Vladimir Markin wants the moon landing investigated in the name of science and culture.

Writing in an op-ed piece published by Izvestia, a Russian newspaper, the spokesperson for Russia's Investigative Committee said that an investigation may shed insight on new information about the historic moon landing. As such, Markin fully supports the launching of an inquiry into the disappearance of the original footage shot when Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins first landed on the moon in 1969.

"We are not contending that they did not fly [to the moon] ... But all of these scientific -- or perhaps cultural -- artifacts are part of the legacy of humanity," said Markin, adding that their disappearance is a common loss.

NASA admitted in 2009 that it had erased the footage from the first moon landing in an effort to save money. The agency, however, has since made copies of the historic event by restoring copies from other sources. And thanks to technology, the restorations yielded recordings of better quality than the original ones that have been erased.

As for the more than 800lbs of moon rock said to have been brought back by Apollo astronauts from the landing, most of them are stored in Texas' Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. Samples of the moon rock, however, can be viewed in museums all over the world.

While Markin is calling for an investigation of the moon landing, the event was not the primary reason he wrote an op-ed in the newspaper. Rather, he was venting that the U.S. had overstepped its bounds by launching a massive probe targeting corruption in FIFA. This investigation prompted the resignation of Sepp Blatter, longtime FIFA president, and a heated debate involving Russia as the World Cup host in 2018.

The Russian official said that prosecutors from the U.S. have declared themselves as supreme arbiters for football affairs. If they were going to be questioning someone, it should be themselves, added Markin, pointing out that the U.S. itself has murky elements in its past.

And by murky elements, he is referring to the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the original footage for the first moon landing and the location of the moon rock.

Some historians believe that the U.S. beating the Soviet Union to the moon back in the day could have contributed to the latter's fall in space travel by showing that American technology is superior.

Photo: Willem van Bergen | Flickr