NASA
NASA runs the United States' civilian space program, from the Apollo landings to deep-space observation. Its imagery and statements are a recurring anchor for both space-mystery claims and manufactured doomsday scares, and just as often the source that defuses them. These files gather cases where NASA data, missions, or denials are at issue.
Reference: Wikipedia, nasa.gov
The US Army drew up a real, detailed plan (Project Horizon) to build a manned military base on the Moon
In June 1959, at the height of the Cold War space race, the US Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, completed a study titled Project Horizon: A U.S. Army Study for the Establishment of a Lunar Military Outpost. Directed under the Army's chief of research and development, Lieutenant General Arthur G. Trudeau, and led by the rocket engineer Wernher von Braun with Heinz-Hermann Koelle as project manager, the two-volume report laid out, in remarkable detail, how the Army might land soldiers on the Moon and keep them there: dozens of Saturn rocket launches, buried cylindrical habitats, nuclear reactors for power, and a garrison of about 12 personnel by the late 1960s. The plan was real and it was serious on paper. It was also never built, and it was quietly abandoned when the newly created civilian agency NASA took over America's space effort. This case file separates the record (a genuine, declassified military plan) from a further claim that sometimes rides alongside it (that a base was secretly constructed), which is a different matter entirely.
Read the case file →The military recovered a crashed acorn-shaped craft from the woods at Kecksburg
On the evening of 9 December 1965, a dazzling fireball streaked over the Great Lakes and into the northeastern United States, seen by people in at least six states and Canada. Astronomers concluded it was a meteor. But in the tiny village of Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, residents reported that something came down in the woods, and a handful of witnesses later described a copper-colored, acorn-shaped object the size of a small car, banded with markings like Egyptian hieroglyphics. They said the Army sealed off the site, set up a command post, and drove the object away under a tarpaulin, while officials insisted nothing had been found. Forty years later NASA said the debris was a Soviet satellite whose examination records had been lost, prompting a journalist's Freedom of Information lawsuit that a federal judge called a "ball of yarn."
Read the case file →NASA photo labs routinely airbrush UFOs and alien craft out of satellite and Apollo imagery before releasing it to the public
The claim is that NASA does not just miss anomalies in its photographs, it deliberately removes them: that photo labs routinely airbrush UFOs and alien craft out of satellite and lunar imagery before any of it reaches the public. The account traces to one person. Donna Hare worked as a technical illustrator for the NASA contractor Philco Ford Aerospace from 1967 to 1981, and in May 2001 she told the Disclosure Project press conference that, around 1970 or 1971, a technician in a restricted photo lab showed her a print with a round white object over a stand of pine trees and said they always airbrushed such things out before selling the images to the public. This file keeps two things apart, the record and the claim it rates. The record is that NASA and its science teams place enormous volumes of raw, unedited, public-domain imagery online: the Apollo Image Atlas alone holds roughly 25,000 scanned frames, and orbital missions publish their raw data to open archives. The claim we rate, a standing agency-wide practice of erasing anomalies, has never been backed by an airbrushed original, a named technician, a policy document, or any independent corroboration in the twenty-five years since.
Read the case file →The interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is alien technology being hidden by space agencies
In July 2025 astronomers confirmed the third known visitor from beyond our Solar System, an object on an unbound path that will never return. Most of the field sees an ordinary, if ancient, comet. A smaller current of speculation, amplified online and given intellectual cover by one prominent Harvard astrophysicist, asks whether it might instead be a piece of alien technology, and whether the agencies tracking it are downplaying what they know.
Read the case file →The Fermi paradox: if the galaxy should be full of extraterrestrial civilizations, why do we see no trace of them
The Fermi paradox is the gap between two things that are hard to reconcile. On one side, the numbers look generous: the Milky Way holds hundreds of billions of stars, NASA's Kepler mission implies billions of roughly Earth-size worlds in habitable orbits, and even modest probabilities at each step would seem to yield many technological civilizations, some far older than ours. On the other side stands the silence. Decades of radio and optical searches, plus the absence of any probe, beacon, or engineering visible across interstellar distances, have produced no confirmed sign of anyone. Physicist Enrico Fermi is remembered for cutting to the heart of it at a 1950 lunch with the question, where is everybody. This case file treats the paradox as what it is, a documented and respectable scientific question, and surveys the leading proposed resolutions without endorsing any one of them. The puzzle is real, but no single answer has been shown to be correct.
Read the case file →The strange dimming of Tabby's Star (KIC 8462852) is caused by an alien megastructure orbiting the star
KIC 8462852 is a main-sequence star about 1,470 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. Volunteers with the Planet Hunters project, sifting NASA Kepler data, flagged it for bizarre dips in brightness: sharp, irregular, and far too deep and misshapen to be an ordinary transiting planet. In 2015 a team led by Yale astronomer Tabetha Boyajian described the anomaly and floated natural explanations, favoring a swarm of comet fragments. Separately, astronomer Jason Wright noted that the light curve was also what one might expect from a large artificial structure, a Dyson swarm harvesting the star's energy, and that possibility, seized on by the press, made Tabby's Star briefly the most famous star in the sky. This case file keeps two things apart: a real and still not fully explained pattern of dimming; and the claim it rates, that the cause is an alien megastructure. Follow-up observations found the dimming is stronger at shorter wavelengths, the hallmark of dust, not of a solid object that would block all colors equally. The megastructure hypothesis is not disproven with finality, but it is unproven and disfavored, while dust has become the leading natural account.
Read the case file →The 'Face on Mars' is a monument built by an ancient Martian civilization
In 1976, Viking 1 photographed a Martian mesa that, at low resolution and in raking sunlight, looked strikingly like a carved human face. Promoters cast it as proof of an ancient Martian civilization. Sharper images from three later spacecraft show a plain, natural landform: the face was an artifact of the camera, the light, and the eye.
Read the case file →A coordinated 9-day global blackout of power, internet, and communications will begin on 18 July 2026, staged as part of Agenda 2030 and a planned great reset
In the summer of 2026 a claim spread across social media that a coordinated 9-day global blackout would begin on 18 July 2026, shutting down electricity, the internet, and communications worldwide. Many versions tied the supposed shutdown to Agenda 2030 or a planned great reset and said governments were hiding the plan from the public. Fact-checkers including Tempo, Factually, and Boatos examined the claim and found nothing behind it: no official statement, no scientific study, no technical basis, and no single global grid that could be shut off at once. Indonesia's energy ministry explicitly denied any such plan. This case file keeps two things apart: that the hoax went viral and was checked and rejected, which is a matter of record; and the claim it actually rates, that the blackout was real or planned. That claim is debunked. It follows a well-worn template of dated blackout and darkness hoaxes, several of them falsely attributed to NASA, that recur every year or two and always pass without event.
Read the case file →The swarm of glowing discs filmed on NASA's STS-75 downlink in 1996 were intelligently controlled UFOs
In February 1996, Space Shuttle Columbia flew STS-75 to deploy the Tethered Satellite System (TSS-1R), an experiment that reeled a satellite out on a 20-kilometer conducting tether to generate electricity from Earth's magnetic field. On 25 February the tether snapped near the deployment boom after roughly 19.7 km had unspooled, and the satellite drifted free. In the hours around the break, NASA's live infrared downlink showed dozens of glowing, roughly circular objects, each with a small notch, drifting slowly through the frame, some appearing to move past the broken tether. In UFO circles the clip became a classic: proof, it was said, of a swarm of intelligently controlled craft caught on a government camera. This case file keeps two things apart: a real mission and a real tether break; and the claim it rates, that the discs are controlled UFOs. The discs are out-of-focus foreground particles near the camera, rendered as fuzzy notched circles by the optics, and their apparent motion behind the distant tether is a trick of depth of field. The claim is debunked.
Read the case file →The Maya calendar predicted the world would end on December 21, 2012
For years, popular books, documentaries and websites insisted the ancient Maya had predicted a cataclysm (or a cosmic transformation) for December 21, 2012. Mayanist scholars, NASA, and the Maya people themselves said otherwise: the date closed a calendar cycle the way an odometer turns over, the one inscription that mentions it describes a deity's ceremonial appearance, and the day passed like any other.
Read the case file →Stanley Kubrick secretly filmed the faked Apollo Moon-landing footage for NASA, and hid confessions in his later films
One of the most enduring versions of the Moon-hoax legend casts Stanley Kubrick as the secret director of the fraud. Fresh off 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the story goes, Kubrick was recruited to shoot convincing fake Apollo footage on a soundstage, and later, wracked by guilt, buried confessions in his films, above all in The Shining. This case file keeps two things apart: Kubrick genuinely did make a landmark effects film, and this theory is a real and popular one; and the claim it rates, that he filmed staged landings and hid clues to it. On the evidence the claim is debunked: the landings are supported by physical proof and third-party tracking, a 1969 fake would have been more difficult than the real mission, the Shining readings are pattern-seeking, and the famous confession tape was an admitted fabrication. It is offered here as the vivid, self-refuting piece of folklore it is, cross-referenced to the main Moon-landing file for the broader rebuttal.
Read the case file →The moon landings were faked
The claim that NASA never landed astronauts on the Moon and staged the footage to win the Space Race, and the physical, photographic and third-party evidence that shows it did.
Read the case file →The 2025 Blue Origin all-female spaceflight was faked, staged, or never actually reached space
On 14 April 2025, Blue Origin's New Shepard NS-31 flight carried an all-female crew, singer Katy Perry, journalist Gayle King, Lauren Sanchez, former NASA engineer Aisha Bowe, activist and researcher Amanda Nguyen, and film producer Kerianne Flynn, on a brief suborbital trip just past the Karman line and back. Within hours, a wave of posts claimed the whole thing was faked: staged on a soundstage, rendered in CGI, or never actually in space. The supposed proof was a grab-bag of screenshots: a capsule door opened from outside, Katy Perry's hair not floating the 'right' way, an unscorched capsule, a glitchy clip of Gayle King's hand. Every one of those details has a plain explanation rooted in how a short suborbital flight actually works. The flight was real and livestreamed. What was fair to criticize was the spectacle, not the physics.
Read the case file →An alien satellite called the Black Knight has silently orbited Earth for 13,000 years
A viral claim that a dark, ancient, extraterrestrial satellite has tracked Earth from a near-polar orbit for thirteen millennia, 'proven' by a real 1998 NASA photo, real 1920s radio echoes, and Nikola Tesla's real 1899 signals. Every piece is genuine. None of them are the same story.
Read the case file →The Earth is flat
The claim that the Earth is a flat, stationary plane and that space agencies conspire to hide it: set against evidence anyone can gather for themselves, and the far more interesting question of why the belief persists.
Read the case file →NASA and the UN plan to fake a global holographic event to install a one-world government
A Canadian writer's 1994 self-published claim that NASA and the United Nations are preparing a staged, technologically faked 'second coming' or alien invasion (complete with sky-projected holograms and mind-beamed telepathy) to frighten humanity into a single world government and religion. It has no supporting documentation of any kind, and the core technology it describes is not physically achievable at the scale claimed.
Read the case file →A secret Apollo 20 mission secretly landed on the far side of the Moon in 1976 and recovered an ancient alien city and a mummified extraterrestrial pilot
Starting in April 2007, a series of grainy videos on YouTube told an extraordinary story: that a secret Apollo 20, flown jointly by the United States and the Soviet Union in August 1976, had landed on the far side of the Moon, explored the wreck of a vast alien city, and brought home a mummified extraterrestrial pilot, a humanoid female the uploader called the Mona Lisa. A man identifying himself as the mission commander, William Rutledge, gave interviews filling in the details. None of it happened. Apollo 20 was one of three lunar missions NASA cancelled around 1970, and the last crewed landing was Apollo 17 in December 1972. Keep two things apart: the real, cancelled missions and the real end of the Apollo program, and the claim this file rates, a hidden 1976 flight and an alien corpse. The footage was assembled from reused NASA photographs and a science-fiction painting, and a French artist named Thierry Speth publicly claimed authorship of the hoax in July 2007. The verdict is debunked.
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