Today is April 1, which means the annual migration of hoaxes, practical jokes, and improbable headlines. It also seems to bring out something particular in people when the subject is space.

Perhaps that is because space already feels slightly unreal. We are used to thinking of it as a place where anything might be possible: aliens, secret bases on the Moon, crashed saucers in deserts, and shadowy government coverups. If someone claims that NASA faked a Mars landing in a film studio, or that the Apollo astronauts never really walked on the Moon, there are always people willing to believe it.

One of the earliest space-conspiracy stories to make a real impression on me was Capricorn One, the 1977 film about a fake Mars landing. In the story, the astronauts are sent to a secret soundstage in the desert and ordered to pretend they have landed on Mars while the whole thing is broadcast to the world.

It was a clever premise because it tapped into something that already existed: our fondness for imagining that the truth is stranger, darker, and more dramatic than reality.

The odd thing is that reality usually wins.

When I was a child, there was a UFO photograph splashed across the front page of the West Australian. Three people had created it. Two of them tossed a little saucer-shaped object between them, while the third lay on the ground beneath and snapped the picture at exactly the right moment. A Frisbee, or perhaps a hubcap, became a spaceship.

That was enough. The photograph looked convincing because people wanted it to be convincing.

The same instinct lies behind the endless claims that the Moon landing was faked. Even now, there are people who insist that Apollo was filmed on a soundstage somewhere in Nevada. The trouble with these theories is that they always require more complexity than the real event. To fake the Moon landings would have required thousands of people to keep the same impossible secret for decades. It would have been easier simply to go to the Moon.

And besides, the real astronauts are rarely solemn enough to fit the conspiracy stories.

The International Space Station turns out to be full of practical jokers.

Chris Hadfield, who may have the best sense of humour of any astronaut, once posted April Fool’s photographs from the station suggesting that there was an alien aboard. Another time, he claimed a UFO was approaching. Scott Kelly smuggled a gorilla suit into orbit and used it to chase another astronaut through the station. Long before that, one astronaut sneaked a corned-beef sandwich aboard Gemini III because he was tired of the official menu.

The real people in space are not mysterious puppet-masters hiding impossible truths. They are human beings, stuck in a metal tube hundreds of kilometres above the Earth, trying to do difficult work while also finding reasons to laugh.

Strange Enough Already

What fascinates me is that the hoaxes always underestimate reality.

We invent stories about little green men and secret filming locations, while the actual universe is far stranger than anything we can make up.

The deepest parts of the ocean contain creatures that look like nightmares. There are black smokers on the seafloor, giant squid in the dark, and fish with transparent heads. In space, there are moons with methane lakes, stars that pulse oddly for no apparent reason, and planets where it rains glass.

We do not need to invent weirdness. We are already surrounded by it.

Perhaps that is why the best April Fool’s jokes work. They begin with something just believable enough to tempt us, before reminding us that the real world is every bit as strange.

So if you see a headline today claiming that aliens have landed on the Moon, take it with a grain of salt.

But if astronauts are chasing each other around the space station in a gorilla suit, that one may well be true.

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