![]() Sibrel is a smaller-scale challenger, but his sales are growing so far he has moved 20,000 copies of his first film, all through the Internet. ''The Bible Code,'' which argues that events in the past and the future were encrypted 3,000 years ago in Holy Scripture, is again a best seller in its sequel edition. The black-helicopter/New World Order videos that began popping up after the collapse of Communism still sell well. The megatheories provide huge umbrella explanations of the world around us. That percentage is growing, in part because conspiracy theorists now have easy access to media tools - jump cuts, dissolves, special effects, studio-quality voice-over, zippy credits - that bolster their theories with something they've never had before: the elegant formatting of television truth. Statistics are vague, but somewhere between 6 and 10 percent of Americans say they don't believe astronauts ever landed on the moon. (''Kiss the world goodbye, and away we'll fly, destination Moon.'') As Dinah Washington performs her 1962 hit ''Destination Moon'' (''Come and take a trip on my rocket ship, we'll have a lovely afternoon''), one rocket after another fires off, then hooks right back around to plunge nose first into the launching pad and explode in a spectacular ball of fire. Sibrel introduces his thesis with a lighthearted visual montage of real rockets, entertainingly blowing up. (Sibrel says he believes that it was probably directed by Stanley Kubrick and shot at Area 51 in Nevada.) Sibrel's first documentary, ''A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon,'' is a 47-minute feature contending that what people saw on their television screens that famous July night in 1969 was in fact filmed on a back lot. Plus, he knows how to make decent television. He has absorbed the real lesson of the last two decades: push for belief in ever bolder and more unlikely ideas. Sibrel came of age in the post-Watergate era. Sibrel is not your father's conspiracy theorist - some grumpy autodidact with a self-published book raging at the gates of the establishment. To be noticed now, a theory must be of a scope only Stephen Hawking could measure, and it must be promulgated by an amiable spokesman who can deftly juggle often absurd contradictions. Ever since the passing of that sweet, simpler time - when the Trilateral Commission ordered the hit on John Kennedy and the Queen of England managed the drug cartels - the narratives of big suspicion have been distorted by the same force that has reshaped our partisan politics, action movies and morning TV talk shows: outrage inflation. Sibrel is part of a new generation of conspiracy mega-theorists. If you believe there's nothing up my sleeve, then nothing is cool. Sibrel cranks up the background music he has selected, and the familiar voice of R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe brings it on home: If you believed they put a man on the moon, man on the moon. ![]() One American says, ''Yes, I think we walked on the moon.''Īnother American offers balance: ''Jury's still out in my opinion.'' On a Sony Trinitron, the video screeches to a halt and then rolls on some average folks exercising their First Amendment right to express heartfelt opinions on both sides of a debate. Sibrel's studio, located along a strip of storefront recording joints and one-room editing suites known as Nashville's Music Row, is actually his tiny two-room apartment, crammed with mixers and Apple computers. ''Some man-on-the-street kind of interviews that I did.'' He hits the fast-forward control to race through a rough cut of his new documentary. 'There's going to be a comedic section here,'' Bart Sibrel says. ![]()
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