It’s been around since December, but you likely first saw a trailer for The Principle—a far-out “documentary” that claims the sun revolves around the Earth, a “fact” that NASA is obviously committed to suppressing—sometime this week. And if you’re a geek in the purest sense, you may have recognized the voice of the narrator who tickles our curiosity with a vague but sweeping pronouncement: “Everything we think we know about our universe… is wrong,” says Kate Mulgrew, best known for playing Captain Kathryn Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager.
The juxtaposition is baffling. How could an icon of the sort of science fiction that prides itself on a correspondence to the laws of reality be a geocentrist? Moreover, the film is the brainchild of Catholic apologist Robert Sugenis, who, besides writing a massive tome entitled Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right: The Scientific Evidence for Geocentrism, has openly questioned the facts of the Holocaust. Physicist Lawrence Krauss, also featured in the preview clip, called shenanigans over at Slate, nevertheless admitting he could not explain his involvement:
I have no recollection of being interviewed for such a film, and of course had I known of its premise I would have refused. So, either the producers used clips of me that were in the public domain, or they bought them from other production companies that I may have given some rights to distribute my interviews to, or they may have interviewed me under false pretenses, in which case I probably signed some release. I simply don’t know.
Following up on that puzzled disavowal, Mulgrew came out with a Facebook post that described her rejection of Sugenis’ junk science and indicated that she had been “misinformed” about him.
So, did anybody in The Principle actually agree with its core thesis? Or conduct a little due diligence with regard to its director? Because we’re sort of impressed that Sugenis could put together a project like this without his collaborators knowing what it entailed or how their likenesses would be used therein. If it weren’t ignorant propaganda that makes climate change deniers look sane, you might even call it “guerilla filmmaking.”
As things stand, it’s more like “a pending class-action suit.”
H/T National Post | Photo by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)