After years of insisting that the Apollo program successfully carried astronauts to the moon, NASA finally admitted today that the entire program was a hoax. "There have always been people that saw through the trickery," said NASA Administrator Frederick Gregory. "We tried to fake the photos and video footage as well as we could with the technology of the time, but people like Bart Sibrel and Bill Kaysing have long seen the inevitable mistakes, like the missing stars and the flag waving in the wind. Everyone knows there's no air on the moon, so it's pretty amazing we were able to pull this off as long as we did."

Faced with mounting pressure to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, but knowing there was no way to get an astronaut through the deadly radiation of the Van Allen belts without meters of lead shielding, NASA had no choice but to falsify the missions. The filming of the moon landings actually took place on Earth, in the highly secret Area 51 facility. Gregory said that the time had finally come to acknowledge the deceit and admit that NASA had never successfully landed on the moon. "We've covered this up long enough, and it's time to tell the truth to the American people," he said.

Since the Apollo project, NASA has maintained an extensive network of paid "debunkers" to discredit those who said that the lunar landings were faked. Dr. Philip Plait, known as the Bad Astronomer, acknowledged that he has been on the NASA payroll since 1993 to cast doubt on those who had realized the truth. "We knew that some people would figure it out," said Plait, "but as long as we could cast doubt on their arguments, most of the public would never believe that NASA had pulled off such an enormous hoax."

Another of NASA's paid debunkers, known only as "JayUtah", acknowledged that NASA had now given permission to tell the truth about the landings, but refused to give further comment. JayUtah has long been known for providingly lengthy and seemingly rational and irrefutable explanations disproving the hoax claims. We contacted several of the nonhoax-believers, who still refuse to accept that the moon landings were faked. "I just can't believe it," said one individual, who asked not to be identified. "Jay's always given such rock solid arguments, how could he have just been making it all up? And the BA [Bad Astronomer] on NASA's payroll? This has to be some kind of political stunt." The nonhoax-believers we spoke with were unable to adequately explain how they could ignore obvious problems with the photographic evidence, such as crosshairs appearing behind objects, showing that the photos had been retouched, and non-parallel shadows demonstrating that there was more than one light source on the set during filming.

Gregory also admitted that there has long been clear evidence of an advanced civilization on Mars, but that since news of this would cause too much chaos and public unrest, it had been been carefully supressed while NASA worked to gradually accustom the public to this idea through discoveries leading up to life with the various unmaned missions. He said that it was necessary to announce this now, because a manned mission to explore the ruins could be accomplished much earlier than expected by using a gravitational assist from Planet X, currently in an unstable orbit between Earth and the Sun. "We're expecting a pole shift any time now, and we need to move fast to recover the lost technology of the Martian civilization if we expect to survive it." When asked if NASA was still hiding any other secrets, Gregory refused to comment.