Lue Elizondo Claims NASA Has Photos of Alien Monoliths on the Moon

​In a live interview with former and current Japanese government officials on a Japanese podcast yesterday, UFO proponent Lue Elizondo claimed that the U.S. government has photographs of monolithic extraterrestrial towers on the moon and that these photos may be released soon. “There’s also photographs that I don’t believe have been made public yet that show on the lunar surface what appear to be large monolithic structures with right-angle cuts that appear to be on the lunar surface,” he said. “And I believe those photographs, if they have not been released yet, may be released soon.” One wonders why he does not know, but it is almost certainly because he is repeating secondhand information he gleaned from a different podcast rather than anything he saw firsthand.

​This is an old conspiracy theory that dates back decades. Low-resolution early photographs of the lunar surface led to speculation that some of the shapes seen in the images were alien structures. George H. Leonard was the first to make the claim in his 1976 book Somebody Else Is on the Moon in which he used NASA photographs to allege that towers, bridges, and whole cities could be seen on the lunar surface—a claim even the wildest proponents of lunar structures no longer assert.
 
Fred Steckling built on Leonard’s work in 1981 with We Discovered Alien Bases on the Moon. Writers like Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara promoted the conspiracy in the 1990s, but better-quality, high-resolution photos from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter starting in 2009 debunked many of these claims. However, the idea did not fade away quietly, and modern ufologists argue that the new photos depict still other alien structures.
 
Elizondo’s comments seem to reflect a NewsNation interview Ross Coulthart did with physicist Maaneli (Max) Derakhshani a few months ago in which Derakhshani alleged that LRO photos showed sharp-sided, right-angled alien towers but that NASA blurred the images to hide the towers from the public. He uses AI to reconstruct the underlying image, yielding alleged alien structures, though these are more likely to be AI processing artifacts. (Derakshani accidentally conceded the point during his interview with Coulthart, mentioning without prompting that the algorithm he uses to upscale the images may be responsible for the sharp edges.)

Derakshani claimed that he discovered higher-resolution raw originals of some of the NASA images previously seen in less-sharp processed images while he was reviewing the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photo archive. His claim that these photos were accidentally or secretly released recently is the likely the source of Elizondo’s claim.

For his part, Coulthart used the claim of blurred photos to promote his podcast but made no effort to confirm the allegation beyond asking his guest for his opinion. Derakhshani admitted he cannot prove the photos were intentionally blurred, and Coulthart made not attempt to contact NASA for an explanation. when Coulthart repeated the allegation more emphatically than Derakshani supported, Derakshani even reminded Coulthart that it would be useful for a journalist to ask NASA if the blurring were intentional.

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