“Orange Is the New Black” star Kate Mulgrew threw her fans for a loop this week when they discovered her narration in a trailer for a “documentary” called “The Principle,” which argues that Renaissance-era astronomer Copernicus was way off about the Earth revolving around the Sun.
“Everything we think we know about our universe is wrong,” Mulgrew says at the beginning of the film’s trailer (above). The documentary promises to trace the history of cosmology and introduce “new discoveries of Earth-oriented alignments in the largest structures of our visible universe.”
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As it turns out, however, Mulgrew — who played Capt. Kathryn Janeway on “Star Trek: Voyager” for seven seasons — does not believe “everything we think we know about our universe is wrong,” at all.
In fact, it sounds like she believes that anything “The Principle” executive producer Robert Sungenis believes is wrong — which makes sense — because he’s a noted Holocaust denier, creationist, geocentrist, and crazy person. He is also author of the book “Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right, Volume I, The Scientific Evidence for Geocentrism.”
“I am not a geocentrist, nor am I in any way a proponent of geocentrism,” Mulgrew wrote on Facebook on Tuesday.
She went on to say: “More importantly, I do not subscribe to anything Robert Sungenis has written regarding science and history and, had I known of his involvement, would most certainly have avoided this documentary. I was a voice for hire, and a misinformed one, at that. I apologize for any confusion that my voice on this trailer may have caused.”
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Despite the trailer’s YouTube page advertising a theatrical release this spring, even IMDb does not appear to take the film seriously. The logline reads: “Another ill-informed attempt at reversing the knowledge of the human race. Am curious to see the reaction to the scientists quoted in this film, I am assuming, unknowingly.”
Whoever wrote that logline would be correct.
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American theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss refuted the film on Twitter Tuesday, as well as a Slate blog titled, “I Have No Idea How I Ended Up In That Stupid Geocentrism Documentary.”
“The notion that anyone in the 21st century could take seriously the notion that the sun orbits the Earth, or that the Earth is the center of the universe, is almost unbelievable,” Krauss wrote. “I say almost, because one of the trials and tribulations of being a scientist with some element of popular celebrity is that I get bombarded regularly by all sorts of claims, and have become painfully aware that ideas as old as the notion that the Earth is flat never seem to die out completely.”
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The trailer consists of respected scientists Michio Kaku, Max Tegmark and Krauss making general, out-of-context statements about the mysteries of the universe, while Sungenis chimes in with his version of the “truth.”
“Science has said you must stay over in this category over here. You can’t go into the God category, because that’s going to destroy our science,” Sungenis says. “You can go on some websites of NASA to see that they’ve started to take down stuff that might hint to a geocentric universe.”
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Krauss doesn’t know how he made it into the movie, directed by Katheryne Thomas, but he summed up the situation pretty well in 140 characters on Twitter.
For all who asked: Some clips of me apparently were mined for movie on geocentricism. So stupid does disservice to word nonsense. Ignore it.
– Lawrence Krauss (@LKrauss1) April 8, 2014