falsified, the images faked.

Got your attention? Good.

According to DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, the most important film of its kind since Oliver Stone's JFK - or since Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap, at any rate - images of Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon on July 20, 1969 were shown to the world through the lens of master film-maker Stanley Kubrick and were staged on the same Borehamwood, U.K., soundstage where Kubrick made his landmark film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Don't believe it? Consider the evidence. Still images taken of the American flag on the moon showed it waving this way and that, but, as Dark Side of the Moon points out, there is no wind on the moon.

The moon is affected by extreme temperature changes, which are exacerbated by its lack of atmosphere. The camera supposedly used to take the lunar stills, a Hasselblad 500, would not operate at temperature extremes that cause chemical changes in film emulsion. Mechanical parts expand and lenses loosen in extreme heat. Exposure meters fail and film shatters like glass in extreme cold.

X-rays from the sun would fog the film, and ultra-violet rays would distort the colors - yet the colours in the Moon landing pictures are perfect.

Gravity on the moon is one-sixth that of the Earth, which means that an astronaut who would weigh 140 kilograms in his space suit on the ground would weigh only about 30 kilos on the moon. And yet the depth of the astronauts' footprints in the sand on the moon suggest they weighed much more than that.

None of the photos taken on the Moon showed evidence of a flash. You would have seen a flash, experts in Dark Side of the Moon insist, because the astronaut taking the photograph would have been reflected in the visor of the other astronaut.

Remember now, as they say on CSI: people lie; the evidence doesn't.

Dark Side of the Moon was written and directed last year by 63-year-old historical documentary film-maker William Karel for France's Point du Jour Production and Arte France (the film's original, French title was Operation Lune). It uses documentary evidence, archival footage and extensive interviews with Kubrick's widow, Christiane Kubrick, astronaut Buzz Aldrin and former and present-day U.S. government officials and luminaries such as Henry Kissinger, Lawrence Eagleberger, Al Haig and Donald Rumsfeld, to lay bare the lie.

And an elaborate lie it was, too, judging from the evidence. (The official CBC press release refers to the film's subtle blend of facts, fiction and hypothesis as a navigation through fact and fiction and asks rhetorically whether "Neal Armstrong's [sic] famous walk on the moon" was another stanley Kubrick production. I can't tell if the misspelling of Neil Armstrong's name is meant to be ironic or incompetent.)

Dark Side of the Moon points out that, given the turmoil of the day - the Vietnam war, civil unrest, a newly elected president warily eyeing his prospects for a second term - the Nixon administration understood that it was more important that astronauts be seen to be walking on the moon than actually walk on the moon.

If the astronauts landed safely, but could not televise live images back to Earth because of some unforeseen technical glitch, then the entire expensive enterprise would have been a waste of time, from a public relations standpoint.

The Nixon administration approached Kubrick - an American ex-pat and avowed recluse, living in seclusion in a palatial estate somewhere in the suburbs of London - with a mind to stage the moon landing in advance, so that if worse came to worst, the Apollo program would still have pictures to show a doubting public.

The administration knew Kubrick would jump aboard, the film's makers suggest, because it was widely known that Dr. Strangelove, which Kubrick directed five years earlier, in 1964, was one of Nixon's favorite films.

The original idea was to have the CIA stage the event and film it themselves on the same sound stage where Kubrick recreated the lunar surface for 2001: A Space Odyssey. But when Kubrick - a notorious perfectionist, with a temper to match - saw how incompetent the CIA camera operators were, he demanded that he be allowed to film the scene himself.

In return, Dark Side of the Moon posits, Kubrick was allowed use of a special, one-of-a-kind Zeiss camera lens, originally designed for NASA's satellite program, to shoot his James Thackeray epic Barry Lyndon, which required a special heretofore unknown lens to depict images of life in 18th century Ireland using only available light. The film preserved the great man's vision for generations to come.

If this all sounds a bit hard to follow, trust me: Dark Side of the Moon makes it seem simple - as simple, anyway, as deciphering the lyrics to a Pink Floyd album. It should come as no surprise, in any event, to anyone who saw Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, to learn that the great man staged the moon landing for effect. Eyes Wide Shut, after all, could only have been directed by a space cadet.

But wait, there's more.

Armstrong's famous line - "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" - was scripted in advance, and mangled in the translation, into "one small step for man, one great leap...who wrote this crap?" Armstrong proved to be a temperamental star. While boarding the lunar capsule prior to liftoff, for example, he was overheard to ask about the in-flight movie, about whether he was in the smoking section or nonsmoking, about whether he was assigned a window seat in the back, about his requests for a kosher meal, and whether his car would be safe in the NASA parking lot.

It's the actual testimony from Kissinger, the late Vernon Walters (speaking in Russian, and dead, under suspicious circumstances, just hours after conducting his interview for the film), Rumsfeld ("I'm going to tell you a fascinating story"), Eagleberger, Haig and others - real people in real interviews, not actors playing a role - that brings Dark Side of the Moon to life. (A cynic would point out that their comments are edited out of context, but then a cynic would already have guessed that the Apollo moon landing was staged, so why bother?)

The decision, ultimately, was Nixon's.

"He was the president," Kissinger explains in the film, "and he deserves the credit for having had the courage to do it." Kissinger was awed by the sheer hubris of Nixon's actions.

"At no stage in my life could I have anticipated that this would happen," he goes on to say. "At no stage. Not even when I was made National Security Adviser. And I think it is a great symptom of the strength of America that this was even conceivable."

It was the right thing to do, Rumsfeld concurs, "because we had to do something to show that we're still the United States of America...We walked out of the room and President Nixon said, 'I've decided to do that, and I need you to do this job, we're going to do it.' It was just amazing."

Dark Side of the Moon is a mammoth undertaking. It seeks nothing less than to expose the incongruities between rhetoric and reality, by disclosing how the camera's lens can be manipulated to suit any ends, and it achieves its goal with, style and verve. It is a thoroughly entertaining and revealing flim, and well worth seeing.

Oh, and one other thing. According to the final credits, any resemblance to actual living persons is purely coincidental.

That's important to know. After all, the camera lies. It's not always easy to tell.

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON aired Sunday, November 16, on CBC Newsworld's Passionate Eye.