1969: Neil Armstrong becomes the first human to walk on the moon, broadcasting back to Earth the immortal words, “By God, it’s perfect! Not a hippie in sight!”
1970: A return trip is made to the moon (Buzz Aldrin left his wallet).
1971: The astronauts on the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission are successfully returned home in what is later determined to be the most expensive assistance call in AAA history.
1974: Alan Shepherd hits a golf ball on the moon, unluckily sinking it into a sand trap.
1976: Led Zeppelin records a follow-up to Physical Graffiti on the moon. “We’ve always been drawn to recording locations with a peculiar ambience,” says Jimmy Page, “and the moon in particular has a special magical significance for all of us.” Thanks to the lack of atmosphere on the moon, the tapes come back totally devoid of audible sound.
1979: Werner Herzog somehow, without anyone’s knowledge, brings a film crew to the moon and shoots a movie, making it back with the final cut just in time to enter it into the Berlinale Film Festival. The movie, entitled The Final Resting Place of the Gods, suffers a troubled production in which faulty space suits cause the entire cast to succumb to hypoxia and slowly die. Herzog wins the Silver Bear for Best Director.
1980: The United States Olympic hockey team defeats the Soviet Union in the “Miracle on Ice,” securing America’s legal ownership of the moon once and for all, thanks to a secret bet made between Ronald Reagan and Leonid Brezhnev.
1981: Reagan sends troops to the moon, pledging to liberate it from tyranny. The first three battalions are vaporized by the moon people’s psychic beams.
1983: The first McDonald’s opens on the moon, featuring fries made from locally-grown moon potatoes, which have nearly four times the fat and a strange, “snake-y” aftertaste. McDonald’s quietly pays a total of $7 million to two customers who mutated into sentient fungus.
1991: Michael Jackson becomes the first musical artist to perform on the moon. He does not moonwalk, believing it would be tacky. Afterwards, Jackson is mobbed by a crowd of moon people, under the impression that Jackson himself is from the moon. “I just look like this!” Jackson protests, but is nonetheless nearly trampled.
1994: Moon people activist groups successfully lobby the American Psychiatric Association to remove the harmful name “lunacy” from the DSM-IV, replacing it with “Periodic Homicidal Ideation.” Additionally, all references to the moon are removed from the “werewolves” entry, which instead describes transformation taking place “in the middle of each month, by the Islamic calendar.”
2000: Pets.com raises $742 billion in venture capital for the purpose of erecting a giant neon Pets.com logo on the moon. The company crashes and is liquidated shortly thereafter, but the logo remains visible from Earth to this day.
2004: With the War on Terror in full swing, a prison is built on the moon to house terror suspects. The first class of inmates are physically and psychically mutated by alien artifacts found beneath the prison, and break out using their newfound powers. These suspects, nicknamed “The JihadE.T.s” remain at large.
2011: Several years after fracking commences on the moon, a massive explosion causes a gigantic chunk of rock to be ejected into space, roughly corresponding to the Man in the Moon’s “front tooth,” leading to its new moniker, “Alfred E. Moonman.”
