We live in a world rife with moon-landing conspiracy theories, where out-there ideas suggest we didn’t land on the moon at all, or, if we did, there were aliens already there. Thank goodness we have Elon Musk to help guide us deeper into the confusion.
The SpaceX founder posted a bizarre/cryptic/silly tweet on Thursday saying, ‘There are no coincidences,’ along with a meme of Neil Armstrong in a spacesuit next to an image of an alien. The meme says, ‘Neil Armstrong was the first person to land on the moon. ‘Neil A.’ backwards is ‘alien.”
There are no coincidences pic.twitter.com/9AEbbuXZGn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
The tweet attracted a storm of over 475,000 likes. Musk soon followed it up with another backwards musing: ‘Evian, the first bottled water, is naive spelled backwards.’
A tabloid story in early 2018 claimed NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin saw aliens during the Apollo 11 moon mission in 1969, but it was quickly debunked. Comments on Musk’s tweet point out that there were indeed aliens on the moon: the humans who set foot on it.
The backwards Neil Armstrong idea isn’t new. A Reddit thread from four years ago muses on how his name spells ‘Gnorts, Mr Alien’ backwards when you use his full last name. The concept continues to fall apart when you include his middle name: Gnorts Mr Anedl Alien.’
We can also examine what happens when you spell Elon Musk backwards. You get ‘Ksum Nole.’ KSUM is a country-music radio station in Fairmont, Minnesota. ‘Nole’ is the nickname of Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic, a notorious prankster also known as the Joker. So, it seems Musk could be hiding a secret life as a comedy country music songwriter in the vein of Ray Stevens.
Or maybe he’s just a guy who makes electric cars, tunnels and spaceships and plans to fly a bunch of artists around the moon. That’s plenty strange enough.