There's a Video in Which an Astronaut Says He's Recording From the U.S. — While in Space

Another day, another conspiracy theory about whether or not humans have been to space. While we admit that everything NASA does is under hyper-intense scrutiny, we kind of have to hand this one to conspiracy theorists — this clip is pretty hard to explain.

In a livestream, an astronaut says he's recording from the U.S. The problem with that statement is that he was supposedly on the International Space Station at the time. So, what's the broader context of the video, and how has NASA tried to handle the issue?

The controversial video features three astronauts on a question-and-answer livestream, supposedly from the International Space Station. All the elements are there — the spaceship background, the floating hair, everything you would expect to see from a video recording from space. However, viewers ended up hearing something they didn't anticipate.

Upon talking about his childhood education, one of the astronauts said, "All of that happened in a little town called York, Maine, across the Unites States, from where we're talking to you right now."

That certainly sounds like a Freudian Slip if we ever heard one! Adding to the drama is the fact that the video was being livestreamed, so the astronaut couldn't take back what he'd said. Naturally, the clip's comments section lit up with theories. One person wrote, "It was done in a Hollywood studio." Another suspected, "It's not a mistake. Its disclosure." A third celebrated, "He’s so BUSTED!!!"

That said, some people did come to the astronaut's defense, and theorized that it was an issue of clumsy wording rather than an accidental reveal. As this person explained, "When he says 'from where we’re talking to you right now,' he’s referring to the people on the other end of the call who were on the West Coast, not the astronaut." Honestly, this seems to be the only logical explanation available. It's kind of awkward wording on the astronaut's part, but it makes enough sense.

Here's our only issue with the clumsy wording explanation: The video keeps disappearing. Social media users keep re-posting the clip, but it's routinely taken down. Upon trying to find it, you can see remnants of a clip once being there on the internet (such as a video description), but when you click on it, you get an error message. It seems that the actual video itself no longer exists.

People are also claiming that there was another slip-up in the very same livestream. According to the comments on the few remaining social media clips with this content, that same astronaut claimed that this mission was NASA's first time sending humans to the moon. Given that the full video has been all but scrapped from the internet, we are unable to confirm whether or not he actually said that in the livestream.