MORE PAREIDOLIA ON SELENE? A UFO? OR “SOMETHING ELSE”?

I warned you in last Monday's  blog that this week's blogs were going to highlight the weird and wonderful. That's not because I've been in a "weird and wonderful" mood , but because apparently all of you are (and besides, many would argue that in my case it's not a mood, but a permanent habit or characteristic). This is, after all, a community-driven website, and I blog about the articles all of you send me during the week, and this week's pickings were decidedly "weird and wonderful".  So, having dealt with what appears to be the latest iteration of the Mandela Effect in the death(s) of actor Tim Curry on Monday, we turn again to outer space and the anomalous weirdness to be found on our celestial neighbors, in this case, on our nearest celestial neighbor, Selene, or Luna, better known as The Moon. This article was spotted and shared by M.C., who has our gratitude for doing so, because the article reveals yet another lunar anomaly hitherto unnoticed, even by the determined team of space anomaly researchers that cluster around Mr. Richard C. Hoagland who almost single-handedly made the subject of space anomalies and ancient lost civilizations on our nearby celestial neighbors a respectable subject of discussion.  While NASA was busily trying to bury such ideas (and the pictures that inspired them), Mr. Hoagland and his teams over the years were happily digging them up, enhancing them, and discussing them on radio shows, at conferences, and in papers.

But this is one that, apparently, even they missed:

Mysterious object spotted in NASA moon photo sparks theories of extraterrestrial life: '100% proof'

Before we get to the article itself, a caveat: I am not really concerned with proving that what is seen in the picture is a UFO. It may be that, but it may be something else. In any case, here is the picture of that "something":

And here is the circled "something" enlarged:

The article then gives the following summary of the interpretation of the man who had discovered the photo, and the size of the "something" in question:

An image of the moon's surface has sparked theories of extraterrestrial life.

NASA(opens in new tab)'s Lunar Orbiter 3 snapped the photo in 1967, as the agency prepared to send humans there for the first time.

Nearly six decades later, UFO(opens in new tab) researcher Scott Waring has claimed that it captured something far more extraordinary than the lunar landscape.

He believes an elongated feature (opens in new tab)in the image is an alien(opens in new tab) spacecraft hovering above the surface, stretching an astonishing 3.4 miles from end to end.

Waring arrived at that estimate by comparing the feature with Theophilus crater, using a crater diameter of 68 miles and judging the supposed craft to be one-twentieth as long.

For him, the photograph carries(opens in new tab) a chilling implication.

‘This is 100 percent proof that aliens were watching humans before we ever stepped on the moon,’ he wrote on his website UFO Sightings Daily.

He even suggested that the enormous vessel would be considered a ‘small shuttle craft’ by its supposed occupants.

In my opinion, Mr. Waring leapt too quickly, and easily, to the conclusion that the "something" is a UFO, a craft of some sort. That it is a "something" appears from the enlargement, for it appears to possess regular and rectilinear geometry and appears also to possess symmetry along the axis of its length, with perpendicular "ribs" jutting out on each side from that axis. But such indications of artificiality do not necessarily mean a UFO; they could equally be indicative of a "something" that is a more permanent feature. Unfortunately, we do not have a second picture from more or less the same angle and lighting taken at a different time. If we did, the picture might not show the "something" and that in turn could be taken as an indication that the object might have moved and therefore might have been a UFO of some sort. Conversely, if such a picture were to show the same "something" in the same position, then it would seem more reasonable to conclude that it as a more permanent and immoveable feature on the moonscape...

... or rather, above it.  And when we say above it, we're back to Mr. Hoagland, who has been arguing for years if not at least two to three decades that there are such permanent structural "somethings" all over the surface, or rather, above the surface of the Moon, structures that he believes are the decayed shards of remains of vast lunar domes and other structures. Mr. Hoagland has argued that these structural remains constitute the real reason humanity has not returned to the Moon for more manned landings on the surface: the risk of collision with these structures above the surface is, or at least, was too great.  The article itself actually mentions some of the anomalies that Mr. Hoagland has pointed out as suggestive of his own structural idea:

During the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, astronauts Gene Cernan, Jack Schmitt and Ron Evans reported seeing a bright object that rotated and flashed rhythmically out in space.

Cernan said: 'I'm looking at what - what Jack was talking about; and it's definitely not a particle that's nearby because there is another one I can look at and get a three-dimensional comparison with.'

'It is a bright object, and it's obviously rotating because it's flashing. It's way out in the distance, as I say, because there are particles that are close by and it's obviously not one of those,' the astronaut described.

'It's apparently rotating in a very rhythmic fashion because the flashes come around almost - almost on time. And as we look back at the Earth, it's up at about 11:00 - oh, maybe ten or 12 Earth diameters. I don't know whether that does you any good, but there is something out there.'

And there's even more:

Three years earlier, the Apollo 12 moon mission also reported strange sightings as they neared the lunar surface.

The Trump administration's third batch of UFO files, released on June 12, included recorded NASA briefings after Apollo 16, which referred to an 'alien starbase' on the dark side of the moon. (Emphasis added)

Of course, we lack the documents and the context of those Apollo 16 briefing remarks, but in the context of the 1967 "something", they become significant. In any case, whether the "something" is still there or not, it is perhaps quite telling that the other nations that have sent unmanned probes to the Moon to photographically map its surface - India, China, Japan, and the late 1990s US "Clementine" mission - have released only a fraction of the photographs they have taken. My bet is that the "something" is not a UFO at all, but that it is structural, and still there, and that others have seen it too, and have even higher resolution photos of it. But if none of them do have photographs, you can bet your bottom dollar that the next probe sent to the Moon will have it as a mission task to verify - or refute - the 1967 NASA photo.

See you on the flip side...

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