As you no doubt heard many times over the last few months, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong did what no human before him had ever done — he set foot on an extraterrestrial world. Or in his words, he took “one small step for man… and one giant leap for mankind,” as he let his boots sink into the soft terra firma of the moon. Long had we stared up at the glowing body in the night sky, and now, we’d crossed an ocean of inky black space and made physical contact.
Now, of course, there are those who believe this never happened. They firmly believe that the moon landing was faked. There’s one popular theory that Stanley Kubrick created the elaborate hoax for NASA. But that’s nothing compared to a far stranger lunar theory. There are many, many people who believe that the moon is hollow. And not only that, they believe the moon was intentionally hollowed out by aliens who brought our moon to the Earth’s orbit and placed it into position. They think that the moon is actually an alien spaceship. It’s appropriately (obviously?) called the Hollow Moon Theory, or the Spaceship Moon Theory.
The first person to suggest that the moon is hollow was sci-fi writer H.G. Wells, who wrote about it in his 1901 book, The First Men In The Moon. Much later, a far more entertaining notion, that our moon is hollow and actually a lunar spaceship created by a distant alien civilization, was put forward in 1970 by two Soviet scientists. Since the two men (Mikhail Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov) were legitimate scientists, they opted to tread lightly as they stepped out onto such unstable grounds.
“Abandoning the traditional paths of ‘common sense,’ we have plunged into what may at first sight seem to be unbridled and irresponsible fantasy,” they wrote. “But the more minutely we go into all the information gathered by man about the moon, the more we are convinced that there is not a single fact to rule out our supposition. Not only that, but many things so far considered to be lunar enigmas are explainable in the light of this new hypothesis.”
Recently, the Hollow Moon Theory received a new wrinkle after researchers discovered a huge unexplained mass of metal buried in the crust of the moon, located down by its South Pole. A research team, led by Peter James from Baylor University, announced the incredible new discovery. As James explained in a statement, “Imagine taking a pile of metal five times larger than the Big Island of Hawaii and burying it underground. That’s roughly how much unexpected mass we detected.”
‘Apollo 11’ Is a Time Capsule — And a Warning About How Far We Haven’t Come Since
The crater surrounding the mass of buried metal is roughly 2,000 kilometers wide, which is about the same distance as L.A. to Lincoln, Nebraska. You’ve never seen this massive crater before since it’s on the far side of the moon (i.e., the dark side we never see). Those who speculate that the moon is a hollow spaceship wonder if this enormous mass of metal might be remnants of the terraforming that hollowed-out the moon. Naturally, James and his team don’t draw that same conclusion.
The same goes for nearly every other NASA researcher and scientist, who will occasionally comment on the Hollow Moon Theory to correct the record. They like to point out that early reports that the moon “rings like a bell” when struck with heavy objects simply aren’t true; similarly, they reiterate that claims that rare trace elements like Neptunium exist on the moon are false as well. Skeptics counter that’s merely what NASA wants you to believe.
To dive deeper into this lunar debate, I recently spoke with Rob Shelsky. He’s a paranormal investigator, author and frequent guest of Coast to Coast AM with George Noury. He’s also a leading expert on the alternative theories that the moon is actually a hollowed-out spaceship, even though he considers himself more a man of science and skepticism than a true believer.
How would you describe your profession?
A fringe nut. [Laughs.] I’d call myself a paranormal investigator because I primarily investigate UFOs, but I also investigate a lot of different paranormal things.
Can you explain the merits of the Hollow Moon Theory?
When it all started, I didn’t believe in it at all. I’m not sure I believe in it now. I do think it’s possible. I hate to use the word “believe” because that implies faith in something for which you have no proof. I like to go by hard evidence — what’s available. I go by the principle of Occam’s Razor. When you look at something, if there’s more than one explanation, you have to go with the simplest one because it’s usually the correct one.
If you apply that to the moon, there are some glaring problems with it. They include the make-up of the moon. For instance, the density of the moon. It’s too low for its size. It should have more mass than it does. And since it apparently seems to be made up of the same material as the Earth, how do we account for this lack of density?
Moreover, astronauts found that the first three layers of rock material on the moon were in reverse order of density with the lightest being on the bottom and the densest layer on the top as far as they drilled. This is very unusual because as we all know the heaviest stuff sinks and the lightest stuff stays on top. We have found titanium on the moon. Much more so than on Earth. We have found Neptunium-237, which has a half-life of under 2.5 million years. And there’s none left on Earth because the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, approximately. If the moon was formed way back then, it shouldn’t have any left either. But it does.
So there’s a lot of evidence to support the idea that the moon is hollow. One scientist said that it’s easier to explain the non-existence of the moon than it is to explain its existence.
How did you discover the Hollow Moon Theory, and why did it impress you enough to write a book about it?
I was on Coast to Coast AM with George Noury. He brought up the subject to me. He said, “What do you think of the Hollow Moon Theory?” I laughed and said, “I try not to.” I told him I thought there wasn’t anything to it, and that it was about as valid as the Flat Earth Theory. But it started me down this path, investigating why people would even begin to think of such a thing. I began to find all this evidence of anomalies and oddities. Plus, there were all these quotations by various scientists that the moon might actually be hollow. If not hollow, at least filled with giant caverns and lava tubes. Somehow we have to account for the lower density of the moon.
In your book, you cite the many ancient cultures that speak of a time before the moon. There were the Proselenes –– the Ancient Greek people who Aristotle referred to in his writing. He claimed that they lived in a time before there was a moon in the sky. Plutarch and Ovid made similar claims. Additionally, you point out that the Maya of Central America described a time before the moon. The Zulu of South Africa also apparently speak of the same thing.
Interestingly, too, they never say, “Before there was a Venus in the sky…,” “Before there was a Mars…” or “Before there was a Jupiter,” all of which you can see plainly in the sky. They just talk about the time before the moon. This comes up consistently in cultures around the world.
The historical records of the moon are really slim. The further back in time you go, the less you see drawings, maps or etchings of the moon. Especially in the Neolithic and Paleolithic period, you don’t see pictures of the moon. There’s one cave painting that shows a crescent that might be the moon. That’s about it. Why weren’t they painting the moon? It was a pretty big object in the night sky.
Let’s say they’re all describing (or not) the same period of time — when would you say that the moon arrived in our sky?
I think the moon arrived here in the last 50,000 years. But more precisely, I’m gonna go with that it arrived roughly 12,000 years ago.
That’s generally considered the end of the last Ice Age. Why do you think that’s when the moon arrived?
Something big happened on the Earth about 12,000 years ago, or roughly 10,000 B.C. We can’t account for what it was, but we do know it was worldwide. We know it was massive. We know it caused deluges. We know that it ended the megalithic cultures of that period. We know that certain places like Göbekli Tepe were intentionally buried to protect them. So the moon may have arrived then. Now again, this is all circumstantial evidence. But there’s a lot of it.
Because something caused crown fires in North America. Something wiped out the large species of mammals in North America, the megafauna of the Paleolithic period — mastodons, mammoths, giant sloths, sabretooth tigers. We have different theories for each of these things, but we don’t have one overarching theory that describes why this all happened, at roughly the same time that so many civilizations along the coasts were flooded — and so quickly. If this resulted in a fast melting of the glaciers, that could account for the deluge. Or maybe you lob one small asteroid or meteor into an ocean, and you’d have a tsunami that rips around the coastlines and wipes out civilizations in its wake.
There’s a wood block carving from Europe in the 1500s. It was similar to a news report, essentially, of a space battle that took place in the sky over Renaissance Europe. Why would aliens come to Earth and have a space battle over Germany and Switzerland?
That wood block engraving shows a battle taking place in the skies over Nuremberg. There was another battle that took place over Basel, Switzerland. These were big enough news of the day that they made wood block prints and engravings and distributed the prints. Plus, people in the thousands saw that battle take place.
We could be part of an interstellar empire, and that was part of a border war between alien species. But we don’t know. According to that engraving, a battle took place over Nuremberg. The Hindus, in the Vedic texts, also describe a time when humans were ruled by gods, and a great war was fought. Not only on Earth, but in space itself. The most trusted humans were trained to fly the spacecraft. There’s even like a manual where they go into detail about how the thing was engineered. Apparently, liquid mercury was even involved. This stuff doesn’t sound like myths and legends to me. It sounds like someone reporting on what they saw, framed by the circumstances of their time.
Do you believe in God?
It’s open. I’m not opposed to the idea because there’s not enough evidence either way. If you look back at our history, there’s one common thread through all of it: the notion that knowledge is the forbidden fruit. There were two trees in the Garden of Eden. One was the Tree of Life, the other was the Tree of Knowledge. It was the Tree of Knowledge that was forbidden to us. This repeats throughout history. The Greek god Prometheus who gave humankind fire was eternally punished by the other gods. He was chained to a rock and a giant vulture or something pecks out his entrails over and over. They weren’t kind to him because he dared to give human beings knowledge.
Even now, a lot of people are becoming anti-intellectual. It’s like we were trained to not want knowledge. Perhaps, an alien group, like the Annunaki, were the original ones behind that messaging. I think we had God and this idea of forbidden knowledge impressed on us. But I’m not sure it was really God and not a historic alien species — one that was quite cruel and brutal to us. They insisted we not learn anything, ever.
So, in a sense, the Bible and other religious texts are accounts of our interactions with aliens that we mistook for gods?
Yes. It’s quite possible that our current conceptions of God, right down to our churches, temples and mosques of today, could all be remnants — they’re places where we serve God, but God isn’t physically there. One of my science-fiction books, The God Factor, is based on the idea we were trained to believe in God.
Recently, there’s been a huge viral campaign that started as a joke Facebook post: It’s a call for people to all show up on the same day and bum-rush Area 51, the top-secret base many believe hold proof of aliens or their technology. Have you ever been, or do you plan to go join the marauding horde to find the truth about aliens?
I have one friend named Mary who plans to go. I’ve tried to talk her out of it. She said, “It’s my best shot at getting some answers.” I said, “It may not be your best shot, it may be a soldier’s best shot. And you might be the target, so I’d think twice about it.” [Laughs.] I don’t think that’s the answer; I don’t think that’s the way to go. I’ve been to Area 51, not on the base but near it, and trust me, it’s an extremely hostile appearing place.
Do you expect that aliens will ever announce their presence during your lifetime?
I hope so. Because I’d like to know. I have this burning need to know. That’s why I explore all of these paranormal things and try to find answers. I have this need to know. If someone asked me what’s your overriding urge to do all of this stuff, that’s my answer: I want to know.
Zaron Burnett III
Zaron Burnett is an investigative journalist and longform features writer based in Los Angeles. He covers culture, politics, race, and other perplexing mysteries for MEL.
