In October 2002, a pitchman from British Columbia named Michael Henderson, who'd made a fortune in laser eye surgery, came to town. He had a $1 million model and a 20-minute videotape introducing the five-star, five-diamond Moon Resort & Casino, a proposed $5 billion lunar-themed hotel-casino, to be built at a 250-acre site. What he billed as the biggest and most expensive hotel ever built on Earth would come complete with 10,000 rooms, a 250,000-square-foot casino, a giant convention center, a winter-sports area, indoor golf course and tennis courts, a biosphere enclosing a vineyard and organic gardens, and even the Moon Buggy Activity Landscape, where guests could slip into the driver's seat of one of the Apollo landing's famous lunar cruisers.
Though there was no financing, no location, no one with casino experience connected with the project, and no interest from existing casino companies, the press conference attracted representatives from the media and luminaries from the casinos. The concept's unveiling was front-page news in the Las Vegas dailies, which all seemed to take the lunacy, if not seriously, at least at face value.
Of course, Moon immediately disappeared from the Las Vegas radar screen. We knew it then, when we wrote, "This place has as much chance of being built in Las Vegas as it does of opening on the moon itself." And nothing has been seen or heard of this grand pipe dream since.
