REVEALED: COLD WAR PLOT TO... NUKE THE MOON

No, not science fiction but an attempt by U.S. military chiefs to stop Russia doing it first, as detailed in a riveting new book. TOM LEONARD reports…

Murky mind control experiments, psychics who ‘see’ scenes thousands of miles way and a plan to blow up the Moon — well, ‘the truth is out there’ as they used to say on the TV sci-fi series The X Files.

But such truth isn’t confined to the fevered imaginations of screenwriters. And although Black Vault may sound like a farfetched X Files episode, it actually refers to the largest archive of previously classified federal documents outside the u.S. Government itself.

running to more than two million pages, all obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests, the online treasure trove has been curated since 1996 by John Greenewald, whose teenage obsession with uFOs led him to discover the vast array of government secrets that, with persistence, were there to be revealed.

A real-life Fox Mulder and now a widely respected researcher, Greenewald has compiled some of the most outrageous revelations into a new book, Secrets From The Black Vault. And it proves that, where the u.S. Government and military are concerned, the truth is sometimes a lot weirder than fiction...

LUNAR LUNACY

The Pentagon saw the Moon as a potential battleground in the Cold War ‘space race’ with the Soviet union. So in 1959, a plan known as Project A119 was formulated to blow it up with a nuclear weapon fired from earth.

Sponsored by the Pentagon’s Air Force Special Weapons Center, the proposal was outlined in a research paper with the harmless- sounding title The Study of Lunar research Flights. And among the scientists who contributed to it was the celebrated astronomer and TV scientist Carl Sagan.

‘Nuclear detonations in the vicinity of the Moon are considered in this report, along with scientific information which might be obtained from such explosions. The military aspect is aided by investigation of space environment, detection of nuclear device testing, and capability of weapons in space,’ said the report.

The plan was motivated by political, scientific and military considerations.

First, the u.S. had got wind of rumours — correct, as it transpired — that the Soviets were planning to detonate their own atomic bomb on the Moon. Given that the Soviets got a satellite into space first, the Americans were determined not to be trumped again. Nuking the Moon would be a huge show of force, an explosion visible to the naked eye on earth. Sodium would be added to make it glow for extra effect.

Secondly, military scientists were trying to discover the effects of nuclear explosions in various environments — critical if the Cold War escalated into Space.

Thirdly, a nuclear explosion on the Moon would create a plume of debris that could be used to analyse the make- up of the lunar surface.

Scientists did worry about what would happen to the radiation produced by the blast and the plan was eventually dropped because of the threat of what one declassified document called ‘unparalleled scientific disaster’.

SPACE SOLDIERS

JuST as the u.S. Air Force was planning to blow up the Moon, the u.S. Army planned to colonise it.

under 1959’s Project horizon, the first step in a strategy to dominate Space and thwart Soviet ambitions, a ‘manned military outpost’ would accommodate between ten and 20 personnel who would be ‘self-sufficient for as long as possible’.

It wouldn’t be cheap. It was estimated that a 12-man mission would cost £4.8 billion (more than £43 billion today) to set up and run for the first year (when materials, supplies and equipment would require 64 rocket trips). But money was no object in the Space race.

Declassified documents show that the u.S. Army had addressed every detail, even designing a Dan Dare-like space suit with skatelike footwear.

The 40- ton base would be powered by blasting craters into the lunar surface, where nuclear reactors would be sited.

Water would be collected from the atmosphere and recycled, while food would include homegrown algae and chickens that could feed on the plant waste.

The u.S. Army optimistically said it could have the outpost in operation by late 1966. As it was, Nasa didn’t succeed in putting a man on the Moon until 1969 and there has never been a permanent base there.

MIND CONTROL

ONe of John Greenewald’s biggest Black Vault finds was material related to Mkultra, a top-secret CIA project that involved dozens of mind- control experiments on Americans and others.

When it was closed down in 1973, CIA Director richard helms ordered all papers to be destroyed but 20,000 pages were later discovered in CIA archives. When Mr Greenewald asked for them, the CIA initially withheld 300 documents, claiming they were lost, but he finally got them all.

The final 300 referred to two highly sensitive operations — Projects Artichoke and Bluebird — which concerned CIA use of hypnosis and hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD to control human behaviour.

Convinced the Soviets, Chinese and North koreans were using mind- control techniques on captured agents, the u.S. set up Mkultra in 1950 to discover what was possible and even did it themselves. Part of the testing was surreptitious, sometimes using alcoholics and drug addicts as subjects.

It could lead to tragedy. In 1953, CIA scientists gave glasses of Cointreau, secretly spiked with LSD, to colleagues at a conference. One of them, Dr Frank Olson, died nine days later — after showing symptoms of paranoia and schizophrenia, he fell to his death from the tenth-floor window of a New york hotel.

TEST DANGERS

The CIA was doing research on biological and chemical weapons using unknowing or unwilling victims, to see how far such agents might spread through the air and infect targets such as civilian populations and military units.

It later emerged that potentially tens of thousands of military personnel and civilians were exposed to dangerous chemical or biological substances during tests.

A 1965 experiment dubbed Fearless Johnny was designed to test the effectiveness of a lethal British-made nerve agent called VX when sprayed out of a plane. Although the military claimed it used a harmless chemical as a substitute, papers later showed it had also released VX itself.

According to John Greenewald, the u.S. Government and military have, intentionally or not, obscured the impact on the health of those exposed.

PSYCHIC SPOOKS

reMOTe viewing — supposedly using the mind to ‘see’ an unseen place through extra- sensory perception or eSP — is a field of paranormal activity full of charlatans. But it wasn’t too hokey for the CIA.

For two decades from the 1970s, the agency spent more than £16 million consulting psychics about hidden places they wanted intelligence on. Targets included a North korean tunnel network under the border with South korea, the whereabouts of enemy spies and the leadership of criminal organisations.

The author of a classified 1979 paper on the CIA’s remote viewing work — the SCANATe programme — even claimed it had notched up notable successes with its psychics (so-called ‘psi-spies’).

CIA psi- spy Ingo Swann told scientists he could ‘look anywhere in the world’ if he was given the right co- ordinates. Another person involved in the research was the Israeli-British ‘psychic’ uri Geller. The CIA was very impressed with him.

encouraged, the CIA extended its paranormal research to include the ‘military applications’ of psychokinesis, the ability to move objects or affect living organisms by mental effort alone.

In their conclusion to Project Grill Flame, another remote viewing programme, experts decided it was ‘a real phenomenon and is not degraded by distancing or shielding’.

SecretS From the Black Vault: the Army’s Plan For A Miltary Base On the Moon and Other Declassified Documents that rewrote History, by John Greenewald, is published by rowman & Littlefield, £10.95.