# 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

**Verdict: 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.

Category: Hoaxes & Pop Culture · Era: 2000s · First circulated: April 2007, when videos appeared on YouTube under the username retiredafb, the first uploaded on 1 April; the story gained reach in May 2007 through an interview an Italian researcher published with a man calling himself William Rutledge · 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
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/apollo-20-hoax

## Summary
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.

## The claim
That 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.

## Origin and timeline
- 1970-01: NASA 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.
- 1972-12: Apollo 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.
- 2007-04-01: A 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.
- 2007-04: Further 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.
- 2007-05-23: Italian 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.
- 2007-05: In 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.
- 2007-07-09: French 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 onward: Despite 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.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: Apollo 20 was a real, secret mission flown in 1976.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: The videos show genuine footage shot on the lunar surface.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: A mummified alien pilot, the Mona Lisa, was recovered and filmed.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: The commander, William Rutledge, was a real astronaut who told his story.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: The mission launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on a joint US-Soviet flight.
  Evidence: 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.

## Why people believe it
- The videos looked the part. Low-resolution, washed-out imagery mimics the texture of genuine 1970s spaceflight film, and a viewer without the tools to trace each shot can find the footage persuasive on its surface.
- The real cancellations left a gap the story could fill. Apollo 18, 19, and 20 genuinely were planned and then dropped, so a tale of a secret mission slots neatly into a true absence and borrows credibility from it.
- A named commander and an interview gave it the shape of testimony. A first-person account with dates, crew names, and a landing site reads as reporting rather than fiction, even when none of it can be checked.
- It fused with a larger belief. Audiences already convinced that space agencies hide contact with extraterrestrials received Apollo 20 as one more suppressed disclosure, which made the confession easy to wave away as part of the cover-up.
- The far side supplied built-in mystery. The Moon's hidden hemisphere, invisible from Earth, is a natural stage for claims that cannot be casually disproven by a backyard telescope, and the story set its discoveries precisely there.

## Open questions
- 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.

## Sources
- 50 Years Ago: NASA Cancels Apollo 20 Mission, NASA (2020): https://www.nasa.gov/history/50-years-ago-nasa-cancels-apollo-20-mission/
- Canceled Apollo missions, Wikipedia (2024): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canceled_Apollo_missions
- Down to Earth: The Apollo Moon Missions That Never Were, Scientific American (2011): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/canceled-apollo-missions/
- World UFO Day: Alien Girl and the Secret Apollo 20 Mission, International Business Times UK (2013): https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/world-ufo-day-alien-girl-secret-apollo-20-mission-1454928
- Lost Moon: Reconstructing the Missions of Apollos 18, 19, and 20, AmericaSpace (2023): https://www.americaspace.com/2023/08/28/lost-moon-reconstructing-the-missions-of-apollos-18-19-and-20-part-1/
- Apollo 17, Wikipedia (2024): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_17
- Apollo 17: Mission, Landing Site, Crew, Dates, and Facts, Encyclopaedia Britannica (2024): https://www.britannica.com/event/Apollo-17

Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/apollo-20-hoax