By S.T. Patrick
At the same time many teenagers are worrying about getting their drivers license or standing in line for the newest video game console, John Greenewald Jr. was cataloging information about UFOs. As a high school sophomore in 1996, Greenewald used what he had just learned about the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to request documents from any and every government agency he thought might have answers to the questions and concerns that were his chief pursuits. Two decades and more than 3,000 FOIA requests later, Greenewald’s “Black Vault” website houses over 2 million documents, all gathered via FOIA requests. Some of the most shocking answers that Greenewald has found have been gathered in his books Secrets from the Black Vault: The Army’s Plan for a Military Base on the Moon and Other Declassified Documents That Rewrote History and also Inside the Black Vault: The Government’s UFO Secrets Revealed.
According to Greenewald’s investigations, the U.S. Army hatched a plan in 1959 to construct a base on the Moon. The idea, codenamed Project Horizon, was to build a mini-colony that could house 10-20 military personnel by 1966. The plan called for an average of five equipment-carrying Saturn rocket launches that would take place between August 1964 and November 1966. It wasn’t just a sporting race to the Moon with the Soviets. There was a more devastating reason for Project Horizon’s creation.
“Moon-based military power will be a strong deterrent to war because of the extreme difficulty, from the enemy point of view, of eliminating our ability to retaliate,” the plan, now declassified, suggested. The plan’s first page describes the Army chief of staff’s “expeditious approval and enthusiastic endorsement of initiation of the study.” As detailed:
[T]he base would have been used to develop techniques in Moon-based surveillance of the Earth and space, in communications relay, and in operations on the surface of the Moon; to serve as a base for exploration of the Moon, for further exploration into space and for military operations on the Moon if required; and to support scientific investigations on the Moon.
A 12-man outpost on the Moon would have cost as estimated $6 billion annually (around $53 billion today). Despite President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson sharing grand ideas about the Moon and space travel, the plan never came to fruition. Or has it? We know that 19 Saturn launches have been confirmed and a bevy of scientists and ufologists have speculated that some sort of lunar base exists.
The more revealing and more dangerous Cold War military plan was to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon as a “show of dominance.” The origin of this ill-fated plan (Project A119) was an Air Force division located at New Mexico’s Kirtland Air Force Base in 1959.
The disastrous idea was to blow up a nuclear bomb near the Moon’s terminator, the area halfway between the illuminated side and the dark side of the Moon. So that it would be visible and could be studied from Earth, the military had planned to add sodium to the bomb.
Described by Greenewald as “one of the stupider things the government could do,” the detonation was never executed. Another unclassified document may explain that cooler heads prevailed. It warned of “unparalleled scientific disaster.”
Physicist Dr. Leonard Reiffel had been tasked with studying the possibilities of lunar nuclear detonations. Before he passed away in 2000, Reiffel gave an interview to London’s Observer:
I made it clear at the time there would be a huge cost to science of destroying a pristine lunar environment,” Reiffel said. “But the U.S. Air Force were mainly concerned about how the nuclear explosion would play on Earth. Had the project been made public, there would have been an outcry.
From there, Greenewald delves into documentation about mind control and MKULTRA, a topic American Free Press has covered intelligently for decades, and remote viewing, the use of psychic spies to target a location that can be viewed inside the viewer’s mind from anywhere in the world. The military wanted to “see” and potentially “hear” a room from great distances, potentially thousands of miles away, all through psychic abilities. The phrase “remote viewing” was first used by Ingo Swann in 1971, but was popularized in the 1990s by the release of documents related to the Stargate Project.
The Stargate Project was a U.S. military initiative that began in 1975 as a means to determine whether there was any usable military application that could be gleaned from psychic and paranormal phenomena. The $20 million program was based at Fort Meade and run by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The project was declassified in 1995 after 20 years in existence and after telling the American public that all that was gained was information that was “vague . . . irrelevant . . . and erroneous.”
In an interview Greenewald did with the New York Post, he summed up the magnitude of what he believed was still out there, unfound, unread, and, thus, unknown. “You look at these documents and wonder,” Greenewald said, “if this is what they’re telling us, imagine what they’re not telling us.”
S.T. Patrick holds degrees in both journalism and social studies education. He spent 10 years as an educator and now hosts the “Midnight Writer News Show.” His email is [email protected].
