[April 9th Update: It seems Mulgrew was likewise hoodwinked. In a Facebook post (via the AV Club), the actress says:

I understand there has been some controversy about my participation in a documentary called THE PRINCIPLE. Let me assure everyone that I completely agree with the eminent physicist Lawrence Krauss, who was himself misrepresented in the film, and who has written a succinct rebuttal in SLATE. I am not a geocentrist, nor am I in any way a proponent of geocentrism. 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. Kate Mulgrew

]

Yesterday, the trailer for the creationist/geocentrism documentary feature The Principle was making the rounds. And there seemed to be two reactions.

The first was typically, “Wait, there are still people who believe the earth is the center of the universe?” Centuries of reasoning and thought along with actual human beings heading out into space to observe the behavior of the stars and planets in relation to one another, while volumes of mathematical and scientific data to support what apparently 1 in 4 Americans still don’t believe.

And the second, slightly less depressing thought was “Is that Captain Janeway narrating this thing?”

Somehow, Mulgrew’s voice ended up in the trailer and whether or not she knows what she was getting into might be up for debate, given that at least one participant in the doc has no idea how he ended up seemingly positioned to shill for this nonsense.

Writing for Slate this morning, author and Arizona State professor Lawrence Krauss says that he would never have sat down for a doc of this nature nor can he recall the context in which the footage shown here was recorded.

So, the question I had to face after discovering this abuse of my words was what to do about it. I have no recollection of being interviewed for such a film, and of course had I known of its premise I would have refused. So, either the producers used clips of me that were in the public domain, or they bought them from other production companies that I may have given some rights to distribute my interviews to, or they may have interviewed me under false pretenses, in which case I probably signed some release. I simply don’t know.

Whether the same holds true for Mulgrew remains to be seen – her narration is so non-specific here, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that she was asked to contribute some hazy, vague sentiments about space and the universe that just got plugged into this mess.

Krauss suggests that we all ignore this mess lest we elevate it to an actual, serious conversation. Personally, I think it’s still necessary to be a vigorous defender of science and to call out this kind of intellectual dishonest/laziness wherever possible.

Oh, and the film was paid for by an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier.

Anyway, here’s the trailer. Around the point that they start pointing fingers at NASA as part of some information cover-up, I quit.