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Did a secret Apollo mission to the dark side of the Moon discover an ancient alien lifeform?

Apollo 20: Journey into Darkness Did a secret Apollo mission to the dark side of the Moon discover an ancient alien lifeform? theunredacted 03 Feb 2018 Little grips people’s imaginations like stories of what might have been, alternative histories where zeppelins fill the skies, the Nazis won WW2 and JFK was never assassinated.One such speculative tale revolves around a subject already heady with conspiracy and legend — the Apollo moon landings. We can only imagine what alternative history would have unfolded if the program hadn’t been cancelled, but continued to explore the Moon.Official history tells is that the last time man ever went to the Moon was in December 1972, when Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent a record breaking three days on the lunar surface.But more Apollo missions were originally planned — Apollo 18, 19 and 20 having already begun construction or in the latter planning stages when they were cancelled in 1972, a combination of declining public interest and budget cuts making the once prestigious moon program fall out of favour in Washington.Apollo 17 was the last official moon missionScience fiction can speculate on what would have happened if these programs had gone ahead. Perhaps we would have habitable colonies on the Moon today, or staging posts for trips to Mars. And maybe we would have explored the dark side of the Moon, long rumoured to contain remnants of an ancient alien civilization.In 2007, a mysterious figure took to video sharing website Youtube with evidence that this incredible scenario was not speculative fiction, but a clandestine fact, one hidden from the world to protect the truth about what they had found on Earth’s closest neighbour.A user calling himself retiredafb posted a number of videos purporting to be footage of a secret Apollo 20 mission, jointly manned by US and Soviet astronauts, that took place in August 1976.Retiredafb identified himself as William Rutledge, a now elderly and retired Nasa astronaut, in exile in Rwanda, who took part in the secret Apollo 20 mission alongside fellow astronauts Leona Marietta Snyder and Alexei Leonov.According to Rutledge, Apollo 20's mission was to explore the polar region of the Moon, on its dark side, to investigate images supposedly taken by Apollo 15 of the area which showed what appeared to be a vast ancient city and a huge, miles-long crashed spacecraft.Rutledge’s footage would be astonishing if true, as it shows both the alien city and a flyover of the cigar-shaped spaceship. The videos then cut to the Apollo 20 crew actually exploring the interior of the crashed ship, and perhaps most amazingly of all discovering the body of a human-like alien.Dubbed ‘Mona Lisa’ by the astronauts, the body appeared to have been that of a young woman, partially mummified with a thin layer of a waxy substance covering its skin. She appeared to be locked into the controls of the spacecraft by a device connected to her eyes and nose.The alien body supposedly found by the Apollo 20 crewIn an interview with Italian journalist Luca Scantamburlo, Rutledge went into more details about their discovery of Mona Lisa, explaining that the EBE — Extraterrestrial Biological Entity, appeared to be neither alive or dead, but in some kind of state of suspended animation.According to Rutledge, the alien was disconnected from the navigational device and returned back to Earth aboard the lunar module, where the body still resides today.Rutledge also described the ship — “We went inside the big spaceship, also into a triangular one. The major conclusions of the exploration were: it was a mothership, very old, that crossed the universe at least a billion years ago”.Understandably, due to the sensational nature of the videos, Rutledge’s posts to Youtube gathered millions of hits. But soon after he claims his account was hacked and the videos deleted. Was NASA trying to destroy the evidence of this most secret of missions?If so, it did not work. Quickly Rutledge and others would set up multiple mirrored versions of the videos on several different video sharing websites, and they remain widely available.But did NASA, or anyone, really need to worry? For many the story was simply too incredible to be believable. Indeed, more than one commentator noted how similar Rutledge’s claims were to a variety of science fiction films.Could there be any truth in the Apollo 20 story?Evidence forHidden in plain sightPhotographs of the lunar surface taken by Apollo 15 in 1971 do appear to show some strange anomalies in the Delporte-Izsak region in the southern region of the Moon’s dark side.An unusual cigar-shaped object situated on the edge of a crater can clearly be seen in several of the NASA photographs circulating on the internet, including those on NASA’s own website. The feature looks to have mass and form and seems to sit on top of the Moon’s surface rather than be a part of it.The craft shown in Rutledge’s videos match the anomaly captured b...