The other side of the Moon has become a screen upon which have been projected, two mighty different projections the calculated type constructed of rocks and equipment, and the alien type constructed of human vision. They both continue to refer to the same painful fact people desire the unseen half of the Moon to tell something concerning what governments are privy to, what science can demonstratively affirm, and what the human mind does when assurance is exhausted.
During 1977 to 1995, the CIA funded a program known as Project Stargate which involved training of participants in what has been termed as remote viewing, an act intended to describe the distant objects without having to visit them physically. According to the internal record of the program, the results were uneven, and the program was stopped by official evaluation that found it unusable to provide intelligence of operations. Nevertheless, the archives remain in the memory of the general population since there were a few sessions when they had gone too far beyond enemy bases and into space.
One of the most incessant assertions refers to that related to Ingo Swann, who is commonly referred to as one of the greatest remote viewers of Stargate. In interviews relating to his 1998 book, he said that someone had offered to send him to the Moon and report what he saw on the other side: I saw towers, and machines, and lights of various colours, buildings that looked oddly at me. He said, and I discovered bridges, whose purpose I could not make out. There were many domes of different sizes. Swann also wrote that the shapes which he saw were conscious of his presence: Two of them pointed at me. How they can, how they can… unless… or unless they have some sort of high psychic perceptions, too? In another conversation later, which he said was made by an American diplomat, the innuendo narrowed down to a threat: They have somehow told you not to come. That is why you are reducing to psychic perceptions. They are not sociable, are they? It was in the nature of the answer given by Swann, viz. that you are only quite right… not quite all.
The same kind of story continues to rise to the fore to this day, because it has always been appealing: it gives us one dramatic reason why exploration seems discontinuous and dark. But the reverse side of the Moon is no longer blankness in a scientific sense, and the latest writing makes the notion of the need of a mystery to have inhabitants more complicated.
In 2024, The Chang’e 6 mission of China brought 1,935.3 grams of the far-side lunar samples of the South Pole-Aitken basin, an enormous impact crater approximately 2,500 kilometers in diameter and estimated to be 4.25 billion years old in published reporting. Studies reported the presence of far-side basalts as a result of volcanic events at 4.2 and 2.8 billion years old, and traces of a mantle source that is depleted in thorium and an exceptionally low water content in parts per million. The same announcement also gave accounts of samples who maintain a history of the primeval magnetism of the Moon, with a backward leap of the field force approximately 2.8 billion years earlier- indicating that the lunar inside was not merely cooling in a straight line.
In isolation, scientists working with microwave and thermal methods have observed a region of some 50 kilometers on the far side temperature 10degC above temperature on the centre of the surface, which secondary reporting has interpreted as the remnants of a buried granite mass and ancient volcanism. The granite worldwide in the rock is typical but typically surprising on airless planets where plate tectonics are absent, and the discovery was a reminder that it is still natural that improbable can be possible.
What comes out is a contradiction that keeps the Stargate tale alive. The further mapped, sampled, and thermally sensed the far side is, the more it is turned into a canvas on which rival interpretations are drawn, some based on geochemistry, some on secrets, some on the psychology of belief and the lure of forbidden knowledge. In that regard, the far side is not that much a destination as it is a reflection: it is what is familiar, what is lacking, what individuals are prepared to visualize in case official histories feel unfinished.
Even the cultural questionings which surround contact have their own infrastructure. Even before any evidence was found to support the existence of other species, researchers have taken the societal implications to be real enough to be studied, including studies of the societal implications of astrobiology and how belief systems could evolve to cope with new types of intelligence. It is based on that background that the lunar assertions of Project Stargate are framed more as a case study in the continued existence of extraordinary histories rather than as one that succeeds on the evidence, but instead latches itself to locales where it is most difficult to personally test.
It is the back side that is giving birth to rocks, and not to rumors. And yet the gluttony of the other tale towers, domes, a caution given by a head rather than a radio is still a part of the seriousness of the Moon.
