A Russian official has called for an international investigation into the Apollo moon landing. File photo NASA/UPI | License Photo

MOSCOW, June 18 (UPI) -- For most conspiracy theorists, questioning the moon landing is rather passe. They've moved on to Benghazi, global warming and GMOs.

But one official in Russia didn't get the memo. Russian Investigative Commission spokesperson Vladimir Markin wants an international investigation into the Apollo moon missions.


Specifically, Markin wants to know what happened to the film footage of the landings. He's also curious about where those moon rocks ended up.

"We are not contending that they did not fly [to the moon], and simply made a film about it," Markin wrote in a op-ed for Russian paper Izvestia.

"But all of these scientific -- or perhaps cultural -- artifacts are part of the legacy of humanity, and their disappearance without a trace is our common loss. An investigation will reveal what happened."

NASA has admitted to erasing the tapes, along with 200,000 others, in an effort to save space. And the moon rocks are reportedly in storage at the Johnson Space Center.

Markin didn't necessarily set out to question the moon landings. His op-ed begins as an attack on the U.S. Justice Department's decision to probe nine FIFA officials as part of an investigation into the world soccer federation's ongoing corrupting scandal.

"U.S. prosecutors having declared themselves the supreme arbiters of international football affairs," Markin argued in his letter -- as translated by the Moscow Times.

His displeasure inspired him to demand a series of retaliatory investigations. In addition to the moon missions, Markin would also like an inquiry into the 1994 U.S. World Cup. Even more brazenly, he calls for an investigation of alleged U.S. war crimes in Eastern Ukraine.