Pyramids are no stranger to mystery and mystique. They have long generated all manner of conversations and discussions on what they are, how they were made, and whether there are more baffling mysteries to be found. Yet, this has largely been seen as a mystery bound to Earth. There are some place one might not be expected to find pyramids, such as our moon, for instance, but then why is it that people keep finding pyramids on the lunar surface?

One very interesting case comes from the Apollo moon missions, which are already surrounded by their fair share of strangeness. The Apollo program itself was a manned spaceflight program started by NASA in 1961 that put the first Americans in space in 1968, and would later focus on putting the first human on the moon. Between 1968 and 1972 these missions would send the first crewed space flights beyond Earth’s orbit in 1968, see the first man on the moon with Apollo 11 in 1969, and gather 842 pounds (382 kg) of lunar rocks and soil that would shed an immense amount of light on our knowledge of the moon. There would also be UFOs and other weirdness, apparently, and our case here concerns the Apollo 17 mission, which was the last of the missions in the Apollo program and the last time humans have travelled into space beyond low Earth orbit. Launched in December of 1972, the Apollo 17 mission was composed of Commander Eugene Cernan, Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt, Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans, and five mice brought along as a sort of biological experiment. During the course of the mission the crew would conduct three moonwalks, collect various samples, and it was the longest moon landing ever. They also supposedly photographed a pyramid on the surface of the moon. Wait, what?

The Apollo 17 moon pyramid

During their tme on the moon, the Apollo 17 crew carried out their mission on the surface with the aid of a rover near a place called Geophone Rock. They took numerous photos of the moon’s surface during their dangerous mission, and one of them shows what appears to be an artificial structure looming in the distance. This particular photo was written off as an overexposed “blank” at the time, as it seemed to show nothing but a solid background. Yet some curious photography enthusiasts cleared up the contrast and found that in reality the photo seems to show what looks like a pyramid structure. This was immediately jumped on by some in the UFO community as proof of aliens on the moon, but the photograph has been subject to much scrutiny, and accused of being simply an overexposed accidental shot of the rover itself. Whatever it is at least looks weird nevertheless, and it would not be the last time a pyramid would be purportedly found on the lunar surface.

The next case comes from when the moon was a focus of a study done through the famed Hubble telescope, which was launched into low Earth orbit in 1991. The orbital telescope has remained in nearly constant use ever since, able to capture extremely high resolution images due to being out beyond the distortion caused by the atmosphere, and it has been invaluable to uncovering the mysteries of our universe, taking some of the most breathtaking photos of our cosmos ever seen. In 1999, the Hubble telescope was used to take an array of pictures of the moon’s surface which are to date among the most well-defined and startlingly clear photographs ever taken of the moon, and many of these images were released to the public to great fanfare. Yet, in 2008 another supposed photo from the Hubble photographs that seems to have been curiously absent from the original batch was officially released. It is unclear on when exactly the image was taken or if it is even really authentic, but it seems to show a very clear shape of a well-defined pyramid casting a shadow over the surface. This image has been picked apart by conspiracy theorists and UFOlogists on the Internet ever since, and since NASA will neither confirm or deny the photograph it is still hotly debated. Is this a hoax, a trick of shadow and light, or something else?

The Hubble moon pyramid

More recently still is a series of images that came to light in 2019, when a UFO researcher Scott C. Waring uploaded them after discovering them in a batch of NASA moon photos. The photo in question is labelled as NASA photo PIA13510, and appears to show a large crater on the moon called Evdoks, in the center of which sits what appears to be a triangular structure that look very much like a 3-sided pyramid hidden in its shadows. Waring tinkered with the resolution and lighting to bring out the clarity, and the result took the Internet by storm. Although skeptics and astronomers think that the image is just a trick of light on an unusually shaped rock, Waring has gone all out in his endorsement of it as a real pyramid, saying:

It is convincing evidence of the existence of intelligent life on our moon. So the question remains, is this definitive proof that the pyramids in Egypt were built by aliens from our moon? It seems so.

The 2019 moon pyramid

Of course, the fringe ideas on these images say that this is evidence that aliens have built structures on our moon, and that these pyramids are perhaps connected to the ones we can find on Earth. However, not everyone is so convinced, and skeptics basically point to the same mundane phenomena blamed for creating the whole craze about the “Face on Mars.” Here we would have plays of light and shadow that perhaps combine with features of the landscape to create an image that seems more anomalous and mysterious than it really is. This is then magnified by a phenomenon called “pareidolia,” which is basically an incorrect perception of a stimulus, the brain trying to find familiar patterns or features in otherwise random images, such as in the rocks and craters of the moon or Mars. The effect is the same as what makes us see faces and animals in the clouds floating past us overhead, and is the brain’s attempt to find a familiar pattern where none exists. Believers will point out, however, that these images are very unambiguous in what they show, and that is obvious pyramids. On the moon.

As long as people keep poring through NASA photographs we are likely to keep getting claims like these, and extrapolations on what it means for history and how it pertains to extraterrestrial life. It doesn’t help that NASA typically doesn’t comment on such claims, fueling the fires of conspiracy debates. What are we seeing in images such as these? Are these natural phenomena, illusions, mind tricks, hoaxes, or something altogether more mysterious? Is NASA really trying to brush these under the carpet, or are they merely ignoring it all because it is not worth their time? It doesn’t seem to matter what the answers are to those who look for these enigmatic structures, and we can probably expect to see more images brought forward in the future.

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This week I’ve done 7 or 8 radio shows and podcasts on my new book, The Rendlesham Forest UFO Conspiracy. More than a few people in Ufology have said that no-one in Ufology (apart from me LOL) believes in the “secret experiment angle.” Really? I could reel off a whole bunch of people who suspect the experiment angle is the genuine one. But, for today I’ll go with a perfect, right-on-target statement on this issue of a non-alien theory. It comes from long-time UFO researcher/writer Jacques Vallee. He said on Rendlesham/Bentwaters: “The Bentwaters case is a classic. At the landing site, they had a mix of ordinary guards, officers, sentries and so on – they all had orders to go to the site under a scenario. And that’s not what would have happened if the encounter were real – if a strange object landed on the base you wouldn’t be sending out a hundred people without weapons. The thing has all the earmarks of being staged for the benefit of the witnesses, so that they could be studied and the reactions of the different psychological types and of different ranks could be studied. And when you think about it, it’s not that weird [italics mine].”

Vallee concluded: ” If you were in charge of a project like that, you’d have to test it in conditions where nobody is danger and you can get the data you need. In cases like this one – not many but a few of them – that I investigated, I had to conclude that these were tests of virtual reality projectors.” There’s another angle too: the matter of holograms. In my book I suggest the events in Rendlesham Forest in December 1980 did not involve aliens. Rather, it was all a ruse in which sophisticated  holograms were used – for reasons along the lines Jacques Vallee suggested above. This week, I’ve been asked time and again something like this: “Why are you the only one talking about this hologram scenario?” This is particularly crazy, because that theory first surfaced way back in 1991! And is know by just about every Rendlesham researcher.

It’s certainly not every day that you get to meet with a pair of Edward Snowden-style whistle-blowers from the U.S. Department of Defense. But, incredibly, that’s exactly what happened to UFO researcher/writer Ray Boeche on November 25, 1991. The location, however, was not a dark and shadowy parking garage – as per the story of “Deep Throat” in Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s hit book of 1974, All the President’s Men. Rather, it was a pleasant restaurant in the Lincoln Marriott Cornhusker Hotel in Lincoln, Nebraska. I guess you’ve already got a good idea of what the two guys wanted to talk about. Along with various and sundry theories concerning the UFO phenomenon, it was those mysterious woods on the other side of the world and what went down deep within them in December 1980. Ray said: “I found it interesting that they would mention Rendlesham at the meeting. They said there was a sense that this was maybe, in some sense, staged. Or, that some of the senior people there were more concerned with the reaction of the men, how they responded to the situation, rather than what was actually going on. That this was some sort of psychotronic device – a hologram – to see what sort of havoc they can wreak with people. But, even if it was a type of hologram, they said it could interact with the environment. The tree marks and the pod marks at the landing site were indications of that.”

UFO investigator/author Jenny Randles had a good, solid, working relationship with Ray Boeche. She, too, addressed the matter of what Ray’s secret informants told him back in 1991. On the matter of those claims pertaining to highly sophisticated holograms, Jenny stated, in her 1998 book, UFO Crash Landing?: “This is a device which manipulates the subatomic basis of matter at a quantum level and builds a bridge between mind and physical substance. If I understood it correctly, this supposedly stimulated the mind into having vivid hallucinations but, at the same time, created physical effects in the real world which could take on a semblance of the appearance of the hallucinated images. What was seen was mostly in the mind – but it was not entirely without physical form and partially substantial in the same way that a hologram is real, but has no weight or solidity. The result is a terrifying apparition.”

In 2000, Georgina Bruni’s book on the Rendlesham controversy surfaced. It was titled You Can’t Tell the People. Georgina was certainly not a full-on believer in the theory that the incidents in the woods were nothing but the results of top secret human experimentation. She stressed to me that she viewed the hologram angle as a theory to be studied. Georgina was, though, incredibly generous with her information on this angle – and quite open to sharing with me what she found concerning a secret, domestic explanation for Rendlesham. Even if she didn’t fully buy into it, Georgina was happy to help when and where she could. Georgina also said to me that Ray Boeche’s informants “explained that holography and Fourier transforms are a way of separating an image from its object, the viewing of the image at a distance. In essence, they claim the world is a hologram composed of interference patterns which can be altered by disruptive static frequencies. They believe the human brain is part of this hologram and as such it is capable of performing its own Fourier transforms. However, they concluded that the human brain is unreliable, whereas a psychotronic device, much like a computer, would be able to exert an exact effect on animate and inanimate objects.”

Finally, there’s Encounter in Rendlesham Forest, a book published in 2014 and written by Nick Pope, John Burroughs and Jim Penniston. On the angle of a secret experiment for Rendlesham, they said in their book: “Suggestions as to how such an exotic test could have been accomplished include hallucinogenic drugs, mind control, and holographic technology.” What all of this tells us is that (A) the hologram controversy has circulated for almost thirty years and (B) it has appeared in almost all of the Rendlesham-themed books that have been published since the 1990s; albeit to small degrees. And, if people tell you that no reputable ufologist buys into the “secret experiment” angle,  refer them to Jacques Vallee’s words at the top of this article.

Just a few days ago while doing radio, I was asked what I thought about the so-called “Grey” aliens of Ufology. And of the possibility of them being some kind of “biological robot.” I was also asked what I thought about how this tied in with a now dead man who caused a controversial storm in 1997. In the summer of that year, one of the most inflammatory UFO-themed books ever written was published. Its title: The Day After Roswell. Ghost-written by William Birnes, the editor of the now-defunct UFO Magazine and of History Channel’s also defunct UFO Hunters, the book tells the story of Philip Corso. Specifically, Lieutenant Colonel. Philip J. Corso. U.S. Army. Corso’s story was both amazing and groundbreaking. But, was it true? While some in the field of Ufology embraced the story, many certainly did not. I viewed the whole story as disinformation intended to confuse the truth of what really happened at Roswell, New Mexico back in the summer of 1947. Or, it was nothing more than an elaborate and ingenious tale designed to make money from the gullible and the “I want to believe” crowd.

According to Corso, he, in near single-handed fashion, spearheaded a secret program designed to seed alleged alien technology and wreckage – recovered from the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico by the U.S. Army Air Force’s 509^th Bomb Wing in July 1947 – into the private sector. As a result of this clandestine operation, so Corso maintained, the United States was soon able to understand, and even back-engineer, at least some of the extraterrestrial materials. Fiber-optics, transistors, night-vision equipment, and computer chips, were all, allegedly, a direct outgrowth of the extensive studies of the Roswell materials. But, it’s not so much the technology reportedly found at Roswell that we need to focus our attentions on today. Rather, it’s the bodies of the beings allegedly found strewn around the crash site.

Contrary to what the UFO community said or assumed, Corso never explicitly stated that the Roswell corpses were extraterrestrial. In fact, what he really said was quite the opposite. In Corso’s story the so-called “Grey aliens” are actually created, built, or grown to perform specific tasks. As for the creators of the Greys, it was they, Corso maintained, who were the real aliens. Corso also said that, as far as he was aware, no one has ever seen the real aliens. Only ever their black-eyed, large-headed worker-drones. William Birnes said that Corso described the Greys as “…an android or biological robot. He said it had no digestive system whatsoever and was connected electronically to the navigation controls of the spacecraft.”

As for Corso himself, he stated: “…perhaps we should consider the EBEs [Extraterrestrial Biological Entities] as described in the medical autopsy reports humanoid robots rather than lifeforms, specifically engineered for long distance travel through space or time.” He expanded on this, outlining the profoundly weird nature of the Greys: “While doctors couldn’t figure out how the entities’ essential body chemistry worked, they determined that they contained no new basic elements. However, the reports that I had suggested new combinations of organic compounds that required much more evaluation before doctors could form any opinions. Of specific interest was the fluid that served as blood but also seemed to regulate bodily functions in much the same way glandular secretions do for the human body. In these biological entities, the blood system and lymphatic systems seem to have been combined. And if an exchange of nutrients and waste occurred within their systems, that exchange could have only taken place through the creature’s skin or the outer protective covering they wore because there were no digestive or waste systems.”

I can’t say I’m a fan of the writings and claims of Corso – at all. I find the majority of his story to be just too far out there. The biggest irony, however, is that for all the sensational claims made by the man, I actually do think that the Greys could very well be some kind of manufactured entities, rather than creatures born in a normal fashion.