In April 2007, videos began appearing on YouTube under the username "retiredafb" telling the extraordinary story of Apollo 20, a secret lunar mission that definitively proved the existence of intelligent, alien life on the Moon. Then, on May 23, 2007, Italian ufologist Luca Scantanburlo interviewed a man who identified himself as William Rutledge, a retired American astronaut living in Rwanda. Rutledge claimed to be the commander of the Apollo 20 crew and to be the owner of the "retiredafb" account. However, Scantanburlo never met Rutledge in person because he conducted the interview over Yahoo! Messenger. During the interview, Rutledge claimed Apollo 20 was a top-secret mission launched in mid-August 1976 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, California, conducted jointly by the United States and the former Soviet Union. He alleged the other mission members were American Leona Snyder and former Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first human being to perform a spacewalk. The purported landing site of the mission was near Guyot crater, a feature near the much larger Delporte crater. Rutledge said the videos show that he and Leonov discovered the remains of an ancient lunar civilization. He also said they brought back artifacts to Earth for study, including a hibernating, female humanoid.
YouTube videos
The first Apollo 20 videos appeared on YouTube on April Fool's Day, a hint that the story was nothing more than an elaborate prank. The videos, however, were then moved to Revver.com also under user name retiredafb. Other videos are scattered throughout YouTube posted by several different account users, making it difficult to determine the true identity of the hoaxer. Each video continues to draw thousands of views. Despite the realistic appearance of the videos, amateurs have easily debunked them on YouTube and elsewhere on the Internet. The videos are short, each only lasting a few minutes. If viewed in their intended sequence, they tell a partial story of the faux mission, starting with astronauts boarding Apollo 20 and ending with the extraordinary "discoveries" on the Moon. They include the following images:
The body of a hibernating female alien nicknamed Mona Lisa by YouTube users.
Videographer
The creator is French videographer/artist Thierry Speth. However, the website with Speth's admission, Need2know.eu, no longer exists, nor does Speth's personal website. However, the page with Speth's admission is partially available when browsing internet archives. Also, more videos associated with other accounts have appeared on YouTube about Apollo 20, suggesting that more than one person is keeping the hoax alive.
Truths behind the video
Like many hoaxes, this story is a mixture of facts and fiction. The starting point for it are photos that NASA astronauts took in 1971 while in lunar orbit during the Apollo 15 mission, the fourth mission that landed men on the Moon. The photos show what look like a cigar-shaped object resting in a lunar crater. The hoaxer apparently used these photos to create the image of a pock-marked alien spacecraft on the Moon. The NASA photos are real. However, NASA never claimed they include images of alien spacecraft. The object in question is apparently nothing more than a natural part of the lunar terrain. Apollo 16 photos of the same crater taken a year later show no evidence of artificial structures. In truth, Apollo 20 was a mission that never flew. It was one of the three lunar missions NASA cancelled after Congress reduced its funding, including Apollo missions 18 and 19. The last crewed lunar mission was Apollo 17, launched in 1972. The next crewed mission that used an Apollo spacecraft was Skylab 2, launched on 25 May 1973, followed by Skylab 3 and Skylab 4. The Skylab missions were followed by the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, coordinated by the United States and the former Soviet Union in 1975. Some of the stages for the Saturn V rockets intended for NASA's three cancelled lunar missions had already been constructed before their cancellation. According to the hoaxer's story, these were all used for the lunar landings of Apollo missions 18, 19, and 20. In reality, NASA used one of these to launch Skylab into orbit in 1973. The others are on display at three American space centers: the John F. Kennedy Space Center near Cape Canaveral, Florida; the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas; and the United States Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Apollo 20 mission patch
The 'recreation' mission patch suggests the crew's names as, "Rutledge - Snyder - Leonov", with a Latin phrase from Virgilio's “Bucoliche”, carpent tua poma nepotes, which translates as, —your grandsons will gather your apples. The patch deviates from the actual planned, yet aborted, Apollo 20 mission NASA textile patch, with the primary crew embossed as, "Roosa - Lind - Lousma", which had been planned to land at Tycho crater to test a rendezvous mission with an earlier uncrewed lander.
In popular culture
The Apollo 20 hoax was discussed on Aliens on the Moon: The Truth Exposed, a TV documentary directed by American television producer Robert Kiviat which was released on July 20, 2014 on the SyFy Channel.
