Can Remote View­ing help us to see beyond the lim­i­ta­tions of our human­ity, to embrace knowl­edge that we could oth­er­wise never attain?

What’s on the Far Side of the Moon?

From Stephen Wag­ner, Your Guide to Para­nor­mal Phe­nom­ena.

Is there proof for extrater­res­trial bases?

Tonight I’m going to jour­ney to a dis­tant place and time,
where sor­row and teardrops are unknown
and heartbreak’s left behind,
where there’s no pain nor any gloom -
the far side of the moon.

– Joyce P. Hale, Far Side of the Moon

WHAT WE CANNOT see, often, we fear… or at least con­sider with suspicion.

This is per­haps because it’s unknown, and peo­ple tend to be fright­ened of the unknown. Ghosts, for exam­ple. The far side of the Moon might be another example.

Because we can­not see it, the far side of the Moon is for many a place of dark mys­tery. Why can we never see it? What’s there? Rumors in cer­tain cir­cles spec­u­late that it’s the per­fect place for an alien base.

Rumors aren’t real­ity, of course, so is there any infor­ma­tion to back up these claims?

Why we can’t see it

When we look up at the Moon, we always see the same side. This pecu­liar­ity results because the Moon rotates just once for every orbit it makes around the Earth. The Moon is slightly lop­sided, so over mil­lions of years, grav­i­ta­tional forces have slowed its rota­tion so that the one side always faces our planet.

The side fac­ing away from us often used to be referred to as “the dark side of the Moon,” which is erro­neous since, on aver­age, the side we don’t see receives just as much sun­light as the side we do see.

For many hun­dreds of years, humankind won­dered what the far side of the Moon was like. Was it sim­i­lar to the famil­iar near side? Was it dif­fer­ent? What secrets did it hold? The mys­tery began to be revealed in 1959 when the Soviet Union’s Luna 3 space­craft flew to the far side of the Moon and pho­tographed it for the first time. These first pho­tographs were crude and grainy, but seemed to show a land as bleak and life­less as the near side.

Sub­se­quent space probes, such as the Lunar Orbiter 4, suc­ceeded in pho­tograph­ing the sur­face of the far side in much greater detail in 1967. Then in 1968, astro­nauts aboard Apollo 8, which cir­cled the Moon in prepa­ra­tion for the Apollo 11 land­ing, saw the far side of the Moon with human eyes for the first time.

Today, we have detailed photo maps of the far side, as well as topo­graphic maps call­ing out its main fea­tures. So the far side of the Moon is not as mys­te­ri­ous as it once was. Yet the sto­ries per­sist that there are still many secrets there – sto­ries fueled in part by the fact that since Apollo 17 in 1972, we have not returned to the Moon with a manned mis­sion. The con­spir­acy minded sus­pect that there’s a rea­son for that: the aliens don’t want us there.

Alien bases

It has long been a the­ory of some UFOl­o­gists that the far side of the Moon could har­bor a base for extrater­res­tri­als. Pre­sum­ing they come from a dis­tant planet in some other solar sys­tem, they must have a base from which they can make their reg­u­lar vis­its to the Earth. What bet­ter place than the far side of the Moon, which is per­pet­u­ally hid­den from sight?

To bol­ster this claim, authors at such web­sites as Alien Pres­ence on the Moon, site the words of Mil­ton William Cooper, allegedly a for­mer intel­li­gence offi­cer with the US Navy. In a 1989 press release from Cooper (again allegedly), he swears under oath that he was privy to infor­ma­tion that the US gov­ern­ment has knowl­edge of alien craft vis­it­ing Earth. “LUNA is the alien base on the far side of the Moon,” the release states. “It was seen and filmed by the Apollo Astro­nauts. A base, a min­ing oper­a­tion using very large machines, and the very large alien craft described in sight­ing reports as MOTHER SHIPS exist there.”

Also known as William or Bill Cooper, he wrote about his the­o­ries in such book­lets as The Secret Gov­ern­ment: The Ori­gin, Iden­tity and Pur­pose of MJ-12 and his 1991 book Behold A Pale Horse. Cooper was killed by offi­cers of the Apache County Sheriff’s Office in 2001 dur­ing a raid on his Ari­zona house for tax eva­sion. (Cooper opened fire first.)

Is there bet­ter evidence?

Pho­tos

The UFO Case­book web­site says there are actual NASA and mil­i­tary pho­tos of the bases on the far side of the Moon. “There is a HUGE alien moon base com­plex on the far side of the moon,” the web­site says. “This sounds silly but it is true and we have solid proof… straight from the mil­i­tary. In 1994, the US Navy sent a satel­lite called Clemen­tine to the moon to image it for two months. Dur­ing that time, the satel­lite took 1.8 mil­lion images. Out of those images, 170,000 images were made avail­able to the pub­lic. The rest were clas­si­fied. Clas­si­fied moon craters?”

The web­site pro­vides links to the pho­tos, but like many such pho­tos they are unclear and open to interpretation.

Remote viewed bases

One of the most fas­ci­nat­ing pieces of “evi­dence” for alien bases on the far side of the Moon comes from psy­chic and remote viewer Ingo Swann. Swann, who was instru­men­tal in cre­at­ing the US government’s remote view­ing pro­gram in the 1970s, is one of the most respected remote view­ers in the world.

The opin­ion that he is per­haps the best remote viewer around is held by other remote view­ers, due to his many aston­ish­ing suc­cesses. In 1973, for exam­ple, while remote view­ing Jupiter, Swann reported that the giant gas planet had rings. This fact was unknown to astronomers at the time, but was con­firmed by Voy­ager 1 in 1979.

In an arti­cle called “To the Moon and Back, With Love” for Amer­i­can Chron­i­cle, writer Gary S. Bekkum recounts Swann’s remote view­ing ses­sion about the Moon, an event reported in Swann’s own 1998 self-published work, Pen­e­tra­tion.

Swann was asked to remote view sev­eral tar­gets by a man named Axel­rod, work­ing for the US government.

“Axel­rod tasked Ingo with a series of moon coor­di­nates,” writes Bekkum. “Unknown to Swann, the tar­geted moon coor­di­nates, about ten dif­fer­ent loca­tions, would bring him mind-to-mind with what he soon real­ized was an unearthly extrater­res­trial presence.

“Swann ‘saw’ with his mind’s eye craters in dark­ness, and decided that he must be see­ing the hid­den side of the moon, the side that always faces away from the Earth. Upon achiev­ing psy­chic ‘con­tact’ with the lunar sur­face, Swann first came upon what looked like trails of tractor-tread marks. Con­fu­sion set in until Swann real­ized that he was ‘see­ing’ intel­li­gent activ­ity and struc­tures on the moon.

“In the depths of a crater he viewed a green, dusty haze lit by banks of arti­fi­cial lights mounted on very large, tall tow­ers. Swann was stunned by the real­iza­tion that ‘some­one’ or ‘some­thing’ appeared, under the aegis of his mind’s eye, to be build­ing a base on the moon. He had been inducted into an inter­plan­e­tary oper­a­tion and brought to Mr. Axelrod’s under­ground facil­ity by the need to mon­i­tor extrater­res­trial activ­i­ties in an uncon­ven­tional way. Swann decided that Axel­rod and com­pany had been given the task of psy­chi­cally spy­ing on the alien moon base because the extrater­res­tri­als had been less than friendly about con­ven­tional human curiosity.

“When Ingo sensed that he had been psy­chi­cally ‘spot­ted’ by two of the humanoid-looking inhab­i­tants of the moon base, he ques­tioned whether or not he was at risk.”

Return­ing to the Moon

Like most such spec­u­la­tion, rumor and psy­chic reports, tales of mys­te­ri­ous goings-on and alien bases on the far side of the Moon have not been proved. Nor can they be proved – or dis­proved, for that mat­ter – until per­haps we return to the Moon.

And we appar­ently have plans to do so. In March, 2006, NASA announced its plans to return to Earth’s neigh­bor. In fact, the plan is to land astro­nauts on the far side of the Moon! “Under the project,” states a [Sun­day] TIMESONLINE arti­cle, “up to four astro­nauts at a time will land on the far side of the moon to col­lect rock sam­ples and carry out research, includ­ing look­ing for water that might one day sup­port a lunar base.”

Astronomers have even more ambi­tious plans of set­ting up a radio tele­scope on the far side of the Moon, where it would be pro­tected from radio emis­sions from the Earth.

What will astro­nauts and sci­en­tists find there? Proof of extrater­res­trial vis­i­ta­tion? Will these projects set­tle the ques­tion once and for all?

Return­ing to the Moon is no guar­an­tee of dis­clo­sure, of course. If the alien bases are not uncov­ered and revealed to the cit­i­zens of the Earth, con­spir­acy the­o­rists can always blame the world’s gov­ern­ments, who they say con­tin­u­ally shield us from the truth of the alien presence.

(About.com: Para­nor­mal Phe­nom­ena)