NASA has photographed an alien building on the surface of the Moon! Hearing news like this certainly makes one sit up and pay attention, but is it is correct?
I heard about this from the Following the Nerd blog which featured a large image of the Moon centred on its South Pole.
The Moon's southern polar region. (Image credit: US DoD)
The alien edifice is tricky to spot, look to the left of the image and find the East-West meridian. There is a crater almost at the edge of the disc and just above it is a tiny black perfect rectangle. Hmm, an alien artefact in the form of a black monolith on the Moon, how original! The crater is called Boltzmann and is about 75 km wide so the artefact would have to be constructed on a cyclopean scale.
The mystery "object" (arrowed) appears to lie partially on the rim of Boltzmann Crater, the larger crater to the right is Drygalski. (Original image credit: US DoD)
Looking for evidence of extraterrestial intelligence preserved on the airless wastes of our satellite is not new and has been proposed numerous times, most recently by the well-known SETI theorist Paul Davies. This image is not new; in fact it is nearly twenty years old as it was made by the Clementine spacecraft during its six month mission to the Moon in 1994. Images like those above are not one off-photographs, instead they are assembled from numerous (hundreds at least) of smaller images. Usually these overlap, but the coverage is not complete and there can be small areas of missing or very low quality data. In this case it was easy to find the original image used in making the larger map.
The original image from the Clementine probe (Image credit: NASA/DoD)
Alas, it is clear that the alien building is just a block of lower quality data. NASA has NOT photographed an alien building on the Moon. If this does not convince you then there are other images of the same area. You can see a fine panorama of the region made by an amateur observer at Lunar Photo of the Day and the area has recently been imaged by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. You can find Boltzmann at Lat: 74.9°S, Long: 90.7°W in the Act-React Quick Map . Keep zooming in until you are sure there is nothing there!
A recent image of Boltzmann Crater: still no sign of alien activity. (Image credit: NASA)
(Article by Colin Johnston, Science Communicator)
I have always had a sneaky respect for the theory that dinosaurs might have made it to the moon. Or at least that things last so long up there that it is a good place to look for artifacts that something could have left behind a long time ago.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/02/dinos-on-the-mo.html
‘The footprints left by the Apollo astronauts will not erode since there is no wind or water on the Moon. The footprints should last at least 10 million years.’ http://home.hiwaay.net/~krcool/Astro/moon/moonglossary/moontrivia.htm which presumably means the moonbuggy and such should last ages up there.
I never knew that anyone has ever seriously suggested smart dinosaurs on the Moon but it has appeared in a few science fiction works, most recently Thomas Hopp’s Dinosaur Wars.
I imagine that Apollo artefacts would still be recognisable after a billion years in lunar conditions, but maybe they will have been removed to be installed as prize exhibits for a museum of spaceflight long before then!
Damn, that’s disappointing.
In the second photo you have, NASA used another part of the moon to patch over the building. Oh, I found the building you mention. How can you pass off the second photo as original when it is clear that the building had been covered up by that patch? Please look more carefully and do not mislead the public by saying this photo above with the building is a photo mistake. NASA deliberately covered up the second photo with the building. Why cause the public to fear what out there? They don’t want to scare the public.
Hi Scott, you do understand that we can see this region from the Earth’s surface? (Not terribly well to be sure, but clearly enough to see there isn’t anything there.)
If you are still not convinced why not do your own research? You could examine images from the LRO, SMART-1, Kaguya,Chang’e or Chandrayaan 1 missions, or even buy a telescope and look there for yourself, you won’t find any aliens but you’ll have a great time anyway!
Hello, I want to advice you about a new discovery about strange constructions on the moon. Please find it here.
Anyway nice blog!
Although I’m not sure that dates work out, it’s possible that the building was part of the set for this movie
http://www.ironsky.net/
Enjoy.
Hi David, you may want to read more on Nazis in Space (Link).