On February 6, 1971, roughly two years after humans first walked on the Moon, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first person to hit a golf ball on the Moon’s surface during the Apollo 14 mission. Not even mission control in Houston knew he’d do that. But now both events survive in grainy footage. An avid science enthusiast himself, Bryson DeChambeau believes the moon landing might have happened, but the footage? That’s fake.

DeChambeau appeared for an interview on the Katie Miller Podcast. Quizzed on Shepard playing golf on the moon, DeChambeau said, “Oh, I don’t … conspiracy theory, I don’t know. Look, Elon [Musk] says we’ve definitely gone there. So I tend to go that route, because he’s the man that knows quite a bit about all that. Artemis just went around the moon. So I do believe if we spent a lot of our resources like they say we did, I think we did. I don’t think the footage is real. But I think we did go to the moon. I don’t know about the footage. It’s quite, it’s quite wild.”

DeChambeau met Musk in 2024 during a SpaceX rocket launch in Texas. The two-time major champion, who majored in physics at SMU, joined Miller, the wife of the White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, to talk about golf and more. Claims that NASA’s moon-landing footage was staged or manipulated are hardly new. In fact, it’s a popular conspiracy theory, although all evidence points to the contrary. What makes DeChambeau’s comment more surprising is what he next said about another polarizing topic.

“I do think that there are interdimensional beings out there, for sure. I do believe in UAPs [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena]. UAPs, UFOs, I think they’re more than just aliens from another world. Maybe aliens from another world. But I think there’s more. There’s a lot more to that story,” said DeChambeau, who featured alongside ‘aliens’ for a Kalshi ad. So the two-time major winner chooses to believe in the existence of UFOs, but not in mankind’s moon-golf expedition, for which Shepard planned a lot, worked a lot, and risked a lot.

Shepard recruited Jack Harden, a pro at River Oaks Country Club in Texas, to craft a bespoke club head. The result—a Wilson Staff Dyna-Power 6-iron head—was placed inside Shepard’s suit, with a handful of balls stashed in a sock. After nine hours of several experiments, Shepard bolted the custom iron onto a rock-sampling tool and, one-handed, hit the shot. He failed at first, but the result at the end was jaw-dropping.

After two botched efforts, Shepard finally hit it, muttering to the camera, “Miles and miles and miles,” as it disappeared into darkness. No one knew where it landed until some fifty years later, Andy Saunders revealed that it had traveled just 40 yards. Meanwhile, in 2019, NASA released some 35,000 still photos and 10 hours of film footage of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing.

So, this admission from DeChambeau is surprising indeed, but his belief in all things interstellar will earn a nod of approval from a PGA Tour pro, who has traveled miles to chase UFOs.

Viktor Hovland would nod his head to that. The Norwegian went to chase UFOs in Northern Norway. He drove six hours from home to go and see that thing. But when he checked, he found it to be just rocks and gravel. Well, Hovland is obsessed with UFOs and claims the government hides the truth about UFOs.

Notably, another golfer, Graham DeLaet, claimed he had seen a UFO in 2018 before backtracking that it might just have been Musk’s SpaceX rocket. But this isn’t the first time Bryson DeChambeau has talked about UFOs.

In 2020, DeChambeau, his coach Chris Como, and friend Adam Hurley noticed “three little, round, silver metallic discs” moving across the sky in a triangular formation. DeChambeau wagered it was a UFO in a 2021 interview. In fact, he was the first of the three to spot them from their Dallas backyard.

It’s not surprising given how deep he is into science (he even bought Sportsbox AI), and curiosity clearly has a strong hold on him. That is why he will be at the U.S. Open with more tech in his hands than other golfers in the field.

Bryson DeChambeau is trying to build a “virtuous ecosystem”

In the same interview with Katie Miller, Bryson DeChambeau stated, “I’ll be at the U.S. Open with it [Sportsbox AI], and then past that, I’m really excited to showcase this to the world. We’re going to be lowering the barriers to entry with golf. … It’s part of this virtuous ecosystem that I’m helping build right now.”

In April, Bryson DeChambeau and a group of investors bought the smartphone biomechanics app Sportsbox AI in an eight-figure deal. The app captures 3D motion data of a golfer’s swing from a single camera view. DeChambeau credits the tech with fine-tuning his game for the 2024 U.S. Open win, then backed it with an investment of his own.

He’s been a heavy user of the tech for the past two years and has actively suggested new metrics and features. LPGA pro Jeehae Lee revealed DeChambeau pushed for things like overlaying two videos or avatars to spot differences at a glance, and a tool that hunts down the single most inconsistent datapoint in a swing by comparing it to Sportsbox’s database.

Bryson DeChambeau is fascinated by tech and science, even if he remains a bit skeptical.