UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

In the world of the paranormal there are countless reports of encounters with strange creatures, entities, and apparitions of all shapes and sizes. These accounts run the range of the slightly odd to the full on absurd, and they never cease to amaze with their pure outlandishness. Some of these are perhaps stranger than others, and I am always on the lookout for such reports and experiences. Well, here I have compiled an array of a certain subspecies of strange encounter reports, which deals with what can only be described as octopoid entities complete with tentacles, which have come wandering in from beyond the limits of the reality we perceive.

In some of these reports of strange entities with tentacles the apparitions in question seem to be of a decidedly paranormal nature. Take the case of one witness on the site Psychic Experiences, calling herself “Alkara.” She claims that seeing strange entities was nothing particularly strange or new for her, as she had been having such visions from a very young age, being constantly tormented by shadow people. She had always taken these to be some sort of demons, and according to the witness they took many forms, such as reptilian creatures, alien “greys,” and others, but the strangest was an octopoid entity that would come to her in her room at night, and she says of it:

My encounters with different types of entities and dead people has continued since. But a week ago, I encountered an entity that looked so ridiculous that I brushed it off as my own imagination. It had a structure of a human: head, torso, two legs but the remarkable difference was it had eight octopus-like tentacles for arms. I couldn’t remember how it’s face looked like because at that time it seemed so ridiculous to me that I didn’t take time to study it.

Very strange indeed. A similar and maybe even creepier account comes from Darkness Radio, concerning a witness called Ken, who also encountered a tentacled entity in his own bedroom. He explains that at the time he had been living out in Rosemead, California, in a small little house from which he ran a tattoo business. Things were apparently pretty odd from the moment he moved in, as he said he was prone to hearing strange things rustling or moving around in the dark in the kitchen and living-room area, and he occasionally saw a “misty shadow” roaming about, but nothing was quite so strange as something that would come to him one evening when he awoke to quite the surreal experience. He says of this:

One night I woke up in a very calm and relaxed state but I found myself floating above the bed with my feet barely hovering off the mattress. I knew I wasn’t dreaming because I was aware of all the items in my room and my eyes were scanning around. I found my body floating gently back down onto the bed but was suddenly slammed down onto the mattress violently, as if somebody put his hand across my face and pulled me down. It felt as if I was in that state of sleep paralysis. To my horror, as I looked to my side; I could not move my face or body but with my eyes, I clearly saw the silhouette or the shadow figure of this creature. I saw the clear defined sharp pointed nose and as crazy as it sounds the silhouette of this tentacle for an arm with all suction cups clearly defined. Its other arm held my head down to the bed and pulled it, as it was trying to make me look back at the ceiling and, in shock, every inch of my black ceiling was covered with this bizarre looking hieroglyphic as if it were painted in wet substance. In my head, it was the color of blood as it was hard to make out in the moonlight shining through my window. I felt as if the entity was trying to tell me something.

With all my energy, I willed myself out of this paralyzed state and once I blinked my eyes, it was over. No writings on my ceiling. No creature. Everything was gone. A few other weird things happened after this incident, especially at night and sometimes even during the day but nothing that tops that crazy night I told you about. I’m not sure if there is a dark history in this residence or if I’m just haunted myself because I’ve seen things in every place I’ve lived. Friends don’t believe me, thinking I was under the influence of something but I wasn’t. I was completely sober. I know what I witnessed.

Was this a ghost, something more demonic, or just sleep paralysis and hallucinations, the witness caught in that bizarre limbo between sleep and wakefulness? It is hard to say. In another account from Your Ghost Stories, we have a witness who says this happened to him after he moved to a small apartment in the state of Illinois with his wife and 2-year-old son. He claims that he was plagued with sudden, very intense headaches after moving into this place, which he had never experienced before but which he chalked up to just the stresses of moving and settling down in a new place, yet it seems there was perhaps more to it than that. He says that one night he would have a horrifying encounter with a very menacing, possibly demonic apparition tormenting his young son, and he explains the outlandish scene thusly:

It was one Sunday when my son was playing in my bed and all of a sudden he started screaming holding his head. When asked he showed the exact same place where I got my pain in head and said that it pains (the pain will be like some one puts a nail on back of the head). I was little concerned but thought to ignore. The interesting thing here is I was not feeling this pain anymore by my son started getting this pain often. We took him to medical check up and turns out to be nothing. Finally after 3 attempts, I decided to use my supernatural medium to protect everyone and it worked.

The face to face happened one night. We were in a good sleep and I was suddenly awake and I noticed a pink ball with tentacles floating above my sons body. When tried to catch it, it just moved away and disappeared and I felt asleep. The very next night we were all sleeping and I was awake at 12. 05 midnight and I saw the wall above my head and ceiling was full black. I turned around and stared at the wall (just 2 feet away) and I saw a totally black object with huge tentacles floating. After this incident I finally confirmed that there are some demonic presence in this apartment and I secured the full house until we vacated.

Again, we seem to be dealing with something very paranormal in nature with these particular reports, or perhaps even projections of the mind or other tenuous phenomena, but other reports point to something more concretely physical in nature. There are a few accounts that seem to definitely at least suggest aliens or inter-dimensional interlopers of some sort, and these are perhaps even more bizarre that the reports of tentacled ghostly specters. There are a few cases such as these from the 1960s and 70s, which have been covered by different UFO and paranormal researchers over the years. Probably the more well-known and indeed creepier of these is what has come to be known as the “Octosquatch.” In the summer of 1961, a 29-year-old truck driver named Arquimedes Sanchez was driving along a precipitous mountain road through the Basque mountains in Spain at around 11 PM, along with an unnamed companion, on their way to the town of Puerto de Barazar. As they rounded a bend, their headlights hit a bizarre and rather monstrous being standing upon an embankment nearby, which prompted the pair to stop their vehicle.

When they peered through the murk ahead of them they claim that they saw a “hairy octopus,” which stood around 4 feet tall, with glowing eyes and “tentacle-like” arms. The witnesses and the thing apparently sat there completely frozen and immobile for several minutes, both parties probably just as startled and scared as the other, before Sanchez snapped out of it and slammed the accelerator, which caused the weird apparition to scurry backwards away from the threat, after which Sanchez backed up and tried again, apparently intent on running it over. Interestingly, the otherworldly intruder refused to take off into the night, instead always just managing to avoid being run over, as if it were all a game. Finally the two men, neither who were willing to step out of the vehicle to investigate, drove off to leave the being behind, never to be seen again. What in the world was this thing? Who knows?

Just a few years later in 1966 we have a case that was covered in both Jim Brandon’s Weird America: A Guide to Places of Mystery in the United States, as well as Jerome Clark’s Extraordinary Encounters: An Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrials and Otherworldly Beings. the state of Oregon for an equally bizarre case. On the night of April 5, 1966, a 16-year-old witness named Kathy Reeves was allegedly walking along with her friend on a secluded dark road in the small city of Newport, Oregon, when they got the sudden, unmistakable feeling that they were being followed and watched. The two girls assumed it was just someone messing around trying to scare them, which was made clearer when they thought they could see a dimmed flashlight beam bobbing about behind them.

They picked up their pace and even tossed rocks behind them at the unseen follower, but the feeling that someone was lurking in the darkness behind them did not abate, and when they turned around at one point what they thought had been a simple flashlight suddenly erupted into a brilliant beam of incandescent light far beyond what would be expected, which was then joined by more spears of brightness jutting from the night to converge upon them. Squinting through the glare, they claimed that they could make out a large, dome-shaped object some distance off that seemed to be wreathed in some sort of fog or smoke. The now terrified girls began to run as fast as they could towards home, but as they did their path was blocked by three unearthly creatures the likes of nothing they had ever seen. The entities were described as being headless and armless, and as looking like mobile tree stumps that moved about on what resembled spider legs and which were dressed in some sort of multi-colored cloth. The creatures thankfully did not seem to pay too much attention to the witnesses, instead scurrying across the road to scamper off out of sight towards the inscrutable dome, which still flickered in the dark behind them.

The 1960s seem to have been a rather odd time for these sorts of octopoid extraterrestrial encounters, because our next case is every bit as bizarre and occurred in 1968 in the province of Tarragona in Spain. It revolves around a humble farmer by the name of John Mateu, and according to a report contained within the Barcelona Tele-Express, in the summer of that year Mateu was out doing his usual farm work like any other day, when he caught sight of what appeared to be something glinting in the morning light some distance down the dirt road that went past the property. His first impression was that it was someone who might be lost or even worse broken down, and so he walked off down the dusty road with his dog in tow to see what was going on. It would soon become quite clear that this was no car, nor any sort of vehicle he recognized.

As he approached, Mateu could see that rather than a car the source of the glinting light was actually some sort of oval, metallic object that was glowing and hovering several feet off of the ground. As the dumbfounded farmer stared on in amazement, he noticed three small creatures that looked vaguely octopoid, moving along swiftly on tentacles towards the craft. When they reached it, the weird entities were described as piling into the spheroid object and shooting off into the sky and leaving Mateu there to faint and lose consciousness. Indeed, he’d go on to remain missing for a full day as friends and family searched for him, after which he wandered home, unable to account for his missing time. Mateu and his brother would go on to find several patches of scorched earth where it was surmised that the alien craft had landed, and oddly enough their watches were also reported as stopping when they entered the vicinity.

Moving on to the 1970s we have the extraordinarily odd account of 9 year-old José Cantu, of the town of Harrah, in Washington state. On January 19, 1977, Cantu was up early in the morning making himself breakfast when he looked outside to see a strange, diminutive “little men” out in the yard. He tried to wake his mother, but she told him to leave her alone and that he was imagining things, so he went out to take a look for himself, soon coming face to face with a pair of 3-foot-tall beings with greenish skin and no legs, instead sitting atop rotating bases with various tubes and small wheel-like protuberances attached to them. The heads of the things were monstrous, with pig-like snouts, odd mushroom-shaped caps, and only a single eye placed within the center of their heads, as well as tiny, useless looking forearms jutting out from the middle.

Cantu immediately hid behind a shed, and it was here where he would notice two brightly lit metallic crafts parked nearby which had ramps leading to the ground and seemed to be piloted by more of the same cyclops beings. The two beings he had seen earlier then boarded these “spaceships” via the ramps, after which the crafts hovered into the air and vanished into puffs of smoke. The boy ran back inside, woke his sleeping mother, and told her all about what he had seen, but she would not believe him and sent him on his way to school. There he would tell anyone who would listen about what he had seen, and two classroom aides ended up being so enthralled by his sincerity that they went home with him after school to take a look at the scene themselves.

In the yard, the aides would find circular indentations within the earth, apparently caused by the bases that the two aliens had sat upon, and neighbors would say that they had also found enormous depressions in the ground where Cantu said the craft had been resting. An examination of these depressions showed that they had strange patterns of swirled grass within them, and this was all big enough news that the following day a a police officer for the Indian Reserve of Yakima by the name of Willard J. Vogel came to investigate, seeing the evidence and interviewing the boy, and he became convinced that the boy at least truly believed that he was telling the truth.

Moving on into more recent years, a truly otherworldly account was given by the Dutch psychic Robbert van den Broeke, who had his own strange experience as he was investigating a crop circle in the area of Zevenbergen with a friend called Roy. At one point they both felt an intense sensation of being watched, after which Robbert had his mind invaded by a sudden, very vivid image of an octopus-like creature. At the time he was puzzled by this, but it would only get weirder in the coming days. Upon returning to his home, Robbert was allegedly overcome with an irresistible urge to venture out to a grassy field near Seppen airport, and when he arrived he says he did so to the sight of an egg shaped craft emanating a golden light hovering over the field. As he watched the strange UFO with awe, the bottom opened and from within came two creatures that looked exactly like the slithering thing he had seen in his vision. They were described as being slippery, reptilian looking things with pear-shaped heads, almond shaped eyes, and numerous tentacles sprouting from their chest and back. These outlandish entities approached him, and gave out a telepathic signal that seemed to be benign in nature, and indeed they allowed Robbert to get close enough to touch one of their tentacles, where things would get more deeply odd.

As soon as he made contact with the wet, slimy skin, he says that he was jolted by a strong shock that was accompanied by an urgent telepathic message from the creature that apparently proclaimed that Robbert was meant to be a bridge between humans and them. Right after this, a light enveloped the beings and they began to spin around at great speed, as if caught up in a tornado, and the tentacles of one of the creatures then seemed to fly off of its body to go scattering all over the field. Alarmed, Robbert telepathically asked them if they were OK, and they said that the tentacles had been left behind as evidence of the encounter and that they would regrow quickly, after which they spun off back into their craft and shot up into the sky out of sight to leave him standing there in the field alone and surrounded by the detached tentacles. Robbert then claims that he gathered these tentacles up and that he now is keeping them frozen in a safe place awaiting analysis. It all seems pretty questionable, since he has not come out publicly in any capacity that I know of on these tentacles, so it should probably all be taken with a huge grain of salt, but it is a wild tale all the same, and when dealing with octopus entities what tale isn’t?

From Reddit user “horrorbxtch” we have a pretty bonkers report that he says happened to him in the summer of 2016 while visiting his grandparents near Grand Junction, Colorado. He describes their house as being rather rural, and situated near a river, and on this evening he had let the dog to do its business when the animal suddenly started viciously barking and snarling at something out in the dark. The witness then grabbed a flashlight to go investigate and he explains of the strange series of events that would unfold:

My dog is outside for maybe a minute before I hear her start viciously growling and barking like I’ve never heard before. She’s growled/barked at animals or people outside before but this was more aggressive than I’d ever heard her. I start making my way over to my dog to investigate, I make it about halfway to my dog and I freeze dead in my tracks. Im pointing my flashlight in the direction she’s facing, and I see the most unsettling thing I’ve ever seen. At first I think I’m just imagining it or tripping out but there was no denying it was clear as day. It was about 3-4 feet tall, a rectanglular figure but with rounded edges. Imagine like a 4 foot tall twinkie lol. It was this gross translucent tan/flesh color. Like the color of a naked mole rat. There was no apparent face, or limbs. All I saw was a bunch of tentacle/leg looking things potruding all down the front and side of it’s body. The way it was moving was creepy.

At first it was sort of gently rocking side to side, and then I swear it started taunting my dog like running from one spot to another to mess with her. At this point I got too scared it would do something to my dog so I ran to her, snatched her up, and booked it inside and locked the door. When I peeked back outside the thing was gone. I don’t think anything has ever disturbed me that much in real life before. My body wouldnt stop shaking for probably 25 mins after I got inside. The most fucked up part is the next day I told my aunt I saw a “weird Alien bug looking creature” outside the night before. She then said “Ive seen some weird shit out there.” And proceeded to explain seeing the exact same thing I saw. Same color, shape, lots of tentacle/centipede looking appendages, and the icing on the cake for me was when she said it kept rocking from side to side. I said you’re kidding me thats exactly what I saw last night. We both got chills and flipped out because it confirmed it wasn’t our imagination.

Also in more recent years, in December of 2014 there was a very odd report taken by the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), concerning an outlandish bipedal creature that was sighted and almost hit by a car in the vicinity of the sleepy town of Carmel, in Highland County, Ohio. The witnesses, a former Marine and his wife, had just moved to the area, and one evening they were driving along the rural road through a wooded area towards their home when a 7-foot-tall creature with muscular, very bendable, tentacle-like legs, and a tubular body without any arms or head ran in front of their car and into the woods on the other side of the road, narrowly avoiding being hit by the vehicle in the process.

It would later be described as being a dull, sickly grey in color and looking sort of like a “walking squid,” and after the report was featured in the local paper there was a lot of speculation as to what it might be. One of the most popular ideas is that this was merely a misidentified deer that had just happened to be witnessed in a strange, bipedal pose. This sort of makes sense, as white-tailed deer are known to rear up on their hind legs and even take a few steps in that position, but it seems odd that one would walk so far, and it doesn’t really seem to totally match the witnesses’ description. Interestingly, the witnesses also claimed that there was a large sphere of grass near their house that is always greener than the surroundings and where snow does not gather, so make of that what you will. Whatever it is, the “Walking Squid” Of Carmel, Ohio, is a truly bizarre case that can’t easily be explained away.

With such completely bizarre, almost absurd reports as we have looked at here, it is rather difficult to get a handle on what could be going on. In some cases it looks like these might be ghostly or demonic in nature, while others might have to do with aliens, interdimensional phenomena, or something else. Perhaps none of them are real at all, and have their origins merely in the imagination and the mind. In the end, we are left with a range of accounts that really stretch the limits of the bizarre, and hint that this world is perhaps far odder than any of us even suspect.

“Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footprints on the Moon.”

We’ve all heard that clichéd phrase at least once in our lives. Leaving the high frequency at which this go-to motivational platitude is used to one side, it’s hard to deny that the traces of human activity on the bright white sphere in the starry ocean above is anything less than utterly inspirational.

It is, without question, a powerfully positive symbol – a timeless encapsulation of our collective ambition and scientific progress. This point in history wasn’t guaranteed to occur, though. Although there is no limit to the number of alternative timelines anyone could entertain regarding our relationship with the Moon, one in particular stands out.

Just as the Cold War was getting going, Project A119 was born. This covert operation, spearheaded by the US Air Force, never truly got off the ground, and it became little more than a detailed thought experiment. If it did, though, we would have lived in the world where the Apollo space program would be nothing more than a thought lingering in an alternative future.

This is the tale of how, once upon a time, humanity planned to trigger a nuclear explosion on the Moon.

One of two "diamond ring" phases of the 2017 summer Solar Eclipse.

MICHAEL ROUDABUSH/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; CC BY-SA 4.0

A Mushroom Cloud on the Dark Side of the Moon

The 1950s were a decidedly unnerving time. “The latest rumor going the rounds is that the Russians plan to explode a rocket-borne H-bomb on the moon on or about Nov. 7,” the Pittsburgh Press reported on November 1, 1957. “If that’s true – look out! The rocket and its cargo of violence are more likely than not to boomerang.”

The sensational article, which notes that the rumor is being checked out by US intelligence, explains that the aim of such a strike on our pale guardian would be to demonstrate how far Russian missile technology would have come. Indeed, this was a momentous year for the Soviet Union: A month earlier, Sputnik was launched, and just two days after this article was published, Sputnik 2 was also sent into space, complete with Laika the dog.

At the same time, President Eisenhower was handed a review that suggested US defensive capabilities had fallen far behind that of the Soviets, particularly in terms of missile technology. Later that month, Soviet premier Khrushchev dared the US to a shooting match to prove his point. The world was on edge, and rumors of a Soviet nuclear strike on the Moon perhaps didn’t seem so outlandish.

The event never took place, of course, but the US government was still nervous at the mere thought of it. Indubitably, they had fallen behind, and long before the Apollo program would see them stand victorious in front of all of humanity, they decided to take those rumors and see just how plausible such a scheme could be.

Dr Leonard Reiffel, a respected physicist, gained his doctorate from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1953, and his star swiftly rose thereafter. He gained senior positions at NASA, and worked with other such famed scientists, including Enrico Fermi, the mind behind the very first nuclear reactor and someone widely considered to be the architect of the nuclear age. Reiffel also collaborated with several key scientists stolen from the collapsed Third Reich as part of America’s Operation Paperclip.

In 1958, officers from the Air Force approached him and, rather bluntly, asked him how possible it would be to detonate a nuclear device on the Moon. Intrigued by the possibility, he worked in complete secrecy as he attempted to answer this question. In the summer of 1959, Project A119 – as it became known – was summarized in one of the strangest scientific reports in human history.

Entitled A Study of Lunar Research Flights, it weighed the pros against the cons of the first atomic explosion on another world to our own. Describing the benefits of such a detonation as being scientific, military and political, it immediately dives in to the many ripples that such a colossal, surprising splash would cause.

Not only would the world find out just how possible it would be to engage in off-world nuclear warfare, but the political benefits the destruction would bestow were obvious: A lunar mushroom cloud, partly illuminated by sunlight if prominent enough, would send an unparalleled message of strength to the Soviet Union.

The report is a thesis on everything scientists knew about the Moon back in the 1950s, from its magnetic field and its lack of atmosphere, to its geological properties and the possibility of organic matter hiding in pockets up there. Every detail was provided in service to a sole question: would it be possible to show the world that the US Air Force could bring hell to a celestial sphere 384,400 kilometers away from home?

A blast on the dark side was preferred.

NASA

This document doesn’t envisage how the nuclear warhead would have made it to the Moon. Or, rather, it does, but those sections are redacted and still not publically viewable.

Interviews given by Reiffel in 2000 – when this document was finally declassified – reveal nothing concrete about the delivery system either aside from the fact that, per the Guardian, it was technically plausible. It’s most likely that it would have involved an intercontinental ballistic missile of some kind, the type that had just made their debut on the world stage in the late-1950s.

Aside from the mysterious delivery system, it’s also uncertain how the package itself would be tracked from terra firma. Nevertheless, various methods were assessed in the report, which focused heavily on visual monitoring through the use of telescopes – both ground-based, and some floating from balloons.

One option was to use flares made using the vaporization of sodium, something tested out by both superpowers that decade and proven to be intensely incandescent. Reiffel and his team even calculated the requisite amount of sodium required for the delivery vehicle on the Moon to be seen with the naked eye, on both the dark and bright sides.

The way in which the blast would be carried out was also undecided at the time, but again, multiple pathways were explored. The document does suggest that, based on plenty of simulations, three instrument packages assessing the nature of the blast would be placed in arbitrary places on the visible hemisphere of the Moon. The bomb itself would likely explode on the very edge of the dark side of the Moon, the part that just about wobbles into our terrestrial line of sight, so that the fire and fury could be seen back on Earth more clearly.

The warhead could be unleashed above, on, or under the lunar soil. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggested that, no matter which option is used, the pressure waves a powerful nuclear explosion would generated would create artificial “earthquakes” on the Moon, rocking an otherwise seismically silent body. If a one-megaton bomb was used, tremors would be detectable anywhere on our planet’s solitary satellite mere moments after the red switch was flicked.

As on Earth, the geology in the explosion’s midst would be immediately vaporized. “we have the picture of the lunar material moving upward as a gaseous piston from the moon… with a considerable fraction of the radioactive material [being] expelled into space.”

The report adds that although the distribution of the irradiated, ejected dust would be somewhat unpredictable, calculations suggested that the volume of radioactive material reaching Earth would be expected to be very low. For that assessment, we can thank a young graduate student named Carl Sagan, recruited by Reiffel as part of the project.

From Earth, scientists could track the development of the blast’s light much in the same way that they track the flickering of the Sun’s corona, its outermost atmospheric extremities. Apt, considering that the Air Force would have been effectively creating an ephemeral new star on the Moon.

It would have been an undoubtedly epochal moment. Much like the hundreds of millions of people that would have sat around television sets watching Neil Armstrong make our species’ first mark on the ancient volcanic soil, recordings of America’s might would have indelibly burned themselves into the public consciousness.

Extinguishing Lunar Life

The legacy of nuclear fires on our pale blue dot are explicitly clear.

When nuclear tests were carried out in the Cold War, they were done so with a near-nonchalant disregard to the environment and the health of others. Surrounded by scientific instruments and recording equipment, the increasingly powerful blasts set the skies ablaze.

Sometimes old battleships were annihilated in atolls, with the wind sweeping radioactive fallout onto fishermen or settlements. On other occasions, soldiers were asked to march toward the mushroom cloud that was rushing up into the azure air – practice for a future where a ground invasion would follow on from a nuclear strike on the enemy’s position.

As time ticked away, the effects of the blast and the resulting radiation became ever clearer. Aside from the clearly dangerous contaminated veils they would leave in their wake, such blasts also led to scientific revelations in fields outside the realm of nuclear physics.

The craters generated by subterranean blasts were curiously similar to a type of volcano – maar-diatremes – whose formation and destruction still eludes volcanologists today. Along similar lines, the document explains that – whether it’s a nuclear or chemical bomb, the subsurface layers of the Moon would be revealed, ending years of scientific debate on the subject.

At the same time, the isotopes forged in such blasts proved to be oddly useful to oceanographers, who used them to provide detailed cartography of the major aquatic currents transporting heat and nutrients all over the planet.

There’s a good chance that, one day, we’ll be officially living in the Anthropocene Epoch, a brand-new unit of geological time created thanks to our irrevocable decisions. Take your pick: plastics littering our oceans, carbon dioxide smothering our atmosphere, species extinction rates – all make good markers denoting when we first left a clearly detectable signature in the sedimentological record.

Committees looking into the matter, however, have decided that the so-called Golden Spike should instead be represented by the spike in plutonium debris those nuclear weapons tests have left laying around. As a result, the Anthropocene would have begun in 1950, or perhaps in the 1960s, depending on which version of “global distribution” wins out in the end.

Symbolically, the 1950 version works even better when you look at the concerns Reiffel et al. had when considering what environmental impact a nuclear detonation on the Moon would engender. Forget the impact of spreading radioactive ash all over the place: Years before the mission to send manned astronauts to the Sea of Tranquility took place, scientists were wondering that delivering a nuke to the Moon would bring with it hazardous organic or biological material from Earth.

By the 1950s, it was thought that Mars and Venus should definitely not be contaminated in any such way. The Moon was considered to be far less hospitable to biology, but nevertheless it remained unclear how correct this notion actually was, particularly with regards to the subsurface.

The report stresses, therefore, that “if such biological contamination of the moon occurred, it would represent an unparalleled scientific disaster, eliminating several possibly very fruitful approached to such problems as the early history of the solar system, the chemical composition of matter in the remote past, the origin of life on earth, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life.”

The document does argue, however, that such a concern may be merely academic. “The first moonfall is very likely to be by a Soviet vehicle,” the report notes, implying that the biological contamination issue was out of their hands anyway. “The US propaganda possibilities following a USSR lunar contamination – or vice versa – should not be overlooked,” Reiffel suggests.

The danger of biological – and of course radiological – contamination wasn’t the only obstacle that the document outlined. Reiffel explained that there were so many potential problems with carrying out this plan that it was impossible to actually foresee them all.

One passage, in particular, emphasizes just how much time it would take to even go through the issues that the document touched on: “The enormous effort that would be involved in any controlled experiment on or near the moon demands nothing less than an exhaustive evaluation of suggestions by the many qualified persons who have begun to think about this general problem.”

The document deals heavily in abstractions, but one concern that seemed absolutely concrete to Reiffel was the affect such a blast would have on public opinion. Detonating a nuclear bomb on the Moon was expected to garner a hugely negative public reaction: America may demonstrate that it’s more technologically advanced than the Soviet Union, but by assuming the mantle of extraterrestrial vandals.

That of course assumed that the warhead would even make it to the Moon. One thing that’s clear from several high-profile disasters is that spaceflight is incredibly difficult to get right. We do succeed more often than not, but enormous risks are always involved, particularly if such spacecraft have had human payloads. The delivery vehicle in this case wouldn’t involve any such passengers, of course, but a failed launch – perhaps one ending in a high-altitude fireball – would spread radioactive debris over an enormous area.

The risk to public health, for once, took precedent – but perhaps not as much as the risk to public opinion did if the plan was to go awry. “Unless the climate of world opinion were well-prepared in advance, a considerable negative reaction could be stimulated,” the report muses.

“The foremost intent was to impress the world with the prowess of the United States,'” Reiffel said in an interview, per The New York Times. '”It was a P.R. device, without question, in the minds of the people from the Air Force.'”

It just wasn’t worth it in the end. In the coming months, the project was abandoned. The Moon’s pristine, alien environment would remain untouched, aside from a few probes sent by both superpowers crashing down onto its surface.

Thanks to the Outer Space Treaty, which came into force on October 10, 1967, we are unlikely to hear about such a plan ever again. Under terms agreed by both the Soviet Union and the US, among others, it became prohibited to place nuclear weapons – and any weapons of mass destruction – in orbit, on the Moon, or on any other physical body in space.

Fear and Loathing on Planet Earth

A Study of Lunar Research Flights is the only declassified document relating to Project A119. Several others likely exist, based on Reiffel’s comments prior to his recent death, and others have been destroyed. Much about it remains tantalizingly under wraps, and little will change in this respect for many years to come.

The plan’s legacy is one of juxtaposition in the starkest of terms. Driven by fear, there was a chance that humanity could have decided to prove that, for all intents and purposes, it could have killed the Moon. Not long after the plan was shuttered, we chose to land on the lunar surface.

Buzz Aldrin, photographed by Neil Armstrong, who you can spot reflected in Aldrin's visor.

NASA

Project A119 is a microcosm of our species’ ability to be dangerously absurd; an example of what could happen if the darker sides to our imaginations are allowed to run riot, catalyzed by doubts and terrors. Although the antagonizing factors have evolved, plenty of us still remain ruled by such hard to control notions today, just as previous generations were in 1959. That doesn’t mean we have to give into them, though.

So by all means, ponder on those footprints if it gives you a sense of optimism. I’d argue, though, that they become even more powerful when you consider that there was a chance that we almost decided to leave a radioactive crater up there instead.