You’ve seen them. Maybe it was a grainy YouTube thumbnail or a "leaked" TikTok clip showing a towering glass spire or a humanoid figure standing near a crater. The internet has a weird, borderline obsessive relationship with pics of aliens on moon surfaces. Honestly, it’s easy to see why. Space is terrifyingly empty, and the idea that we aren't alone up there—just a three-day flight away—is a lot more exciting than looking at gray rocks.
But here is the thing.
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Most of what people call "evidence" is actually just a mix of pareidolia, bad lighting, and the limits of 1960s camera tech. We want to see life. Our brains are hardwired to find faces in clouds and monsters in the shadows. When you apply that to thousands of high-resolution images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) or the Apollo archives, you’re bound to find something that looks like a base. Or a tall gray man. Or a crashed saucer.
The Most Famous Pics of Aliens on Moon (And the Reality)
Let’s talk about the "Moon Man" from 2014. This was a massive viral moment. A Google Moon user spotted a shadow that looked exactly like a person walking on the lunar surface. It had legs, a torso, and a shadow trailing behind it. People lost their minds. "Finally," they said, "proof."
Except it wasn't.
NASA scientists, including those working on the LRO mission, eventually pointed out that the "figure" was actually a scratch on the original film negative of an Apollo 11 photo. When that film was digitized, the scratch turned into a humanoid shape. It's a classic example of how a tiny physical defect on a piece of plastic from 1969 can become a global conspiracy in 2026.
Then there is the "Shard." This one is actually pretty cool to look at. In some older lunar photos, there appears to be a massive, tower-like structure rising miles above the surface. If you look at it with a squint, it looks like a skyscraper. But when modern probes like the Kaguya or the LRO went back to those exact coordinates with better sensors? Nothing. Just a combination of low-sun-angle shadows and vertical "smearing" that happens when a camera is moving at thousands of miles per hour while trying to snap a still frame.
Why the Apollo Archives Are a Goldmine for Hunters
NASA doesn't hide these photos. That’s the irony. You can go to the Project Apollo Archive on Flickr right now and browse through thousands of raw, unedited scans.
Most people don't realize how messy those missions were. Dust was everywhere. The astronauts were literally covered in lunar regolith, which is jagged and static-charged. It got into the cameras. It created lens flares. So, when you see pics of aliens on moon missions, you're often looking at a speck of moon dust reflecting the sun right into the lens of a Hasselblad camera.
It looks like a UFO because it's a blurry, glowing orb. But in reality, it's a piece of dirt floating three inches from the astronaut's face.
The Mystery of the "Monolith" and Modern Findings
Remember the Chinese Yutu-2 rover? In late 2021, it spotted a "mystery hut" on the far side of the moon. This was a huge deal for a few weeks. Even mainstream news outlets were asking if China had found an alien outpost. The image showed a perfectly cubic object sitting on the horizon.
The rover spent weeks crawling toward it.
The result? It was a rock. A small, jagged rock that happened to be shaped in a way that, from a distance and at a specific angle, looked like a building. This is the "Mars Face" phenomenon all over again. Distance hides the truth. Proximity reveals the mundane.
But that doesn't stop the flow of new images. We are now in an era of "citizen scientists" using AI upscaling to "reveal" details in old photos. This is where things get dangerous. AI upscaling doesn't actually recover lost data; it invents it based on what it thinks should be there. If you tell an AI to "enhance" a blurry shape on the moon, and the AI has been trained on images of buildings and people, it will literally hallucinate windows and limbs onto a boulder.
Shadows are the Ultimate Deception
The moon is a world of extreme contrast. There is no atmosphere to scatter light. On Earth, shadows are soft because air bounces light around. On the moon, a shadow is a pitch-black void. If a rock has a weird overhang, that shadow can look like a doorway. If two rocks are side-by-side, the gap can look like a hidden entrance to an underground base.
Dr. Noah Petro, a project scientist for the LRO, has spent years looking at these images. He’s noted that every single "anomaly" reported by the public has a geological explanation once you look at the 3D topographic data.
- The "Base" in Tycho Crater: Just a collection of boulders from an impact melt.
- The "Pipe" on the surface: A collapsed lava tube (cool, but not alien).
- The "Moving Lights": Usually cosmic rays hitting the camera sensor, creating a temporary white pixel.
Why We Can't Stop Looking
Psychologically, we are desperate for the moon to be more than a dead rock. We grew up on stories of "The Man in the Moon" and sci-fi films about secret lunar colonies. When we look at pics of aliens on moon forums, we are participating in a modern form of folklore.
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It’s fun. It’s a mystery.
But if we want to find actual life, we have to be disciplined. We have to separate the "I want this to be true" from the "This is actually there." Right now, with the Artemis missions heading back to the lunar south pole, we are going to get more photos than ever before. We’ll see the shadowed regions where water ice lives. We’ll see high-definition video of places no human has ever stepped.
And yes, there will be more weird shapes. There will be more "anomalies."
How to Vet Moon Photos Yourself
If you see a photo online claiming to show a lunar base or an alien, don't just take the headline's word for it. There are ways to check.
First, find the original source. If the photo doesn't have an ID number (like AS11-40-5863), it’s probably fake or a heavy crop of something irrelevant. Most "alien" photos are zoomed in so far that you lose all context.
Second, look at the sun angle. In many of these pics of aliens on moon theories, the "alien" is casting a shadow that doesn't match the rocks around it. That’s a dead giveaway of a Photoshop job. Or, the "alien" has no shadow at all, meaning it was pasted in later.
Third, check the "noise." Digital photos have a grain. If the grain on the "UFO" is different from the grain on the moon's surface, you're looking at a composite.
Moving Toward Real Discovery
The real mystery of the moon isn't hidden cities. It's the history of our solar system. The moon is a time capsule. Every crater tells a story of an impact that might have happened four billion years ago. Those are the "records" we should be obsessed with.
When the Artemis III astronauts land, they’ll have cameras that make the Apollo gear look like toys. We will see the lunar surface in 4K. We will see the dust, the rocks, and the craters in terrifying detail. If there is something up there, we won't need to squint at blurry 1960s film to see it.
Until then, keep an eye on the official releases from NASA, the ESA, and China's CNSA. They are the ones with the raw data. The internet will always have its "moon men," but the truth is usually found in the geological data, not the grainy crops of a 50-year-old photograph.
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To truly understand what you're seeing in these images, you need to look at the source data. Start by visiting the LRO Camera Image Search hosted by Arizona State University. You can plug in coordinates of famous "alien" sightings and see the high-resolution, modern reality for yourself. Most of the time, that "secret base" turns out to be a really interesting pile of rocks. Focus on the raw TIFF files rather than compressed JPEGs found on social media; the compression artifacts in JPEGs are often what create those "alien structures" in the first place. Verify the sun's azimuth and the spacecraft's altitude to understand why shadows look elongated or "artificial." This is how you transition from being a spectator to a real lunar investigator.