Wake up, folks. The Moon is fake.

The Moon, it’s said, is an anomaly with so many freakish coincidences surrounding its existence that it must be a big, fat fake…

Even to the world’s best scientific minds, the Moon is a mystery of gargantuan proportions. Nobody knows how it was formed, and the most popular hypothesis—that a planet-sized rock called Theia smashed into Earth, ejecting a lump of rock into space that later became the Moon—has recently been thrown into doubt.

Even Irwin Shapiro, an astrophysicist and former director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said:

“The Moon is bigger than it should be, apparently older than it should be and much lighter in mass than it should be. It occupies an unlikely orbit and is so extraordinary that all existing explanations for its presence are fraught with difficulties and none of them could be considered remotely watertight.”

There’s no escaping the fact that the Moon is damned odd. Here are some examples of its weirdness:

• It’s too big. The Moon is bloody huge compared to all the other moons in the Solar System. Author and professor of biochemistry Isaac Asimov argues that the Moon ought to be tiny, only about 30 miles in diameter, yet it’s actually 2,160 miles.
• The Moon is responsible for 80% of the Earth’s constant rotation. In relation to all the other planets and moons in our Solar System, the value’s less than 1%.
• Every planet and moon in the Solar System has different, unique isotopic ratios, and yet the Moon’s are the same as Earth’s. You might think that the ‘giant impact’ hypothesis or ‘whack theory’ explains this—because the Moon is a bit of Earth that broke off. But, in laymen’s terms, whack theory says that the impact would’ve caused the Earth and Theia to melt. The molten debris that eventually became the Moon would’ve mixed with Theia and re-formed in a completely different way to the Earth. This should’ve resulted in different isotopic ratios, but didn’t. Because, well, the Moon’s weird.
• The mother of all coincidences is the very nature of a total eclipse. The Moon is 400 times smaller than the Sun and 400 times closer to the Earth, which is why it completely obscures the Sun during an eclipse. Its size and orbit are just right. What are the chances?

Isaac Asimov says:

“We cannot help but come to the conclusion that the Moon by rights ought not to be there. The fact that it is, is one of the strokes of luck almost too good to accept.”

These oddities have led some to decide that the Moon is in fact an artificial satellite put  in Earth’s orbit by aliens. Michael Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov of the Soviet Academy of Sciences were among the first to suggest this in their 1970 essay Is the Moon the Creation of Intelligence? They argued that the larger craters on the Moon have flat bottoms because meteors slammed into the surface but hit an armoured hull underneath.

And conspiracy theory extraordinaire David Icke believes that the Moon is an inter-dimensional spaceship controlled by our reptilian alien rulers (see my previous blog for more on these reptilians). It’s being used to broadcast the ‘Moon Matrix’, i.e. the world as we perceive it, which Icke believes is a virtual reality construct.

And here’s my favourite. Author Christopher Knight, who wrote the 2005 book Who Built The Moon?, believes that the Moon is an artificial construction probably built by humans. He says that it was created to make life on Earth possible, and that the most likely builders were humans from the future who travelled back in time.

Thing is, as fun as all these wacky theories are, there isn’t a shred of evidence beyond the circumstantial and the coincidental. Yes, the Moon’s weird. Yes, there’s lots about the Moon that science can’t satisfactorily explain.

But what’s the human tendency when we can’t properly explain something? Somebody did it. Someone must’ve planned it, thought it out, designed it. Aliens. God. Someone. Intelligent life must be responsible. It can’t just have happened by chance.

But why? Why can’t it?

To say that aliens or humans from the future created the Moon is a super-easy answer to some tough questions about our mysterious satellite. It’s no different than saying “God did it” when wrestling with questions about the nature and origin of the universe. The same arguments I make about the laziness of religion can be levelled at all these purported ‘Moon truthers’.

Sometimes we need to accept—there isn’t always an answer. Yes, we must keep looking for them. But let’s stop jumping to weird-arse conclusions with zero evidence before we have them.

Now please excuse me. I need to go pray to the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Next week: has the riddle of the Sea People been solved?