Artemis II broadcast error used to stoke false claims mission was staged
- Published on April 8, 2026 at 10:51
- 3 min read
- By Ara EUGENIO, AFP Philippines
NASA's historic lunar fly-by in April 2026 sent astronauts farther from Earth than any human before, but social media users stirred up conspiracy theories the mission was staged -- sharing a video of text appearing through the trip's official mascot as proof. A digital forensics expert told AFP the anomaly was a failed text overlay by the news station that syndicated the official feed, which showed the plush toy remained solid throughout.
"Green screen??? this is from Artemis live on YouTube!" reads overlaid text on a Facebook video shared on April 6, 2026.
It features a smartphone recording of a television broadcast of an interview with the Artemis II crew as they floated in microgravity.
A woman can be heard asking off-camera, "what's up with the lettering behind this ball?" as the camera zooms in on captions that appear superimposed on parts of the mission's official Moon mascot.
The claim surfaced as four astronauts captivated the world with live images from a years-in-the-making flyby of the Earth's natural satellite aboard the Orion space capsule (archived link).
The Artemis II crew -- NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen -- made history as the first humans to fly around the Moon for the first time in half-a-century, venturing deeper into space than ever before.
They are bringing back to Earth rich celestial observations of little-known lunar craters, a solar eclipse and meteor strikes hitting the Moon that scientists hope will open doors.
The video of the glitch racked up over 1.5 million views as it spread in similar social media posts, adding to a persistent catalogue of claims surrounding one of the world's most enduring conspiracy theories -- that NASA's 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing was staged in a Hollywood studio (archived link).
"Green behind a green screen," one user's comment read.
"People will see this and still believe they are in the Moon," another said.
But actual digital footage of the interview does not show such defects.
Reverse image searches on Google found the original video was streamed on YouTube by American broadcaster CNN on April 5 (archived link).
Titled "Artemis II crew speaks while headed to the moon", the uploaded video was taken from the official NASA live feed during the crew's fourth day in transit.
The falsely shared video corresponds to the broadcast's 4:36 mark but does not show any text bleeding through the floating object.
The same footage was also uploaded on the verified VideoFromSpace YouTube channel without any such glitch (archived link).
The toy seen in the video is the Artemis II official mascot, called "Rise" (archived link). The smiley-faced plushie, designed by a child, serves as the mission's zero-gravity indicator and is inspired by the iconic Earthrise moment seen on a previous lunar mission.
Hany Farid, a co-founder of GetReal Security and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told AFP on April 7 that the filmed footage merely captured "a failed text overlay on the part of the broadcaster" (archived link).
"Because we only see the text on the blue part of the spinning object, I hypothesise that the broadcaster didn’t lay down a blue banner on which the text should have been overlaid," Farid said.
AFP has fact-checked other misinformation about NASA missions.
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