A top Russian official is calling for an international investigation into NASA's Apollo lunar missions, arguing that the disappearance of the original footage of the moon landing and some 400 kilograms of lunar rocks is suspicious and worthy of an in-depth investigation.

According to UPI and Gizmodo, Russian Investigative Commission spokesman Vladimir Markin called for the investigation in a column for the Russian-language Izvestia newspaper, in which he also said that the US had declared itself "supreme arbiters of international football" in relation to the ongoing FIFA scandal and challenged the validity of several things American.

Markin listed the moon landings alongside the 1994 USA World Cup and even war crimes in Eastern Ukraine as things that the international community should investigate, apparently in retaliation for the US-led investigation into FIFA.

Loss of video footage, moon rocks cited

"We are not contending that they did not fly [to the moon], and simply made a film about it," he reportedly wrote in the column. "But all of these scientific – or perhaps cultural – artifacts are part of the legacy of humanity, and their disappearance without a trace is our common loss. An investigation will reveal what happened."

For the record, NASA admitted back in 2009 that they erased the original recordings of the moon landings (along with 200,000 other tapes) in an effort to save space, but as Moscow Times noted, the US space agency said that they were able to remaster the original television broadcast of the original moon landing, which took place as part of July 1969's Apollo 11 mission.