Steph Curry is one of basketball’s best, sinking bombs nightly from all over the court.
But the NBA star fired up a mental airball on Monday when he said he doesn’t think man ever landed on the moon.
The comments came when the Golden State Warriors guard appeared on the “Winging It” podcast with two basketball player hosts. At one point, for some reason, Curry asked the others if they thought the United States had ever put a man on the moon, The New York Times reports.
“We ever been to the moon?” he asked.
The others, in unison, agreed that the answer was no.
“They’re going to come get us,” Curry replied. “Sorry, I don’t want to start conspiracies.”
Annie Finberg, a digital content coordinator for the Atlanta Hawks and another host of the podcast, followed up, asking Curry, “You don’t think so?”
“Nuh uh,” he said.
Finberg then “expressed some skepticism, asking Curry to clarify, and he said he did not believe the United States had landed on the moon, leading to a short discussion of some of the more popular conspiracy theories, including one asserting that the film director Stanley Kubrick had staged the entire thing,” the Times writes.
The Kubrick conspiracy theory has been out there since the beginning. Under the theory, the U.S. realized before the July 16, 1969 launch of Apollo 11 that they’d never reach the moon, so NASA called in the famed film director of the 1968 hit “2001: A Space Odyssey” to fake it.
NASA has heard all the theories before and kept a sense of humor about the latest from Curry — they invited him to swing by their lab.
“We’d love for Mr. Curry to tour the lunar lab at our Johnson Space Center in Houston, perhaps the next time the Warriors are in town to play the Rockets,” said Allard Beutel, a NASA spokesman. “We have hundreds of pounds of moon rocks stored there, and the Apollo mission control. During his visit, he can see firsthand what we did 50 years ago, as well as what we’re doing now to go back to the moon in the coming years, but this time to stay.”
NASA also has a page on its website in which it debunks the conspiracy theory.
“There are answers to all the questions raised by the non-believers, but one of the strongest arguments (besides LRO’s evidence) is that all the Apollo missions were independently tracked by England and Russia (our allies and enemies), both of whom sent letters of congratulations after the Moon landings. In the midst of a heated space race, the Russians would have called our bluff if the landings had not actually happened,” NASA says, referring to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Curry’s just lucky he didn’t blurt out his theory when Buzz Aldrin was nearby. Aldrin was the second man to walk on the moon. In 2002, Aldrin was confronted by conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel, who said to the astronaut, “You’re the one who said you walked on the moon when you didn’t.”
Aldrin, 72 at the time, punched him square in the face.