Reality Check: w/ Physicist Maaneli “Max” Derakhshani on Mysterious Moon Towers (Transcript)

I mean, it would be great if they’re there, but most likely what we are looking to see or expecting to find is something like any highly eroded or ruined base or object or something left behind.

And just to give some context, for skyscrapers on Earth, if they were left on the Moon, in 100,000 years the buildings would become this matte frosted type complexion and glass would become opaque. After a million years, structures would be covered in dark lunar dust and surfaces would look moth-eaten with visible pits because of constant meteoric bombardment, micrometeoric bombardment. And after 10 million years, they would start to lean and the walls would start thinning, and they look like Swiss cheese from impacts.

After 100 million years, we would have shattered skeletons. Essentially, heavy steel or titanium frames would remain looking like jagged sandblasted ribs. And after a billion years, the buildings would be basically pummeled into the ground, the regolith, and it would look like a gray hill of dust with occasional metallic glints. And there would be a similar type of erosive process on Mars.

Obviously, this also depends on what the buildings or structures are made of, but the point is that we should expect to see something broadly along these lines. So we should expect to see very ancient structures heavily eroded.

ROSS COULTHART: So if there was a civilization that existed on Mars, say, a million years ago, the implications are there wouldn’t be much left of that civilization that would be discernible as a signature of an intelligent civilization.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Right. It wouldn’t look at least immediately discernible. It looks like they would look like they could be part of the natural geology, but there would be anomalies in the geology. Maybe unusual rectilinear, rectangular geometries, for example.

ROSS COULTHART: Just like we’re seeing, and this is your point, just like we’re seeing with a lot of the imagery you’ve already shown us from the Moon.

Algorithms for Detecting Artificial Structures

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Exactly, exactly. And it turns out we can actually help ourselves. Not only can we look for these types of structures, look for rectangular arrays like Sagan refers to, or other types of deviations from thermodynamic equilibrium. There are algorithms that have been developed by various imaging engineers and analysts using fractal models to detect artificial objects on the surface of the Earth.

This is one example from Michael Stein in 1987. There are other models which are texture-based by Carlato, for example, in 2010. These algorithm detectors have shown to be pretty successful in regards to artificial structures on the Earth’s surface. They have about an 80% accuracy rate of identifying known artificial structures from satellite images of Earth.

There are also other such algorithms that have been applied to the surface of Mars, and I will show some examples. This is an example paper from Carlotta and Stein in the 1990s, and we will see some examples later on.

Last time I showed you an example of these algorithms being applied. In the case of a satellite image of Earth, buildings appear as these very bright areas and the roads as brighter areas, and then the natural terrain as very dark areas. And when applied to the Paracelsus Sea structures, buildings, and monoliths, we see that they stand out as these bright rectilinear structures according to the algorithm. And these very extremely bright mounds also stand out.

And here’s an example of a fractal algorithm applied by Carlado to an airport. The fractal algorithm basically picks up on objects that are very low in self-similarity. Natural terrain tends to have this self-similar character so that a smaller portion is similar to a larger portion of the terrain. But not so with artificial structures like airplanes or buildings and so on, as this algorithm shows here.

Okay, so I just wanted to give this background to prepare people because I’m going to show some images that are going to make use of these algorithms as a supplement to our visual analysis.

A Tower-Like Structure Near the North Pole of the Moon

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: So perhaps the first thing I’ll do is I would like to start with an anomaly discovered near the North Pole of the Moon. An anonymous viewer of the first interview got in contact with you, if I remember correctly, and he told us that there is something unusual looking on the edge of a crater near the north pole of the Moon, and he noted that it no longer appears in some of the public imaging of the Moon, like for example the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) quick map.

Just to give you an illustration, so this is a publicly available 3-dimensional map of the Moon. This is the north pole of the Moon, and we can just zoom in to pretty good resolution anywhere pretty much on the Moon. And in this case, we are looking at a crater called Plaskett, and this is Plaskett U, a satellite of the bigger crater Plaskett.

If we zoom in on this edge here, it’s quite blurry, hopelessly blurry. We can’t really see any of the detail on the surface of the Moon. So it looks like nothing interesting is there. However, I managed to find this article published by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team with higher resolution images of the North Pole, Plaskett and Plaskett U.

So this is the same area as we saw in the quick map, and this article was apparently published in 2026, maybe earlier, it’s hard to say because it’s not dated. And what I noticed is that if I look at this very same spot that our anonymous viewer friend told us about, if we zoom in here, there’s much better resolution. And not only that, but over here there is something interesting. There’s this tinier crater. Let me show you this exact same view in the QuickMap.

ROSS COULTHART: So this is the previously publicly released NASA image.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yes, so this is for the public that NASA puts out. So anybody can go to this website and type in these coordinates and look here for themselves. This one I just found because they have this whole mosaic of images, and I just happened to do some meticulous searching in those images, and I stumbled on this. So this area with this interesting structure with this shadow is completely blurred out in the public quick map.

ROSS COULTHART: Do you think that’s deliberate, Max, knowing what you’re about to show me?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: I can’t say for sure, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility, especially in light of the previous discussions about the Space Act and the Brookings Report and the Clementine Mission imagery. And I think that’s a possibility, and perhaps this just fell through the cracks or was unintentionally left in. But notice how much better resolution we can get here, and notice what we’re looking at. There seems to be a tower-like structure. Actually, we’ll see that it’s actually two of them.

ROSS COULTHART: It’s very tall. Look at that shadow.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Wow. Very long shadow. And I’ve actually calculated based on the known sun angle how tall the structure is based on the size of the shadow and the sun angle. And it turns out to be about 95 feet, which is roughly the height of the Artemis II rocket that sent astronauts to the moon recently.

ROSS COULTHART: Wow.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: So that’s quite tall. And notice there’s all this other surrounding debris and something has rolled.

ROSS COULTHART: Oh my God, that looks like vehicle— go in a bit closer, Max. That looks like vehicle tracks.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, so I cannot go in closer in this particular image. However, I managed to find the raw image strip in NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter archives.

ROSS COULTHART: Love your work, Max. Love your work.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, it took some work, but I was able to stumble on it. So this is the same structure right here.

ROSS COULTHART: Wow.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: And we can get a little bit better resolution now. We can see the second one here as well as the first one.

ROSS COULTHART: Oh, this was a good tip we got from our viewer, wasn’t it?

Mysterious Moon Towers: Analyzing the Schrödinger Anomaly

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, yeah, it was very interesting. And what I like about this example also is that these structures, which are quite tall, there’s nothing like them, at least not of the same extent. There is this other smaller set here, but nothing nearly this big in any direction in this terrain. And there’s no example, there’s no indication of anything like skid marks. It’s not like these structures skidded in from somewhere else. There’s no series of craters which indicate that it bounced to arrive here. They’re just here, sitting here in this otherwise consistent terrain.

ROSS COULTHART: Can I ask you, do things roll on the Moon? You used the word roll earlier. Is that track plausible as a rolling object?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Well, that would depend on how steep this surface area is on the edge of the crater. It’s sort of hard to tell just how steep it is. Notice there is this crevice which might be the edge of another crater. This is definitely another crater edge, but it’s hard to tell how flat or inclined this terrain is. So maybe, but it’s kind of hard to say. The tracks are quite consistent.

ROSS COULTHART: Am I— we use the word tracks. Am I— is this pareidolia on my part? Am I deluding myself visually? Do I see what looks like vehicle tracks? Two clear indentations into the lunar dust?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Well, they look like relatively regularly segmented indentations. So that’s interesting, and it’s not clear to me exactly that those would form just by some irregular boulder rolling down.

ROSS COULTHART: What’s that distance?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: This distance from here to here, if I were to estimate it, probably anywhere from 100, 500 feet to 1,000 feet would be my guess, my estimate.

ROSS COULTHART: And am I deluding myself? Is there something inside that smaller crater down the left-hand side there?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yes, so something, it appears, has rolled from here, one of these objects, down into here.

ROSS COULTHART: And this is the closest you can go with it?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yes, unfortunately this is the closest we can go in the raw imaging data.

ROSS COULTHART: So it looks like a blob, basically.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, or something reflective, something very shiny is reflecting the sunlight even though it’s in the shadowed area of the crater, it seems.

And so the question would be, what could this pair of towers be exactly. It’s hard for me to see how they could be meteoric debris or debris that was kicked up by another larger impact crater which just happened to fall down, because if it fell, I wouldn’t expect it to be falling upright, sticking out orthogonal to the surface, and to be so tall.

Another possibility is that it’s some type of artificial structure. And then the question is, well, what type? Maybe a base of some kind. But there are some other possibilities which actually a well-known physicist and SETI researcher, Paul Davies, discussed.

ROSS COULTHART: Used to live, used to live in Australia. Paul Davies, lovely man.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yes, he’s well known in Australia and he’s the author of a very well-known and highly respected textbook on quantum field theory in curved spaces. He’s a highly respected mainstream theoretical physicist. He’s the director of the SPYON Center at Arizona State University.

He published this in 2011, and he notes, in addition to the idea of a base, he mentions other possibilities with his co-author. He says, “A persistent science fiction theme is that of an alien artifact left on the Moon’s surface long ago, for example Arthur C. Clarke. Such an artifact might originate in several ways. For example, discarded material from an alien expedition or mining operation, instrumentation deliberately installed to monitor Earth, or dormant probe awaiting contact, a variant of the message in a bottle theme. Alien technology might also manifest itself in mining or quarrying activity, or even construction work traces of which might persist for millions of years.”

And he advocates for using the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data to look for them, exactly as we’re doing here.

Paul Davies, Monoliths, and the Case for Artificial Structures

ROSS COULTHART: So, Dr. Max Derakhshani, are we talking about a Space Odyssey 2001 type monolith on the Moon? Is that a distinct possibility?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: I think it’s absolutely a distinct possibility, certainly worthy of consideration. What I might do is, if it’s of interest as well, I can zoom in into these structures with much greater detail resolution using TopazLab’s Gigapixel Upscaling software.

ROSS COULTHART: Ah, come on, seriously, there are multiple tracks there, Max. Gotcha.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, there’s one here, and notice these very— these other objects are just sitting still. They didn’t— they look like—

ROSS COULTHART: They look like radomes, and they’re all casting quite a shadow as well.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, they’re all casting long shadows. They’re all just sitting there quietly, and so it does raise a question of could this in fact be something like what Davies is talking about? Maybe a dormant probe waiting to be accessed. Maybe it’s a monolith of some sort. Maybe it’s some trash or debris, some defunct probe, something of that sort. It doesn’t look like it just crashed into the surface.

ROSS COULTHART: But more importantly, it’s not congruent. It’s not consistent with the rest of the lunar surface. This is anomalous.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yes, I would say so. And to that point, further to that point, if we apply the algorithms that I showed earlier, for example, this is the fractal algorithm, to this area, the brightest area in this image, that is the least fractal or the most anomalous according to the software, according to this algorithm, this artificial object detector that’s used in satellite imaging by the military and private satellite companies, the towers are the ones that are the most anomalous. Yeah, according to that algorithm. And not just this one, but if we go to the other algorithm, we see also that it stands out very starkly as—

ROSS COULTHART: Oh yeah, so we also had blob as a big bright blob.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, so clearly according to these two algorithms, which are well tested, well confirmed, and used in various military and private applications, using our own reasoning about lunar geology and looking for general criteria as to what artificial structures might be like, this is a very promising candidate. And NASA has apparently never noticed this or discussed it, so it remains a possibility there that I think is worth exploring further. Well, thank you, but they don’t want to tell us. Who knows?

NASA’s Role and the Question of Disclosure

ROSS COULTHART: I just want to thank the viewer that sent that in to us, and I’m really grateful, Max, that you’ve done your digging and you found those more high-resolution images. Can I ask you this? Do you think NASA perhaps released those images this year by accident, not realizing what they were releasing?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: That’s always a possibility, I think.

ROSS COULTHART: You’re very diplomatic.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: There are millions of images of the Moon, and I would expect some things, even if the intention is to hide things or to scrub these images of genuine anomalies, some things will fall through the cracks.

ROSS COULTHART: So let’s just ask ourselves, this is at the North Pole of the Moon, right? Why would— is there any geographical advantage conferred to, for example, say, a monolith-type structure or a base or some kind of communication structure if it’s located on a pole? I noticed that the Artemis mission is focused on the south pole of the Moon. I’m really interested now to know whether there’s something on the south pole, but why is the pole of a lunar object important? Is there anything in it?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: The pole itself is just a place that would be convenient to hide something because if they wanted to be discreet. The reason is because it’s very dark over there. We can see that by looking at the previous image, maybe not specifically this one, but here it tends to be darker.

ROSS COULTHART: I see. Yeah. And so it’s a good hideout. It’s a good hideout. Yeah.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Just like the backside, the far side of the Moon. The poles could also be good hideouts.

ROSS COULTHART: Well, that’s a zinger. I mean, we’ll put that on the list for us to put to the new NASA administrator and ask him what the hell’s going on. Why is it that their original photographs released to the public are blurred, apparently quite deliberately? And why is it that the perhaps inadvertent release this year of objects appears to show something artificial?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, I think it’s a fair question to ask them why this discrepancy and what do they think it is, or do they have any interest in exploring it, and to see what they say.

ROSS COULTHART: Wow, well, you’ve really got me going there, Max. That’s exciting. Keep on going. I’m in your hands.

The Schrödinger Anomaly: A Second Case

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: All right, so this second example was brought to my attention by our friend Jeff Clarkshank, who’s a brilliant—

ROSS COULTHART: Another Aussie.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, another Aussie. Brilliant intelligence analyst, brilliant researcher. And he brought this to my attention. I was not previously aware of it. He said, “Here’s this Schrödinger anomaly you should look at in this Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter article, Secrets of Schrödinger.”

So this is in an area of the Moon, a sinuous rille on the near side called Valles Trottiri, and it’s right around here. And anybody can look at this in the quick map as well, but it’s very blurry, so you can’t really see what we’re going to see unless you can access the raw images or read this article. Because in this article, they post a really high quality pair of images. And so this is the full narrow-angle camera image that we’re going to look at.

If we zoom in here, first of all, we see there’s all this debris on this rille, but then there’s also something that has apparently moved in a track.

ROSS COULTHART: Another one. Oh my goodness.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: And this is about as close as we can get in this image, if I remember correctly. Yes. And then this is also the raw image strip showing the same sort of structure from a different direction. So this is a different image and different direction, slightly oblique. But we can get a better picture or a better view by using the upscaling software, the professional grade.

ROSS COULTHART: And just to be clear, this is software that’s used by NASA itself. It’s not some algorithm that’s creating false parabolic imagery.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, this algorithm, the software is professional grade. It is trained on millions of images, Earth-based but also not Earth-based. NASA does use it sometimes to upscale its imaging, and it’s not like free AI upscaling software that produces extra legs or ears or whatever the case may be on objects and photographs. And so we can have a pretty good degree of confidence that what it’s showing us is reliable.

So here is an example of the upscaling. So this is one upscaling model that it produces.

ROSS COULTHART: Yeah, that looks perfectly natural, Max. There’s nothing at all artificial about that.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, and notice this looks all connected, this set of blocks or whatever they may be. They look all bounded together, and yet the track that’s forming with these periodic humps seems to be only formed by these three guys. I don’t quite understand how tracks like this could form from an object this wide, which is much wider than the tracks themselves.

ROSS COULTHART: And do we have any idea how high that object is based on the shadows you’re seeing there?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yes. So I managed to calculate using the raw imaging data in that previous image to estimate the height of this object and the height of these objects based on the length of the shadows and the sun angle. So the other image I showed you gives you that information, and it comes out to about the height of this one, this right angular-ish structure, is about 10 to 15 feet tall, and this one is about 20 to 25 feet tall based on the longer shadow.

So taller than a person, not necessarily the size of a building, but perhaps the size of something that could be like a vehicle of some kind. That would be my— at least roughly human-sized.

ROSS COULTHART: Wow.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: And so this is another upscaling model from Topaz Labs Gigapixel applied to this image. And yeah, this one makes it look more rectilinear. We can zoom in further and get a better shot from the two models, and we can get a broader view and do an upscaling with the broader view. But it produces a very similar result.

And we can also apply the two algorithms, the fractal algorithm and the texture-based, or bits algorithm. Let’s look at the fractal algorithm. So remember, the brighter the areas, the less fractal, hence the more anomalous. Well, what is extremely bright and standing out among other things? It’s the probe, or whatever we want to call it, the Schrödinger anomaly.

ROSS COULTHART: Whereabouts, whereabouts is this Schrödinger anomaly, Max?

De Forest Crater and Lunar Anomalies

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Aha, let me open this. Oh, do you mean whereabouts in the image, or whereabouts?

ROSS COULTHART: No, where on the moon is it?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: On a pole? It’s, if I remember correctly, it’s on the near side facing Earth, so not near a pole. But let’s see. So what I can do, if there is interest, I can try to type in the coordinates of Valles Trottieri in this global map and then it will show us.

ROSS COULTHART: No, no, it really doesn’t matter, but I think the point that you’ve made is a valid one that I see. Okay, so it’s near side, kind of slap bang in the middle.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Okay, yeah, exactly. Wow.

ROSS COULTHART: So I mean, you’ve raised there two, I think, entirely legitimate questions about what appear to be, how does one say this, anomalous objects that are not consistent with the rest of the lunar landscape that your fractal algorithms are assessing as anomalous. If you were a scientist investigating any planet and you were looking for life, where would you go on the planet if you had objects like that? You’d focus on those, wouldn’t you?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: That’s what I would do. I would say, is there something that is geologically anomalous in regards to lunar geology? Is it anomalous compared to the surrounding terrain? And given that we have good reasons, general reasons to think that there could be something extraterrestrial left on the moon, we should find the most promising candidates and then send probes or astronauts to go and examine them in more detail. That is certainly what I would do.

NASA and the Question of Transparency

ROSS COULTHART: Absolutely. Yeah, no, I mean, I think you’ve raised entirely legitimate questions. What I don’t understand is why science hasn’t taken a lot of these lunar anomalies seriously. I mean, I’m not saying NASA is covering up, but there is a legitimate question now in my mind, especially with the first North Pole image you showed us. Is NASA deliberately obscuring images to hide what’s on the lunar surface?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: It’s a question that has to be asked, I think, because if a scientist outside of NASA can find anomalies like these in their own data, it’s hard to believe that they as a team or as a group of scientists have not found anomalies similar to such, or maybe the same anomalies, and yeah, they haven’t told the public if that’s the case. And so yeah, it raises a number of questions. And hopefully we can get some answers from the new administrator of NASA, especially in connection with President Trump’s recent pledge to release all of the files related to extraterrestrials.

ROSS COULTHART: Well, you got to say it for the president. He’s promising transparency. So let’s make sure we include these in the questions that get asked. Keep on going, Max. I’m enjoying this.

Paracelsus C Structures: Algorithm Validation

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Very good. I just wanted to show people that the Paracelsus C structures also show, or are confirmed by the algorithms, as unusual. I managed to actually code the algorithms according to Carlado and Stein’s papers into a Python script and then apply them, and the results match what Carlado and Stein have found in their other contexts, other applications. So we can take them as trustworthy for these newer lunar applications. So this is the original Paracelsus C structures on the left, and this is what the algorithm shows on the right. It picks them out, but not just them.

ROSS COULTHART: And for those of our audience that haven’t watched the previous programs, I recommend that you join us. You put into the Reality Check search engine Dr. Max Derakhshani, and you will find his exposition of the Paracelsus C objects in the previous shows.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yes, so it’s this trio here and then these very, very bright mounds. And it’s not just perfectly natural-looking rectilinear objects there. Yeah.

And another test I did that is also insightful is, according to those tests of those algorithms on terrestrial objects and formations, they tend to be more accurate when the sun angle is lower, or rather when the sun angle above the horizon is lower than higher. So to test this, I found an image of the Paracelsus C structures when the sun angle was higher. That’s on the left, and the algorithm still picks them out, but they’re fainter. Now, if we look at those structures with a much lower, steeper sun angle— so this is a third distinct image that I found—

ROSS COULTHART: —definitely sees anomalies.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, now it’s more prominent. And so the Paracelsus structures respond to the algorithms in precisely the way that actually artificial structures on Earth respond to the algorithms. So that’s another piece of evidence.

And also the fractal algorithm shows that they are the most anomalous of all of them because they are the only areas where you see white spots here, which indicate fractal areas. So now it’s not just a subjective eye test. We also have these objective ground truth validated algorithms that support it. So that’s a nice, helpful additional piece of evidence, I think.

ROSS COULTHART: Wow, okay, wonderful. This is all good fun. Keep us going, Max. I’m excited.

De Forest Crater: Wishbone Towers and Spires

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Very good. So I will now go to the De Forest structures or formations.

ROSS COULTHART: And we’re still on the Moon here.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: We are still on the Moon, yes sir. Let’s see, where should I start? Perhaps I’ll go to the De Forest objects. Yeah, so let’s do that.

In the previous episode, we went to another crater on the lunar far side. Paracelsus C was on the far side. De Forest Crater is another one on the far side, and we saw a number of anomalous, unusual structures on the far side. Inside this crater, one was this wishbone-shaped looking tower structure as shown in the left-hand image. And I applied the fractal algorithm to it, and they respond. But in addition, the surrounding terrain also produces a very strong response to the algorithm.

ROSS COULTHART: Oh, that’s interesting.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: The tower, especially here on the left. And it’s not just this particular object, but we can also— apologies, let me— this is a zoom in. This is a different algorithm, rather, the BITS algorithm. This one produces a very sharp response from the wishbone-shaped structure. And I should stress, there’s no fine-tuning in any of this. I’m just applying the very same algorithm to an image with no other additional inputs. So the algorithm is saying, this is very anomalous, this wishbone-shaped structure. Look here.

ROSS COULTHART: Right.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: And again, in this zoom-out view of the wishbone-shaped structure in the De Forest Crater, you can see it’s picked out. So we have a broad view and a very close-up view, again validating the same results.

And we also saw that there are these spires in the De Forest Crater, a trio or four in what looks like a row. And if we look at the shadows of them, they look very castle-like as spires. And in terms of their size, I calculated this based on the shadow length and the sun angle in this photograph. They are about the height of like one-third to two-thirds the height of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France. So these are— wow— structures, these three in a row. And the algorithm, the fractal one, picks them out, sure enough, especially this one in the bottom here. And then—

ROSS COULTHART: —no, I know you’re not a geologist, Max, but is there anything that could be intrinsic to the Moon’s geology that could explain the formation of such anomalous rock-like, assuming they are natural objects? Is there anything about the geology of the Moon that might explain how such objects could form? Something the height of, or part of the height of, the Eiffel Tower?

Could Lunar Geology Explain These Structures?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Indeed, I’m not a geologist, but to the best of my understanding of lunar geology and NASA’s understanding of lunar geology, there is no plausible geological mechanism on the moon that could produce towers like these.

Because, number one, volcanic activity does not occur on the moon, or at least it ended around 3 billion years ago, at least in the vast majority of the moon. There are no tectonic plates to shift underneath. There are moonquakes, but the moonquakes are very, very weak by comparison, and they don’t produce uplifted sharp spire-like structures like this.

Overwhelmingly, the erosion that occurs on the Moon is by micrometeoric bombardment because of the lack of the Moon’s atmosphere to burn up micrometeorites. So this bombardment, this constant rain of micrometeors, just produces this erosive flattening effect. And if these were formed, say, billions of years ago, these structures within this crater, sometime after the crater was produced, well, they would have been subject to billions of years of micrometeoric bombardment. And if that were the case, I don’t see how they could have these rectilinear sharp spire-like geometries. They should be very flat, smooth mounds by now.

So I frankly don’t see what plausible lunar geological mechanism there is. I’m open to people trying to propose alternatives, but I just don’t see it myself.

ROSS COULTHART: Okay. Gee, fascinating. Keep on rolling, my friend.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Okay. Well, continuing on, the other algorithm again really responds strongly to the spires. And again, this is just a distance view. We see the same sort of algorithmic strong response. This is another mouth-like structure in the crater in the same area. I just call it that as a metaphor because it looks like a mouth to me, but essentially it’s a very big structure. Again building-sized, the algorithm responds to it.

ROSS COULTHART: Can we zoom in at all, or is that the closest we can get?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: In this particular image, we can zoom in like this, but it gets blurry. I do have a very high-resolution image of it, but in this particular comparison image, this is about as sharp as we can get.

ROSS COULTHART: Right, okay.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: It does produce this very sharp response unlike anything else. So yeah, can we see this?

ROSS COULTHART: Can we see the super high resolution version?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Sure. So let me then go to this list. I just have to make sure. Okay, so this is the original, if I remember correctly. Yes, this is the original from the raw image strip. So we can get quite close, but then it gets a little bit pixelated and blurred.

ROSS COULTHART: Hmm, hard to know really.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, and the algorithm, or rather the upscaling software applied to it, produces something like this as the upscaled feature. So again, if we think about erosion on the Moon, if this was an artificial structure but ancient, billions of years old, it could well have been pummeled into something like this mouth-like eroded structure. But then the question would be, what’s inside of it? If there was something artificial inside of it, they could well remain intact because there’s no air or water to erode anything inside of the structure.

ROSS COULTHART: Couldn’t the mouth just be a shadow caused by a lip of rock?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: This could be. So it could be that it’s not actually hollow, but we can’t really tell either way from this particular image. The sun is coming from the right, so that’s why it’s very bright here. This is the most reflective part. So it could be— it looks to me like there’s an indentation here. So it does look to me like there is an inside region. But to be really sure, we would need to send something there directly, right.

Aristarchus Crater: A Bright Anomaly

And so that’s the example of De Forest Crater, some samples. There are more examples. But those are just the ones that I sort of chose to highlight.

We also looked last time at Aristarchus, the brightest crater on the surface of the Moon, or at least the largest bright crater. And on the left is the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s image at high-frequency lighting, so near the UV spectrum, and we see that it’s very, very bright compared to the surrounding lunar terrain. And again, the algorithm responds to it quite strongly, at least the BITS algorithm does. The fractal algorithm doesn’t respond to it very strongly, so I haven’t included that.

But within Aristarchus Crater— apologies, let me just back up— there is this, this is an oblique image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter of Aristarchus. And if you open this image and you zoom in around here near the floor of this extremely bright crater that we discussed in the second interview, we find that there is something unusual. And I will just go to it. There is this object or structure that, to me at least, looks like it could be like a cave entry or an entry into some sort of a hill of some kind, with this being—

ROSS COULTHART: —it’s certainly like, it almost looks like a battered concrete tube.

Aristarchus Crater and Lunar Anomalies

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, and well, a cube. And also I see this as a U-shaped cylindrical top area or ceiling. And well, we can actually get a better view. This is one possible upscaling from Gigapixel. This is another. And what’s really striking to me about it is also that the fractal algorithm responds very strongly to it, as does the other, the bits algorithm.

ROSS COULTHART: The enigma of Aristarchus.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, so Aristarchus is showing anomalies within anomalies. So not just the crater itself from afar view, but even things inside of it have interesting features. And NASA has never actually visited Aristarchus Crater with a rover or with manned missions. There was a plan to do so on Apollo 18, but then Apollo 18 was canceled, and so that never happened.

But now, apart from that, there are many different directions or examples we could go and this one I liked, and it’s a bit different. This is an oblique image taken by the mapping camera from Apollo 17 as they were orbiting the Moon. So this crater here is called Euclid Crater. If you were to look at it from a top-down view, direct view, you would see that it has an inside platform that’s very triangular-like. And it’s surrounded by all of this white surface highlands, or it seemed to be highlands. There’s also this interesting cylindrical-looking structure with this little arm extending out that casts the shadow and there are all these other very interesting surface features.

ROSS COULTHART: What does that suggest to you?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Well, notice how rectilinear this Highland surface appears to be. And so it looks to me like it’s highly geometrical. It looks to me like there is a lot of unusual geometry.

ROSS COULTHART: Yeah, there’s a lot of lines, a lot of lines running in that direction. You know, it’s—

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: And so we can test that too. We can again apply the— apologies— apply the algorithms. So the first one produces a pretty strong response to all of this area or terrain, and not just this, but also the fractal algorithm gives a very strong response, especially up here, this row of structures, and also around the edge of the crater.

ROSS COULTHART: Fascinating.

Euclid Crater and the Lunar Orbiter Images

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: So I think it’s interesting to take a closer look at U-Kerb Crater.

ROSS COULTHART: And when Apollo 17 flew over it, did they acknowledge the anomalousness of it?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: That’s a good question. There are transcripts of them talking about what they’re seeing. I could go check and see if they—

ROSS COULTHART: Yeah, let us know. I would love to know whether they picked it up as something anomalous.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, that’s a good question. A friend of mine actually claims he spoke with astronaut Edgar Mitchell many years ago when he was still alive in New York City, and asked them what’s inside Euclid Crater and said he got an interesting response. But I’d have to probe him a bit more to find out exactly what he was told.

But to continue on, another interesting example to me is this one from the Lunar Orbiter. So the Lunar Orbiter was an imaging probe that was sent to the Moon before any of the Apollo missions in, I guess, the mid-1960s. And so it took these black and white images of a certain region of the Moon in this case, and this image shows what I think are some interesting surface features or patterns.

For example, around here, if we were to zoom in to this image right around here, there are these ripples and rectilinear indentations patterns in the otherwise the mare surface, which is usually smooth. And not just there, but also further up here, around to the left, and also around here. And here.

And so again, we can apply the algorithms shown earlier and see what they say. And they agree, especially this one with the little circular area, a very strong response. Again, thinking about it in context, if there was some sort of structure built around here, say, a billion years ago, by now it would probably be imprinted into the soil surface as a techno-fossil, as the AI comparison mentioned.

And I should say that I didn’t just use Google AI, but I’ve used also other AIs like Grok. But also I’ve researched the question, generally speaking, what would skyscrapers of New York City look like under erosion on the Moon, on Earth, on Mars. And it turns out there’s a literature on that. What would structures look like under erosive processes on different planets? And so these are all scientifically informed sort of extrapolations, but this particular algorithm confirms that there is something geometrically anomalous here consistent with Sagan’s criterion, and so does the other algorithm. So that’s yet another example.

The Apollo 12 Ring Formation

But to sort of switch gears to something a bit different, there is an interesting example of a rock formation or boulder formation nearby the lunar— the Apollo 12 Lunar module on the surface of the Moon. So this was discovered by Holger Eisenberg, who noticed it in an image from the Indian Space Agency’s probe Chandrayaan-2 back in 2021. This is the Apollo 12 probe or lunar module on the surface, and then here you can see that there is what looks to be a ring-like boulder formation with the tall— they’re in the center projecting the shadow. And this is 100 meters, so I guess you could say this is about 10 to 20 meters in diameter approximately. And let me perhaps open this to get a better view. It’s about this—

ROSS COULTHART: It’s a—

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Well, the width is larger than the width of the lunar module. So the sizes of the rocks are about the sizes of the astronauts themselves. So far too big for the astronauts to have just picked them up or placed them there. A couple of my colleagues once suggested that maybe that’s an explanation for how this ring-like formation could have been formed.

ROSS COULTHART: I was going to say, is it possible the astronauts did this?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, but then, yeah, so they would be too big for the astronauts to lift up, and we’ll see an example of this.

ROSS COULTHART: Do we know, did the Apollo 12 astronauts go to this site?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yes, so they— this was their lunar module when they landed. They landed around here, and there are actually photographs of them walking. This is an upscaled version from Topaz Labs Gigapixel AI that confirms that the ring-like formation is real, or at least the AI sees it as well. Here’s an image, a close-up of the ring formation in a surface photograph taken by one of the astronauts.

ROSS COULTHART: Looks less convincing to me there, to be honest.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yes, so at this angle it’s kind of steep and you can’t really see it and there’s no real context. So it’s also in Surveyor 3, which is a robotic probe. So this is one of the astronauts, Alan Bean or Pete Conrad, one of the two. They’re touching Surveyor 3.

So what’s interesting here is that the Surveyor 3 robotic probe landed here before any astronauts landed on the Moon, and then Apollo 12 landed across from Surveyor 3 over there, and in between is this, which means NASA obviously attached some significance to this site. It would seem so. And they say that the reason they landed here is because they wanted to retrieve something from the Surveyor 3 robotic probe. I guess perhaps some data, but it’s also interesting that this unusual formation is there in between the two. To me, at least, that is an interesting coincidence.

And there’s the other kind of far-out view. So Surveyor 3 probe and the lunar module, and then the ring formation seemingly in between the two. There is in the transcripts some indication that they noticed it, or that one of them noticed it. But I haven’t prepared that offhand. This is another photograph from another person using it.

ROSS COULTHART: Really does it— from the top shot, it really does look like a deliberate object, an artificial structure.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, I mean, there’s nothing at all like this in thousands and thousands of photos of the lunar terrain looking straight down. You don’t see anything like this at all, or at least I have not.

ROSS COULTHART: And am I mistaken? Is that 12 rocks? Is it a clock?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: It’s a cylindrical formation. Let’s see, probably here we can count a little bit better. 7, 8, 9, 10, maybe about 12 or so. It’s all coincidence. I mean, elliptical.

ROSS COULTHART: Yeah, it’s hilarious.

The Blue Ghost Horizon Glow Revisited

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: It would be interesting, I think. Well, unfortunately we can’t ask Alan Bean because he’s dead, and Pete Conrad is dead too, so we are kind of stuck. But it would be interesting to know if they had said something about it or noticed it before when they were alive, when they came back or made a comment.

And then as far as other examples go, I wanted to also say something about the Blue Ghost images of the lunar horizon glow that I showed in the first interview. So one of the questions that I raised, or that I mentioned, is that there’s a question about— well, if you look closely at the original image you would notice that there is a concentric dome-like layering in the lighting structure, in the lighting pattern. And the question was, is that a real pattern in whatever medium is scattering the light, or is it an image artifact, for example a JPEG compression artifact?

And the question was an open one, and that’s one of the reasons we sought to find unprocessed raw images of this horizon glow and to acquire them from Firefly Aerospace and NASA. But we were told that no such images were ever downlinked by Firefly and NASA. So we couldn’t really address the question that way. So I tried to address it in a different way.

The good thing about Topaz Labs’ Gigapixel upscaling software is that it also has settings to address compression artifacts from, for example, JPEG-compressed photographs. So it can decompress those photographs or remove compression artifacts that would, for example, produce color banding or banding of light. And so applying that software to this image, this is one model with maximum decompression applied, and well, the result is there is still dome-like layering in the lighting pattern that is visible. And it’s not just in that particular model. Here is another model.

ROSS COULTHART: And just, Max, for our audience who didn’t see the first show, can you explain why it’s odd, why it’s anomalous that there would be any kind of dome-like— what do you call it— glow.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yes, the reason it would be anomalous is because according to NASA, the cause of this glow in the first place— which I should note, the sun is actually— this is not the sun. The sun is somewhere below the horizon. So whatever is causing this lighting is some sort of medium above the lunar surface that is scattering sunlight coming from the Sun or the solar disk that’s below this horizon.

And NASA’s proposed explanation for decades was that dust is being electrostatically levitated from the lunar surface, and that dust, which is made up of a lot of glass, glass-like material, is then refracting or scattering sunlight that’s coming from below the horizon towards the camera.

ROSS COULTHART: And that sounds plausible to me.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, except NASA’s own further studies of that hypothesis have disconfirmed it. In other words, they have not been able to confirm in various in-situ measurements of the dust population that there is anywhere near enough dust to produce this sort of optical effect. And experiments in the lab have also shown that the levitating mechanism proposed doesn’t actually work with actual lunar dust. And not only that, but even if it were the case, electrostatically levitated dust would not form layered dome-like geometric patterns. It would just be floating around incoherently like an incoherent cloud of dust.

ROSS COULTHART: So what’s a plausible explanation for this, Max? Are we suggesting that this is something artificial?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Well, if it’s not dust but it’s something glass-like that can— semi-transparent that can refract sunlight, then we are essentially forced to infer that it’s not dust, it’s not gas, so it’s some sort of other glass-like semi-transparent medium that extends up from the lunar surface into the lunar sky. If it’s not something natural, then it’s got to be something artificial.

And that’s an inference you can draw whether or not the concentric layering is real. But if in addition the concentric layering is real, as these Topaz upscaled images seem to imply, then that is further strong evidence that whatever medium is scattering the sunlight is not something naturally produced on the Moon. And if it’s not naturally produced on the Moon, it’s artificial and it’s not human-made.

ROSS COULTHART: Wow. Okay. Another mystery.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Significance of this. Yeah. And then these are other upscaling models that also show the same.

ROSS COULTHART: Why don’t we call that the Blue Ghost Globe?

Lunar Pits, Caves, and Underground Tubes

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah. The blue ghost globe. That’s, that would be a good name for it, I think. And it’s really surprising to me that NASA claims they, or Firefly Aerospace claims they did not downlink any unprocessed raw images because of this phenomenon, because this was the pinnacle of the mission on the final night of the mission. And they claim that these images are going to be used by scientists to study the lunar horizon glow phenomenon. And one would think that they would want the best quality images possible in order to do that. Which JPEG-compressed images are not. So anyway, that to me is a bit strange and questionable.

But moving on to other examples, something that is not perhaps well known either is that there are pits and caves on the lunar surface that were discovered by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. My late colleague Fran Ridge at the Society for Planetary Study Research wrote this interesting article in 2016 about these lunar caves. So the orbiter actually discovered these caves in the imaging. This is one example. It’s a pit actually in the lunar surface. And here are some— this is one area, Rima Marius Mare region. This is another pit or skylight, so this is actually like a hole in the lunar surface. These are some other ones discovered by—

ROSS COULTHART: So they’re not just craters, right?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Exactly. This is another one where you can really see it in detail.

ROSS COULTHART: Wow.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: There is this indentation here, and this is just a pit that runs deep. And apparently hundreds of these have been found by now by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. And what’s interesting, the Reconnaissance Orbiter has now imaged over 200 pits as of 2016 that show the signature of being skylights into subsurface voids or caverns ranging in diameter from about 16 feet to more than 2,950 feet in diameter.

And it’s not just these images, but NASA researchers have also discovered that some of these pits are connected by massive underground tubes that are enormous. Like, we’re talking about thousands of feet across and hundreds of feet high. This is an example. The Grail.

ROSS COULTHART: So when you say tubes, are you talking about constructed tunnels or are you talking about something that’s been created by natural processes?

Lava Tubes: Natural Formation or Something More?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Very good question. So the interpretation of these tubes is that of a natural formation. For example, this article using GRAIL gravity gradients interprets these tubes as lava tubes, lunar lava tubes produced by ancient lava formed by volcanic eruptions and lava flows billions of years ago.

But what’s interesting is the size of these things. The extent of the lava tube in this particular study discovered with the GRAIL probe with the forward method was 60 kilometers in length, 9 kilometers in width, 605 meters in depth. So that’s like 1,800 feet in depth and 55 meters in height. So multiply that by 3 approximately. So that’s 180 feet in height approximately. And the gradient features indicate that the skylight located on the eastern side of the tube— so there’s an entrance at the surface— could serve as an entry to the main part of the lava tube.

There is nothing like this found on Earth. No lava tubes of remotely this size exist on Earth, and even on the Moon, this particular lava tube discovered is anomalously enormous. There is no other one like it. So when we consider the possibility that there could have been a base on the Moon, one of the other points made by people is that lava tubes could be a natural candidate for building a base. In fact, NASA has even considered that for its own future bases on the Moon, to basically take a lava tube and to turn it into an underground cavern or base for the astronauts. Well, an ET civilization visiting Earth and wanting to put a base could surely think to do the same thing. Perhaps they grew it out and they turned it into a massive underground base.

ROSS COULTHART: Can I just exercise my skeptical brain for a moment, Max? Why do we know for sure that they are, quote, “lava tubes,” i.e., natural objects? How do we know they’re not artificially created tunnels with entrance ports?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, well, they are near ancient lava flows in this particular case. The argument is that because in these photographs— I will just show an example— these are ancient lava ridges or chains, they say, well, then these tubes underneath could plausibly have been formed by similar volcanic processes.

ROSS COULTHART: And how do we know that there are tubes? Is this done with LiDAR imaging that goes under the surface of the Moon? How do we know that there are tubes? Void areas?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, so one is by looking at differences in the gravitational pull of the lunar surface and detecting that there is some sort of gravitational anomaly underneath the surface, which means that there’s some missing mass. Another is through lunar radar sounders used, for example, by the Japanese probe SELENE. So ground-penetrating radar, in other words. These are the two main methods that have been used to make these inferences of these large underground spaces.

But the point I would make is that even if the lava tubes were formed naturally, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that they were actually occupied and turned into something. And it doesn’t rule out the possibility that a smaller lava tube originally was formed and then it was expanded through construction activity, like Paul Davies and his colleague, for example, suggested could have occurred. So these are consistent with the possibility of a natural process explanation of the lava tubes, right?

ROSS COULTHART: At least whatever it is, the science is suggesting there are massive voids— yes— kilometers long under the surface of the Moon.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, 60 kilometers long, so about 180 miles in length, and 9— so 27 kilometers in width, 27 miles in width. These are enormous, enormous structures. And again, it’s only logical, I think, to send a probe there to look, to go inside of them and look around and see what might be there.

ROSS COULTHART: Wow.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: So does NASA talk—

ROSS COULTHART: Does NASA talk about this at all? I mean, it’s great that it’s being looked at, presumably by Chinese scientists. It’s interesting that China is taking a close interest, but does NASA acknowledge that these tubes are real?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yes, NASA acknowledges that, but they say that these are just naturally formed. They never discuss the possibility of them as technological signatures, or as perhaps being the locations of potential extraterrestrial bases from a past ET visitation of the Moon. They only talk about it as a natural formation and as a promising candidate for a future lunar base to be built inside of.

ROSS COULTHART: Sure.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: But people who do talk about it in the context of technological signatures are people like Paul Davies in that article and my colleagues at the Society for Planetary SETI Research and maybe other people involved in SETI research as well. But NASA generally avoids talking about things like that.

Artemis II Astronauts and Unexplained Lunar Flashes

ROSS COULTHART: Fascinating. This gets more and more fascinating. Gee, Max, there’s just so much here. I mean, we’ve probably now at dozens of places on the Moon that really do beg the question. I’m wondering whether in today’s show we’re going to get to Mars because there’s so much still on the Moon.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, well, I was going to say some things about the Artemis II astronauts’ observations and some interesting anomalies there, but I could also just jump to Mars, however you—

ROSS COULTHART: Well, no, let’s— I’m interested to hear because one thing I’m fascinated by is that Elon Musk for years has been going on and on and on about the need to get to Mars as quickly as possible. And now he’s kind of abandoned overnight the idea of going to Mars in the short term and he’s focusing now very much on this lunar operation. And I’m intrigued why. I’m really fascinated what’s going on behind the scenes. So what’s going on with the Artemis astronauts?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Well, in terms of the Artemis astronauts, there are two things I would want to comment on that I think are interesting and worth commenting on. The first is— let me start here. So NBC News had these live updates of what the astronauts were seeing when the mission was happening as they were orbiting the Moon or flying around the Moon. One of the observations made was that the crew reports seeing 4 impact flashes as asteroids strike the Moon. So Reid Wiseman said he saw 2 impacts, and Hansen saw another 2 on the dark side of the Moon, or the side of the Moon that was dark. So they saw visible glints of light, which they attributed to asteroid strikes.

ROSS COULTHART: You don’t?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, so I think that they are slightly misleading the public, if not considerably so. Now, why do I say that? If you remember in the first interview, or rather it was the second interview, I showed a video of an interview of Farouk El-Baz, the chief lunar geologist of the Apollo missions, who recounted an incident during Apollo 16 when— I think it was Mattingly, the astronaut Mattingly— I think he was either the pilot or the commander— he said he saw a flash of light on the lunar surface, and he reported it to Mission Control.

And El-Baz said to him, okay, when you come around the Moon again, keep an eye out for another flash, and if it happens, we’re going to look at the seismometer. Well, they actually said they looked at the seismometers that they left on the Moon in previous missions, which measure vibrations of the Moon’s surface, and they said they found no indication of any sort of blips in the seismometer activities that would be consistent with an asteroid strike.

ROSS COULTHART: So if there was an asteroid that hit the Moon that was large enough to generate a flash of light, you would expect to see some kind of seismic disturbance.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Exactly right. And El-Baz says, we didn’t see it on the first incident. And then he said, keep an eye out, and if you see another flash, we’re going to look again. And so sure enough, Mattingly saw another flash in a different part of the Moon, and El-Baz and his team looked at the seismometers, and there was no change in activity. And he says at the end of the interview, so it remains a mystery to this day. We don’t know what causes these flashes.

Harrison Schmitt in Apollo 17 also saw multiple flashes of light. And again, nobody at the time had correlated it with seismometer activity. Now, to my surprise, NASA recently published a paper examining the Apollo astronauts’ observations of light flashes with seismic data from the seismometers on the Moon surface. And then they talked about it in connection with the Artemis observations. So this was really just published very recently after the Artemis mission, or rather just before the Artemis mission, if I remember correctly.

What they find— the bottom line is that this team of NASA scientists notes that during Apollo 16 and 17 missions, astronauts reported 3 candidate impact flashes on the lunar surface. These occurred when 4 seismic stations on the Apollo Seismic Network were recording data on the Moon. Harrison Schmitt, who’s one of the authors of this paper, suggested that the timing and location of the impact flashes should be cross-referenced against seismic data, but no analysis of this type had ever been published before, so they did it. And what they found is that there was no match. So in other words, the flashes were not matched or correlated at all with any changes in the seismic data.

ROSS COULTHART: And so we now have official— the significance of that is we now have official confirmation in a NASA paper, or at least a paper written by a NASA astronaut— yes— which basically supports the idea that there was no seismic correlation to suggest that those flashes were caused by an asteroid hitting the Moon.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yes.

ROSS COULTHART: What could be an alternative explanation for these lunar flashes?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Well, that’s essentially the question. Among so-called natural, prosaic explanations, one that’s been suggested is levitating dust scattering light along the lines of lunar horizon glow. Another has been that there are gas jets emitted from certain parts of the Moon, and those high-pressure gases get ionized by solar wind and reflect the light, and they look like flashes of light. But the authors here actually discussed these possibilities in connection with transient lunar phenomena, but they admit that these are all highly speculative and there’s no evidence of outgassing of this type. And so they say it’s a mystery.

Now, this paper was published before the Artemis mission. Now, Reid Wiseman is just saying confidently— or the astronauts are saying confidently— that, oh yeah, it’s asteroid strikes. But if you go and look and ask, how did they confirm that? Was there any seismic activity that confirmed it? No, there was no such evidence or data, at least not that I’m aware of, that I could find. So it remains— I think this is an interesting observation made by the Artemis 2 astronauts. I think they should not jump to the conclusion that, oh, it’s just merely asteroids hitting the lunar surface.

Artemis II Anomalies: Seismic Activity, Solar Eclipse, and Unexplained Light Phenomena

ROSS COULTHART: There’s another question for the new NASA administrator. By the way, are there any seismic monitors that are near the locations where the Artemis astronauts saw these lunar flashes? And is it possible that we might be able to see if there is a correlation between the seismic measurements and those lunar flashes, that we could have a look at to review this paper?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, well, so that’s what I initially looked for to see. Did NASA look at their seismometers to see if there was any activity? And I couldn’t find any sort of report or discussion of that from NASA. It seems that it just comes down to an assumption that, oh, these must be caused by asteroid strikes because it’s—

ROSS COULTHART: But are there seismometers— yeah, I can’t even say it.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Seismometers.

ROSS COULTHART: Yeah, seismometers. Are there seismometers that would legitimately have likely measured if there were asteroid strikes at the time of the Artemis mission?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: That’s my understanding. If they’re big enough to produce light flashes that the astronauts could see from thousands of miles away from the lunar surface, those should cause reverberations.

Keep in mind that when the astronauts did this — I think it was, if I remember correctly, it was Apollo 12 — they basically dropped a portion of the lunar module capsule into the lunar surface and it impacted and it caused reverberations all around the lunar surface that lasted for, if I’m not mistaken, hours. And the seismometers, which were very far away from them, picked up the reverberations in the lunar surface. So the lunar surface is very sensitive to impacts in that sense. It can — it would be detectable.

ROSS COULTHART: Just to develop your theme, if it’s full of hollow lava tubes or tunnels, not surprising.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Well, yes. It’s something to consider. And I think that they should not jump to conclusions, or what appeared to be jumping to conclusions by just assuming that these light flashes are nothing really remarkable.

But kind of along similar lines, Hansen also, at one point, as they were passing by, the moon eclipsed the sun completely. So the Sun was much smaller than the Moon from their field of view, and they reported something that was also very interesting. Hansen provided a vivid description of the solar eclipse to mission controllers in Houston. He said, “One of the other things I want to describe which was surprising to me, but the entire Moon is lit up. It’s glowing behind the entire Moon.” Hansen said he thought the Moon would appear dark against the blackness of space, but the Sun lit up the Moon from behind. He described the glow as measuring easily 10 widths or diameters of the Sun around the entire Moon.

The Mysterious Glow Around the Moon

ROSS COULTHART: Okay, what’s an explanation for that, Max?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Well, that’s kind of an open question. Here are the images that were taken. This is one of the images taken. So this image was taken by the NASA Artemis II astronauts at — during the — well, this is now the Sun is peeking over the horizon here. This image is with the full eclipse, and notice, so the Sun is behind the Moon, but there’s this glow all around the Moon in various directions. And there’s lighting here that’s being caused by something. They say it’s due to Earthshine. So the Earth is — they say is illuminating this part of the surface.

But it’s unusual because, one, what is the medium that’s in space scattering the sunlight? NASA says they’re investigating if it’s due to zodiacal — to interplanetary dust or some sort of coronal mass ejection of some kind. But it’s an open question.

And if we brighten this image to some degree — this should be taken with a grain of salt — but it appears that there are these bright spots in the shadowed area. And this color discoloration, this greenish discoloration all along the boundary, and also around here. And I don’t know what explains that, and NASA says they’re still investigating what’s causing this external glow. And then this image too — maybe E.T., maybe E.T.—

ROSS COULTHART: Left the lights on, who knows.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: But you got a similar effect here.

ROSS COULTHART: Yeah. Oh, that’s even more discernible.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, yeah. So I don’t know if these bright spots are indicative of light being reflected or emanating from the lunar surface that we’re seeing more visibly when we increase the exposure. I mean, this is part of the spacecraft, and there are these little bright spots too, but this could be a reflection of just ordinary light that’s more visible.

And also, here, this is an interesting image. So the sun is still not quite above the horizon, if I remember correctly, in this photograph. And let me just rotate this so that we can get an easier view of what we want to take a closer look at.

Streamers, Refracting Light, and Unexplained Phenomena

ROSS COULTHART: Something’s distorting the light.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, so you notice that there are these streaks that are straight, that are emanating, right? And now NASA says in its image description for this image, it says that these emanating streaks that are moving straight are the corona of the Sun from just below the horizon, that are shooting up.

But I’m not so sure if that’s necessarily true, because you may remember from the first interview, I discussed the observations of the Apollo 17 astronauts seeing these streamers or beams of light shooting out from the lunar horizon as they were orbiting from and moving from the lunar dark side towards lunar sunrise. So this to me looks like it could well be an instance of a streamer, possibly. Anyway, I think that’s another explanation that is worth considering.

ROSS COULTHART: And what do you mean a streamer? What does that suggest to you?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: So the astronauts in Apollo 17 saw these radially symmetric beams or strips of light shooting out from the horizon. And they deduced that whatever medium is producing the streamer effect is something that is emanating from or extending from the lunar surface. And so by streamer, I just mean this beam or strip of light that is extending at very high altitudes.

ROSS COULTHART: But basically what you’re expressing there is it’s scientifically plausible to you that there is the potential that something artificial is distorting the light in the way to cause those beams of light, those streamers?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, I think that’s a possibility. I mean, the astronauts in Apollo 17 thought that it was probably lunar dust scattering sunlight, but we now know that that explanation doesn’t really work. So it’s got to be something else. That is obviously highly anomalous.

And so perhaps what the astronauts were seeing here are whatever same mechanism produced the streamers that the astronauts in Apollo 17 saw. Maybe that’s what the Artemis 2 astronauts captured in this photograph.

This is another image that’s, I think, also highly interesting. Notice this is the sun rising, but notice that this rainbow of color is extending over the horizon of the Moon into the shadow.

ROSS COULTHART: How can that plausibly happen?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yeah, I don’t understand that either, because it would—

ROSS COULTHART: I mean, if it’s reflecting the sunlight towards it, it suggests that something is refracting the sunlight.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Yes. Yeah. And well, there are not too many things that can do that other than something glass-like, semi-transparent, with refractive indices that are similar to some sort of glass medium. And again, funny thing is NASA does not comment on this. They do not note this or say or try to explain it in the image description. They just kind of leave it there unexplained.

ROSS COULTHART: And that’s not a camera artifact. That’s an actual NASA image that we can be reliably assured is a representation of what was actually seen?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: I think so. I mean, NASA does not say it’s a camera artifact, and it doesn’t look like that to me as far as I can tell. If someone wants to propose an explanation of what type of camera artifact this could plausibly be, I’m all ears.

But the astronauts were thousands of miles away from the moon at the time of this event. And then here’s another where the sun is kind of taking a — it’s so bright that there’s this odd indentation that again would seem to look like the solar disk sunlight is kind of being refracted so that it’s producing this deep indentation in the edge of the moon, which doesn’t really exist anywhere else on the moon to the same degree.

ROSS COULTHART: The Blue Ghost Globe strikes again.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Perhaps. I’m sure there might well be some sort of connection that has not been elucidated just yet.

So yeah, there are these interesting, so far, anomalies of the Artemis II mission that have not been really discussed or explained. And so I think that there is something here that is worthy of further study.

This is also interesting, this splotch of light in the dark area of the Moon after brightening the image. I don’t quite understand how that would work, either as a camera artifact or as a natural phenomenon. This is just from increasing the exposure a little bit. So there we go. These are the complete set of lunar anomalies that I had prepared for this session, and I will shift back.

Looking Ahead: Mars and a Fourth Episode

ROSS COULTHART: Now, we did promise our audience at the beginning of this fascinating delivery that we’d try and get to the Mars locations as well that have stemmed your curiosity or prompted your curiosity. But I think we might leave that 35 million mile trip for another show. Would you be okay about coming back for a fourth go with Reality Check, Dr. Max Derakhshani?

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: I’d be honored to do that. And there is plenty of material for a good long show on Mars, which I think will be of great interest.

ROSS COULTHART: I’m very excited. I mean, I’m quite struck by what you’ve revealed to us today, Max. It really just gets more and more intriguing. There really are genuine anomalous mysteries about the moon, and most notably prompted by what you’ve uncovered about the latest Artemis mission. It looks like the more we look, the more we see.

Dr. Max Derakhshani, thank you once again for joining Reality Check. We’re going to have to have you back for a fourth bite to go to the red planet. Mars. But thank you for today’s exposition. And I assure you, we are pressing hard with NASA to get answers to the questions we’ve tendered thus far, and we’ll be tacking on a few more from the list that you’ve provided us today. Dr. Max Derakhshani, thank you so much for joining Reality Check.

MAANELI (MAX) DERAKHSHANI: Thank you. It was my pleasure, and I look forward to the Mars presentation.

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