by Mike Bara
The Shard
The first photograph from this probe that Hoagland was able to acquire and examine (LO-III-84M) immediately revealed a number of striking, if bizarre objects on the photos. As he was scanning the horizon of LO-III-84M, he noticed something odd. There, sticking straight up more than a mile high out of the lunar surface, was something that absolutely did not belong; The “Shard.”
Wide angle view of the Shard, sticking 1.5 miles above the lunar surface. Bright smudge beyond is The Tower, a similar structure more than 7 miles high. “X” shaped object is a frame alignment registration mark. Note the shadow being cast across the lunar surface by the Shard, proving it is not a photographic defect or enhancement artifact.
On a bashed and battered lunar surface, exposed to billions of years of unshielded asteroid and meteorite bombardment, the Shard was a highly unusual, defiantly upright bowling-pin shaped structure, with an irregularly-pointed apex, a swollen middle “node” and a narrowing “foot.” Simply put, after billions of years of meteoric bombardment, an object like the Shard simply can’t exist anywhere on the surface of the Moon. Just like the Blair Cuspids, the very existence of its long shadow could serve as proof of its artificiality. With no atmosphere to protect such a structure from the constant onslaught of meteors, it should have been ground to dust eons before, even if it was some sort of exotic natural structure. Its very existence there on the Lunar Orbiter photo is in of itself proof of its artificial nature.
A closer look at the photo shows that it is not some sort of photographic defect, either. The readily-apparent shadow it was casting across the lunar surface is consistent with the local geography on which the Shard was sitting. In addition, the shadow was also consistent with the time of the month, the Lunar Orbiter camera angle, and the actual sun-angle illuminating the object when the image was initially acquired in mid-February 1967. It was this shadow, more than any other single aspect of this object, which solidified the Shard’s reality as an extremely anomalous, potentially manufactured lunar structure.
Close-up of the Shard showing semi-transparent internal structure.
There were other, crucial clues that the Shard was, in fact, a real object–still standing upright against gravity on the lunar surface. One was its alignment with the local vertical rather than with the grain of the Lunar Orbiter film; the second, was a highly geometric internal organization. But what was it made of? The whole thing seemed to shimmer in the light like some impossible Crystal Tower of the Moon.
The striking geometric pattern was composed of a repeating, complex, internal crystalline geometry, visible all throughout the object. Additional enhancements revealed this regular, internal pattern was made up of highly reflective and possibly hexagonal geometric compartments, greatly damaged but still visible. The overall impression one was left with was that of a once-much-larger, complex, crystalline, artificial object now extremely eroded by eons of meteorite impact processes.
Ultra close-up of the top of the Shard.
Since it is virtually impossible to argue with the shadow cast by the Shard, and since the object’s very existence (therefore established) argues forcefully for its artificiality, some critics have looked to alternate explanations for its presence on LO-III-84M. It has been suggested, for instance, that the Shard may be a transient out-gassing event, luckily captured by the Lunar Orbiter camera. But, the absence of any diffusion or spray around the Shard’s sharply defined edges and all that obvious internal geometry works heavily against this explanation.
But there was an even more compelling argument favoring the Shard’s reality, to be made right from the same LO-III-84M frame: the striking presence of “the Tower”…
The Tower
Just to the left of the Shard in the Lunar Orbiter frame LO-III-84M lies what at first appeared to be a faint smudge on the image. However, on close inspection and under additional enhancement, it quickly became obvious that this is a second glass-like anomaly in the same frame. Christened “The Tower” by Hoagland because of its immense size compared to the Shard, the Tower appears to be rising from a point over the horizon, making it at least 260 miles from the camera and more than 7 miles high! Like the Shard, it is aligned with the local vertical rather than the camera or the film grain, and there are even hints of guy-wire like filaments holding the immense structure up.
But could there be another explanation? Maybe it was a comet, or a star or even a far distant nebula or galaxy? The comet idea was quickly discarded when a quick check found no comets of any significance passing through the solar system in February, 1967. As to the possibility of it being a star, nebula or distant galaxy, those possibilities were also put to rest rather easily.
NASA’s published data on Orbiter photography showed that the f-stop setting for this image was 5.6, the shutter speed 1/100th of a second. Simultaneously capturing the bright lunar landscape and a faint background interstellar nebula on the same photograph, with those specific camera settings, on this type of slow-speed, fine-grained film, would be technically impossible. If the camera aperture was held open long enough to capture such an incredibly faint object, the brilliant, sunlit lunar landscape would have been completely blown out. With these possibilities eliminated, the other mundane explanation, that the feature was merely a photographic blemish, was also eliminated through independent analysis by photographic experts at a photo lab in New York.
The bottom line, whatever the Tower was, it had to be local, to the Moon at least.
Analysis of the Tower itself showed it was more than a mile across and was an estimated distance of at least 300 miles from Lunar Orbiter when the image was taken. Just like the Shard, the top of the Tower itself appeared to be composed of dozens of smaller cubical (and/or hexagonal) sub-structures. And these were clearly not artifacts of the enhancement process either. The smallest of these cubes visible on frame III-84M measured at least 50 times the size of the individual computer pixels of the imaging enhancements.
The Tower (left) and the Shard (right).
The Tower (close-up).
In other sections of the image, long, vertical transitions created by apparent refraction-effects could also be traced, as if portions of the background object were being viewed through a heavily-distorting medium, located much closer to the spacecraft. The Tower also appeared to taper towards that surface, and simultaneously, to be leaning in a southerly direction in the photograph. This obvious departure from the local vertical (similar to the internal details in the Shard) could be directly connected with the distance of this object from the Lunar Orbiter cruising thirty miles above the Moon, looking downward toward the lunar horizon. A real object, connected with the surface by an actual vertical tower, could indeed appear to lean, if (a) it was located closer to the spacecraft than the Shard, or (b) was in the process of slowly tipping over from the effects of constant meteor erosion, across literally millions of years.
The Tower (enhanced).
The Tower viewed from the side in Apollo image AS10-32-4856.
Not only is all this patently absurd within any current (or proposed) natural geologic model of the lunar surface, it totally supports the concept that the Tower/Shard are nothing but remaining fragments of a once far-larger, also clearly artificial structure. This structure, because of its transparent nature, was apparently once composed of something like glass, and, attached to some kind of darker, vertical structural framework.
After confirming the existence of the Tower from another photograph taken by the Apollo 10 mission, it became obvious that there was some kind of transparent, glass-like structure over large swaths of the Sinus Medii region. But how could such a structure survive on the lunar surface for so long? Isn’t it dangerous to build glass houses in places where people throw stones (like the Moon)?
That question is actually easy to answer: all materials, including glass-based minerals like quartz silica, take on different properties in the hard, cold vacuum of space than they do on Earth. One of the most abundant
substances of this world is water; in liquid, gaseous or solid form. Space however, has an appalling lack of water, so much so that it can be easily stated that water is one of the least available resources in the vast expanse of emptiness we call space.
As it turns out, this is one of the qualities of the vacuum that makes glass not just a desirable, but an ideal material for building structures on an airless world like our Moon. Glass on Earth is well known to have little tensile strength, meaning it doesn’t stretch easily because it is brittle and will not withstand even a very weak impact from a hard object. When you throw a baseball at a glass window, it fractures and cracks easily and with little resistance. However, if you attempt to crush a glass sphere, you’ll find that it has a great deal of strength under compression stresses.
The reason for these properties on Earth is that it is pretty much impossible to extract the water from glass as it is forming. Water is all around us, even in the most arid deserts. It is in the ground as a liquid, frozen in the arctic as a solid, and even in the air around us as humidity. All this water causes a phenomenon called “hydrolytic weakening” when glass is being manufactured on Earth, meaning that at the molecular level, the bonding of silicates and oxygen is resultantly weakened. This produces a transparent, brittle and fragile material we call common glass. Manufactured under Earthly conditions, we have found that glass is a very useful and artistically pleasing medium for a variety of uses — but structural construction is not one of them.
In short, on Earth, we don’t build glass houses.
But the Moon is a completely different story. It is airless, with no humidity to interfere with the molecular bonding of the silicates that make-up the glass that is omnipresent. The hard-cold vacuum enhances the strength of lunar glass to the point that it is approximately twice as strong as steel under the same stress conditions. In fact, several papers from scientists at Harvard and other universities have suggested that lunar glass is the ideal substance from which to construct a domed lunar base.1
All I’m proposing is that somebody else came up with the idea long before we did. “Somebody,” as in Ancient Aliens.
But if this concept is valid, then there must be other evidence to support it, right? As it turns out, there’s plenty.
Surveyor 6
Surveyor 6 was an unmanned NASA robot probe that successfully landed on the Moon in November 1967 about thirty miles west of “Bruce,” a small five-mile wide crater near the center of Sinus Medii. From there, the Surveyor spacecraft took over 35,000 images of the surrounding lunar landscape. One night after local sunset on November 24, an additional set of time-exposed images were acquired looking west, for purposes of studying light-scattering properties in interplanetary space caused by the solar corona, which was at the time far below the lunar horizon. These images, when they were released, caused something of a fire storm.
One of the Surveyor 6 images.
Instead of the Sun’s faint corona, the image contained a huge flare of light on the horizon, very similar to a common sunset here on the Earth. The problem with this lunar sunset was that it was anything but common. The Surveyor image, with its remarkably brilliant beads of light stretching along the western horizon and an intensely geometric structure of scattered light seen against the lunar sky above it, was taken over an hour after sunset.
On Earth, when we see the sun set, the sun in fact has already “set” (dropped below the visible horizon) several minutes before. But the atmosphere of the Earth bends the light coming from the sun, so the sun we are watching slowly disappear over the horizon is actually already several degrees below that horizon. This atmospheric interference is also the reason the sun tends to turn more orange and distort in shape as it sets.
Surveyor 6 image.
All of this is well and good, except for one problem; the Moon has no atmosphere. So when Surveyor took the image, all it should have seen was the faint wisps of the Sun’s descending corona. This was certainly what the scientists expected to see.
The NASA guys quickly tried to come up with an explanation, and they settled on the idea that electro-statically charged fields had somehow suspended particles of dust in the lunar sky and created the dramatic sunset effect. This theory was later discounted by lunar soil samples, but the NASA explanation has never been officially withdrawn.
Scaffolding on the Moon. Close-up of box like, semi-transparent structures miles above Sinus Medii. Note the 3D structure and depth, and the interlocking sections of supports and structure. (NASA frame AS10-32-4816).
Which left a major mystery; what could cause such intense illumination more than an hour after sunset? The only viable answer is that there must have been some sort of transparent, intervening medium at (and beyond) the horizon that bent the Sun’s light and created the dramatic sunset effect. That “intervening medium” is nothing less than our theorized glass dome over Sinus Medii.
In fact, close-ups of the sunset images revealed this much fainter, lattice-like structure arching far above those mysterious brilliant beads along the horizon. This fading light was scattered just the way an atmosphere would scatter it. Only this “atmosphere” had geometric structure.
These optical phenomena could only be caused by the remnants of some kind of ancient, nearly transparent, glass-like, highly geometric architecture still anchored in the lunar surface and extending literally miles above it. The interlocking, scaffoldlike structure revealed in the Surveyor 6 images is very similar to the miles-high Shard and Tower elsewhere in Sinus Medii, but much better preserved. What was all but beaten to a pulp in the area of the Shard and Tower is remarkably intact just over the horizon some 100 miles distant.
Later, a further confirmation of this Sinus Medii “dome” was found on a picture taken by the Apollo 10 crew, NASA frame AS 10-32-4816.
Fortunately, the location of the Sinus Medii “dome” was amenable to further research, as in searching the image archives it turned out that a great deal of it had been photographed on later missions, especially Apollo 10.
AS10-32-4822 – Los Angeles
After it was clear that Apollo 10 had taken a ton of photographs of the area where Hoagland suspected an immense scaffold-like structure had been constructed, he and other researchers began to pour over the Apollo 10 photo catalogs in an effort to find further images of the “dome,” Ukert, and Sinus Medii in general.
As these photographic catalogs were analyzed, a strange pattern quickly emerged. A great many of the thumbnail images in the catalogs appear to be very dark or almost completely blacked out, as if the astronauts had taken most of the photos with the lens cap on. This would tend to discourage an investigator from ordering prints of these images, since getting them from the NASA archives is not exactly cheap. So of course, being the trusting type, what did they do?
They ordered the blacked out pictures of course.
When you actually see some of the prints, it becomes obvious not only that the pictures are perfectly good, but that NASA would have very good reasons to discourage anyone from taking a close look at them. Some of these Apollo 10 images are absolutely chock-full of the kinds of objects that confirm the Sinus Medii dome model. Foremost among these was Apollo 10 frame AS10-32-4822.
The first thing that stands out about this image is a geometric crisscrossing pattern on the surface just northeast of Ukert that seems to defy conventional explanation. One consulting geologist (Dr. Bruce Cornet) even nicknamed the region “L.A. on the Moon” because of its strikingly urban appearance.
AS10-32-4822 (NASA/Bara).
AS10-32-4822 close-up (NASA/Bara).
In the photograph, over an area of hundreds of square miles (roughly equivalent to the real Los Angeles basin on Earth), there appears a remarkably regular, rectangular, raised, repeating 3D geometric pattern. Large surface grooves stretching for tens of miles appear remarkably similar to streets running across the actual L.A. basin in Southern California. Here and there, small round craters cut into the areas of sharply con
trasting, remarkably rectangular relief, like mile-sized cookie cutters. In a close-up from 4822, this rectilinear, artificial block-like pattern, interspersed with a smattering of remarkably uniform impact craters, is even more apparent. Overall, the overwhelming impression is that of finding a vast, ancient, bombed-out city on the Moon.
Even more bizarrely, after ordering the same picture (AS10-32-4822) from seven different NASA archives, it was eventually determined that there were no less than nine different versions of the same NASA image, all stacked under the same photo-frame number in the catalog. What this meant is depending on where you ordered your blacked out photo from, you would get a completely different picture, with different lighting and visible detail. What we eventually determined was that these different 4822’s were all part of the same sequence of images taken with a power winder camera as Apollo 10 passed over this region of Sinus Medii. Why this was done became obvious fairly quickly. Putting the various 4822’s side-by-side, some objects (because of the change in the lighting angle) become visible and then disappear. And none of them look like natural objects at all.
The “Paperclip” (close-up).
Within this general, very artificial-looking land-scape, a series of smaller, very brilliant, horizontal, vertical and near-vertical features also appear. Some are clearly resolved as rectangular structures, others as possible sky-scrapers. Other features are seen as The “Paperclip” (close-up). merely brilliant, geometrically arrayed points of light—possibly specular reflections from surviving optically flat areas similar to windows or entire glass walls.
One of my favorites of these is an object at the edge of the Los Angeles basin I call the “Paperclip.” It has a central post more than a mile high (and which is casting a shadow on the lunar surface) and some obviously metallic antennae which are also casting a shadow in the surface. Whatever this thing is, it isn’t of natural origin.
