A senior Russian space official says the proposed mission will "check" the moon landing by the United States

Is the verification of facts about going out of this world?

A Russian mission project on the moon would apparently include a task to verify that the moon landings in the United States were really real, said a senior Russian space official in the Saturday joke.

Dmitry Rogozin, director of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, was answering a question about whether NASA had landed on the moon nearly 50 years ago when he made this remark, reported the Associated Press agency.

"We set ourselves the goal of stealing and checking whether they went there or not," Rogozin said in a video posted on Twitter Saturday.

The head of the Russian agency seemed to be joking, smirking and shrugging while answering the question. But the plots surrounding NASA's lunar missions are common in Russia.

The Soviet Union abandoned its lunar program in the mid-1970s after the explosion of four experimental lunar rockets.

In 2015, a former spokesman of the Russian investigative committee called for an investigation into the lunar landings of NASA. Vladimir Markin wrote at the time in a letter of opinion that an investigation might reveal new information on landings from 1969 to 1972.

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In a translation of the Moscow Times' op-ed, Markin claimed that an international investigation might explain the disappearance of movie footage from the first moon landing in 1969 and the location of the lunar rock brought back to Earth .

"We do not claim that they did not steal [to the moon], and just made a movie about it. But all these scientific – or perhaps cultural – artefacts are part of the heritage of humanity and their disappearance without a trace is our common loss. An investigation will reveal what happened, "he wrote, according to the Moscow Times.

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NASA admitted in 2009 that the original recordings of the first landing on the moon had been erased and reused, but it released restored copies of the original broadcast of the landing, reported Reuters at the time. Officials said that the tapes were reused to save money and that the goal at the time of the landings was a live broadcast.

However, conspiracy theories have continued to appear since man walked for the first time on the moon on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to have stepped on the surface lunar.

Last year, a new theory appeared on YouTube that the last landing on the moon, that of Apollo 17, had been organized, despite insurmountable evidence to the contrary. A user claimed in a video that a reflection of a machinist was visible on the helmet of one of the astronauts, which caused a split reaction in the video's comments.

Associated Press contributed to this report.