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
Where the evidence lands: ContradictedThat NASA and the Soviet space program secretly flew an Apollo 20 mission in August 1976, launching from Vandenberg Air Force Base, landing near Delporte crater on the far side of the Moon, and recovering the remains of an ancient alien civilization along with a preserved humanoid pilot, and that this mission and its findings have been hidden from the public ever since.
Believed by: Ancient-astronaut and UFO-disclosure communities online, where the footage still circulates as authentic despite the creator's confession; never accepted by historians, engineers, or NASA
The full story
What is documented
Start with the parts of this story that are true, because they are the soil the fiction grew in. NASA really did plan an Apollo 20, and really did cancel it. In January 1970 the mission was dropped so that its Saturn V rocket could be used to launch the Skylab space station. Apollo 18 and Apollo 19 were cancelled later that year as budgets tightened. The program that had begun the decade racing to the Moon ended it winding down.
The last flight to actually reach the surface was Apollo 17, in December 1972. Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt walked the valley of Taurus-Littrow while Ronald Evans orbited overhead, and when they left, human beings stopped going to the Moon. No Saturn V flew again after Skylab. There was no spacecraft, no rocket, and no ground network standing by to send astronauts to the lunar far side in 1976.
So the question this file weighs is not whether an Apollo 20 was ever imagined. It was, and then shelved, in public, decades ago. The question is whether the far grander claim that grew up online, that a secret Apollo 20 flew anyway and came home with an alien city and a mummified pilot, has anything behind it beyond a set of videos.
The story as it was told
Told in its own voice, the Apollo 20 story has a genuine pull, and it is worth laying out fairly. Beginning in April 2007, a YouTube account under the name retiredafb posted a run of videos that looked like recovered mission film: the interior of a spacecraft, a slow pan across what the uploader called an ancient city on the Moon, and the quiet, unsettling image of a humanoid figure lying still in a cabin, a figure named the Mona Lisa.
The following month a man calling himself William Rutledge, said to be a retired American astronaut living in Rwanda, gave an interview claiming he had commanded the mission. He described Apollo 20 as a covert joint flight with the Soviet Union, launched in August 1976, that set down near Delporte crater on the far side to examine a wrecked alien ship spotted on an earlier mission. The account came with names, dates, and a destination.
A named commander, a hidden hemisphere, and footage that looks like it came off a 1970s reel: the story arrived shaped like testimony, which is exactly why it traveled.
The strongest form of the case is not that any of this was proven. It is that the real, cancelled Apollo missions left a gap, that the imagery carried the grain and glare of authentic spaceflight film, and that a first-person narrator made the whole thing feel less like a video and more like a confession being smuggled out.
Where the claim breaks down
The look of testimony is not testimony. Once the individual pieces are traced, the mission dissolves into assembled parts.
The decisive problem is that the flight is physically impossible on the record. A crewed lunar landing in 1976 needed a Saturn V, a flight-ready Apollo spacecraft, and a worldwide tracking and recovery apparatus. By 1976 none of these existed; the last Saturn V had lifted Skylab in 1973, and the hardware and workforce had been stood down. The claim even launches its mission from Vandenberg Air Force Base, when every crewed Apollo flight left from Florida and no Saturn V ever flew from Vandenberg at all.
The imagery, meanwhile, was built from existing material. The sweeping shot of an alien city is a composite of a real Apollo lunar photograph and a science-fiction landscape painted by the artist Bruce Pennington. The cigar-shaped object sold as a crashed craft comes from a genuine orbital photograph taken on an earlier Apollo flight. The Mona Lisa herself bears the hallmarks of a sculpture, which fits the background of the man who would claim to have made the whole series.
And the commander cannot be found. No astronaut named William Rutledgeappears in NASA's records; the name exists only as an anonymous online voice, placed conveniently out of reach and backed by no documentation. A story assembled from reused pictures, a painting, a model, and an uncheckable narrator is not a suppressed mission. It is a production.
The confession, and why it did not settle it
This case has something many do not: an author who owned up. In July 2007, only months after the first upload, the French video artist and sculptor Thierry Speth claimed responsibility for the videos, presenting the series as a work of fiction rather than a record of anything real. His trade as a sculptor lines up neatly with the uncanny, made quality of the Mona Lisa figure.
A confession like that would end most disputes. It did not end this one. The clips kept spreading, reposted by viewers who had not seen the admission or who folded it into the conspiracy itself: if the mission were fake, the reasoning went, why would anyone need to say so? In that frame the confession becomes just another layer of cover, which is the trap of an unfalsifiable belief. Nothing can count against it, because every disproof is read as further proof.
When a hoax is admitted and the story survives anyway, the subject has stopped being evidence and started being faith.
The honest reading is the plain one. The person who made the videos said he made the videos, and the videos themselves are visibly built from borrowed images. That is what a hoax looks like from the inside.
Why it endures
Apollo 20 keeps circulating for reasons that have little to do with the Moon and a great deal to do with how the story is shaped.
It fills a real absence. Because Apollo 18, 19, and 20 genuinely were planned and cancelled, a tale of a secret twentieth mission attaches itself to a true gap and borrows its credibility. The listener who half-remembers that some Apollo flights never happened finds the story arriving pre-confirmed.
It lives on the far side. The Moon's hidden hemisphere, forever turned away from Earth, is the ideal stage for a claim that cannot be checked by looking up. Whatever is said to be there is placed exactly where an ordinary observer can never contradict it.
And it plugs into a larger belief. For audiences already certain that governments conceal contact with other intelligences, Apollo 20 is not a strange one-off but a familiar genre: the suppressed disclosure. Within that worldview the confession, the missing astronaut, and the reused photographs are not problems to be explained but expected features of a cover-up, which is what makes the belief so durable and so resistant to its own author's denial.
Where the evidence lands
Hold the two things apart. The real Apollo program is a documented achievement, and the cancelled missions are a documented disappointment; both are worth remembering. But the rated claim, that a secret Apollo 20 flew in 1976 and returned with an alien city and a mummified pilot, is contradicted at every level. The mission is absent from all records and was impossible with the hardware that existed, the footage is assembled from reused photographs and a published painting, the central figure is a sculpture, the commander cannot be found, and the man who made the videos said he made them. On that claim the verdict is Debunked.
None of this diminishes the genuine mystery of the Moon or the fascination that drives people to keep watching the sky. The far side is a real and strange place, and the missions that never flew are a real and poignant piece of history. The error is not in wondering. It is in accepting a set of anonymous, admitted videos as proof of the most extraordinary event in human history, over a documented record that says plainly it did not occur.
The last human beings to stand on the Moon came home in December 1972. Everything after that, in this story, is a screen and a sculptor.
What's still unexplained
- Why footage that its own creator identified as fiction continues to circulate as authentic is a question about how confessions travel online, not about whether Apollo 20 flew.
- How much reused real imagery, a genuine Apollo photograph here, a published painting there, contributes to the persuasiveness of a fabrication is a fair question about media literacy that this case illustrates well.
- Whether the anonymous persona and the researcher who interviewed it intended a straightforward prank, an art project, or something else is a matter of motive that does not change the physical impossibility of the mission.
Point by point
The claim: Apollo 20 was a real, secret mission flown in 1976.
What the record shows: There is no such mission in any launch record, flight log, tracking archive, or astronaut roster. Apollo 20 was publicly cancelled in January 1970, its Saturn V reassigned to Skylab, and Apollo 18 and 19 were cancelled soon after. The Apollo program's last flight to the Moon was Apollo 17 in December 1972. A crewed lunar launch in 1976 would have required a Saturn V, a flight-ready spacecraft, a global tracking network, and thousands of workers, none of which existed by then and none of which could be hidden.
The claim: The videos show genuine footage shot on the lunar surface.
What the record shows: The footage was assembled from existing material. The panning shot of an alien city is a composite built from a real Apollo lunar photograph combined with a science-fiction landscape painting by the artist Bruce Pennington. The cigar-shaped object presented as a crashed alien craft derives from a real orbital photograph taken during an earlier Apollo flight over the Moon. Reused stills and painted scenery are the raw material, not first-hand lunar film.
The claim: A mummified alien pilot, the Mona Lisa, was recovered and filmed.
What the record shows: The figure has every mark of a made object rather than a body. The hoax's admitted author, Thierry Speth, is a sculptor by trade, and the humanoid form in the videos closely resembles his sculptural work. The most economical explanation, and the one the confession supports, is that the Mona Lisa is a model built as the centerpiece of the fiction, not a preserved extraterrestrial.
The claim: The commander, William Rutledge, was a real astronaut who told his story.
What the record shows: No astronaut named William Rutledge appears in NASA's records, and the account exists only as an anonymous online persona tied to the retiredafb uploads and one interview. The persona placed itself conveniently out of reach, a retired flyer living in Rwanda, and offered no verifiable documentation. It functions as narration for the videos, not as an independently confirmed person.
The claim: The mission launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on a joint US-Soviet flight.
What the record shows: This detail is physically and historically implausible. Crewed Apollo missions launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and no Saturn V ever flew from Vandenberg. A secret 1976 joint lunar landing with the Soviet Union also contradicts the documented state of both space programs at the time, which had moved on from the Moon. The claim adds cinematic specifics that collapse against the record rather than supporting it.
Timeline
- 1970-01NASA cancels Apollo 20 so that its Saturn V launch vehicle can be used to loft the Skylab space station. Budget pressure and shifting priorities are the stated reasons. Apollo 18 and Apollo 19 are cancelled later the same year.
- 1972-12Apollo 17 flies, the eleventh and final crewed Apollo mission and the last time humans land on the Moon. Commander Gene Cernan and geologist Harrison Schmitt walk the surface; Ronald Evans orbits above. The program then ends.
- 2007-04-01A YouTube account under the username retiredafb posts the first of a series of videos purporting to show footage from a secret Apollo 20. The choice of April Fools' Day for the debut is later read by skeptics as a tell.
- 2007-04Further clips follow, showing what looks like an Apollo cabin, a panning view of a sprawling structure on the lunar surface described as an alien city, and the still body of a humanoid figure lying in a spacecraft. The uploader calls the figure the Mona Lisa.
- 2007-05-23Italian researcher Luca Scantamburlo publishes an interview with a man who identifies himself as William Rutledge, a retired American astronaut said to be living in Rwanda, who claims he commanded Apollo 20.
- 2007-05In the interview, Rutledge describes Apollo 20 as a covert joint mission with the Soviet Union, launched in mid-August 1976 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, with a crew that included the cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, landing near Delporte crater to investigate a wrecked alien ship photographed on an earlier flight.
- 2007-07-09French video artist and sculptor Thierry Speth claims authorship of the videos on the internet bulletin board Need2Know.eu, presenting the series as a work of fiction and digital art rather than a genuine record.
- 2007-07 onwardDespite the confession, the clips keep spreading on video-sharing sites and forums, reposted by audiences who either have not seen the admission or reject it. The story becomes a fixture of ancient-astronaut and UFO-disclosure circles.
Contradicted. The documented record is not in dispute: Apollo 20 was cancelled in January 1970, its Saturn V rocket reassigned to launch the Skylab station, and the Apollo program ended with Apollo 17 in December 1972, the last time humans walked on the Moon. The rated claim is the story that spread online from 2007: that a covert joint American and Soviet Apollo 20 flew in 1976, landed near Delporte crater on the lunar far side, and returned with alien artifacts and a preserved humanoid pilot nicknamed the Mona Lisa. That claim is debunked. The videos it rests on were posted anonymously on YouTube, were traced to reused Apollo-era photographs and a painting, and were admitted to be a fabrication by the French video artist and sculptor who made them.
Sources
- 1.50 Years Ago: NASA Cancels Apollo 20 Mission, NASA (2020)
- 2.Canceled Apollo missions, Wikipedia (2024)
- 3.Down to Earth: The Apollo Moon Missions That Never Were, Scientific American (2011)
- 4.World UFO Day: Alien Girl and the Secret Apollo 20 Mission, International Business Times UK (2013)
- 5.Lost Moon: Reconstructing the Missions of Apollos 18, 19, and 20, AmericaSpace (2023)
- 6.Apollo 17, Wikipedia (2024)
- 7.Apollo 17: Mission, Landing Site, Crew, Dates, and Facts, Encyclopaedia Britannica (2024)
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