Bart Winfield Sibrel (born ) is an American conspiracy theorist who has written, produced, and directed works in support of the false belief that the Apollo Moon landings between 1969 and 1972 were staged by NASA under the control of the CIA. He has written, produced, and directed four independent films promoting the ideas, with the first being the 2001 film A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon. In his works, Sibrel in part films himself asking that various Apollo astronauts put their hand on the Bible and swear an oath that they walked on the Moon. In the case of the Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, whom Sibrel arranged to meet on a false pretence, outside the Luxe Hotel in Beverly Hills, the interaction resulted in Aldrin punching Sibrel, which brought him significant publicity. However, no criminal charges were filed against Aldrin. Background Sibrel has been a director of TV commercials and is sometimes identified as a maker of "documentaries" in respect of his self-released Moon landing denial films, though other sources point out the personal distribution, limited release, and style and content call into question placing Sibrel's work in this genre of filmmaking (e.g., with the St. Petersburg Times and The New York Times placing the word documentary in quotation marks in some of their reports). This concern relates in part to Sibrel's record of misrepresenting his identity to the subjects he attempts to interview, notably repeated attempts involving former astronauts including Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Alan Bean, Eugene Cernan, and Edgar Mitchell (where Sibrel posed as filmmaker associated with the History Channel). As of 2002, Sibrel was operating a video production company in Nashville, Tennessee, and had "made a career out of perpetuating the notion that NASA's Apollo moon missions were hoaxes." Sibrel's single most notable work is a 47-minute video work likewise calling into question the historicity of the Apollo Moon missions; entitled A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, Sibrel describes the Apollo program as a "Cold War CIA and Nixon administration deception." Amanda Hess, writing for The New York Times alludes to the work as a pseudo-documentary, and describes the work in this way: "It mashed up moon footage with ominous shots from the Soviet Union and Vietnam, was narrated by a severe British woman and was sold on a [personal] website called MoonMovie.com." Sibrel confronted several Apollo