Is the moon a barren that revolves around us daily, or is it... something more? MUHAHAHAHA! Sorry, I had to start off with something cheesy. Seriously though, was the moon just the moon, covered in rock and crushed rock and some more rock? Or maybe the moon was actually covered with ancient artifacts, ruins, et cetera.

Richard C. Hoagland, conspiracy theorist, "scientist," psychotic, whatever you want to call him he talks about this a lot, among many other astronomical and NASA related conspiracies.

Some reading on his theory about the moon having remains of ancient civilization:
http://www.lunaranomalies.com/patent.htm
http://www.enterprisemission.com/earth.html
http://www.enterprisemission.com/datashead.htm

He claims that the government airbrushed many frames of footage to erase ruins from the shot. Also he said that either he saw or someone else saw and told him (I forget which) that he and a small group of other people saw a video from Apollo of the darkside of the moon and that you could see lights from the city(s) on the darkside, and that you could even see smoke coming from smoke stacks. The presenter of the video then said something to the effect of "pretty amazing, eh?" and then the video was never seen again, presumably destroyed shortly after.

Are Hoagland's claims outlandish? Probably, but yet the high quality moon footage has gone "missing" and all we're left with is the low quality crap footage. Government conspiracy, lost in time with all the budget cuts and whatnot at NASA, or an stupid decision to reuse the tape for other stuff to save a buck?

some reading on the missing tapes:
http://space.com/news/061103_apollo_tapes.html

I think it's fairly obvious why people's feelings of Hoagland are either "all praise him!" or "bloody window licker imbicile..." So onto the skeptical side. In all of his conspiracy theories hoagland enlarges and "enhances" photos, almost always low res photos, and then claims that he sees walls and buildings and ancient remains from a past civilization. That's far from adequate evidence. Yada yada, blah blah, bad astronomy has whole section devoted to Hoagland, and my brother (if he was a super hero he'd be Skeptic Man) thinks that he's schizophrenic or something.

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/hoagland/

So are we being mislead? Or are we simply misleading ourselves? Either way we should be finding out in about 4 years when China has estimated that they will make their first journey to the moon.

(if anyone has anything better than this....)

Arrgh, yar... arr ar arrgh!