The lost ruins of the Moon
ANDREW MAY explores some of the many artificial lunar structures ‘discovered’ by imaginative observers over the centuries
The Moon is the nearest alien world to Earth, and one that anyone can explore from their own backyard using a small telescope. The downside, of course, is that it’s a notoriously dead world – but that hasn’t prevented over-enthusiastic observers from discovering any number of artificial constructions on its crater-riddled surface. Regular readers of Fortean
Times will need no introduction to the concept of pareidolia – the propensity of the human mind to see meaningful structures in random patterns. It helps if the mind in question is coupled with an over-active imagination – as it is, for example, in the case of Michel Ardan, one of the fictional space travellers in JulesVerne’s 1870 novel Around the Moon. As their projectile passes over the Moon’s southern highlands, Ardan suddenly claims to spot “an agglomeration of ruins”:
“He perceived the dismantled ramparts of a town; here, the still intact arch of a portico; there, three or four columns lying below their bases; farther on a succession of pillars which must have supported an aqueduct; elsewhere, the shattered piers of a gigantic bridge.” 1
Verne wasn’t suggesting there really was a ruined city on the Moon – just that Ardan let himself be carried away with wishful thinking. InVerne’s own words: “There was so much imagination in his glance… that his observations are to be mistrusted”. The same could be said of quite a few people on the Internet today, who scour every new image released by NASA in search of anything that might be evidence of alien civilisations.
Long before the Space Age, however, there were Earthbound observers of the Moon’s surface who did much the same thing. In the 19th century, for example, a whole city was supposedly discovered near the crater Schröter. Here’s what the Victorian selenographer Thomas Gwyn Elger said about it:
“It was in the region north of this object, which abounds in little hills and low ridges, that in the year 1822 Gruithuisen discovered a very remarkable formation consisting of a number of parallel rows of hills branching out (like the veins of a leaf from the midrib) from a central valley at an angle of 45 degrees, represented by a depression between two long ridges running from north to south. The regularly arranged hollows between the hills and the longitudinal valley suggested to his fertile imagination that he had at last found a veritable city in the Moon… At any rate, he was firmly convinced that it was the work of intelligent beings, and not due to
The discoverer of this ‘city on the Moon’ wasn’t just a crackpot amateur but a well-respected academic
natural causes.” 2
The discoverer of this “city on the Moon” wasn’t just some crackpot amateur. Franz von Gruithuisen (1774 – 1852) was a well-respected academic, who later became a professor of astronomy at the University of Munich.
Equally respectable was the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and keen amateur astronomer, John Joseph O’Neill. Shortly before his death in 1953, O’Neill claimed to have observed an unusual feature near the Moon’s Sea of Crises – or Mare Crisium, to give it its Latin name:
“A gigantic natural bridge has been found on the Moon at the edge of the Mare Crisium, in the rim of its surrounding walls… The bridge extends in a north-south direction and judging from the positions of the shadows cast by its lower supports it has the amazing span of about 12 miles from pediment to pediment.” 3
O’Neill’s alleged bridge lies in an area of rough terrain that’s particularly difficult to resolve with a small telescope, and his claim proved controversial to say the least. He contended that a particular pattern of light and shadows – seen only for a few hours at a particular phase of the Moon – was caused by sunlight passing through the arch of a bridge. Some astronomers agreed with this interpretation, others disagreed. Unsurprisingly, O’Neill found his strongest supporters among the UFO enthusiasts of the day, who gleefully seized on the idea of a lunar bridge. “It looks artificial,” Donald Keyhoe wrote in his 1955 book The Flying Saucer Conspiracy. 4
Like Gruithuisen’s city – and many other supposed anomalies on the Moon – O’Neill’s Bridge has a tendency to disappear when looked at with a really powerful telescope. But that in