A past U.S. Defense program considered nuking the moon to reach its core in a quest for lightweight metals.
According to documents obtained by The Vice, the program also studied wormhole travel and gravitational wave communication, both of which are popular in science fiction today.
The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), secretly operational between 2007 and 2012, is the Defense Program in the limelight. It has piqued the attention of people looking for information about extraterrestrial life.
When the program's head left the Pentagon in 2017, he released multiple films showing unidentified planes maneuvering in unusual ways. The AATIP became synonymous with exploring life in space due to the scarcity of information regarding the program. Nonetheless, recent records reveal that the program's reach was far broader.
Secret Files Proposed Nuking the Moon
The confidential data were made public when the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) disclosed over 1,600 pages of the material in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Vice.
According to the records, AATIP earned $10 million in financing for the first year, and it was joined by a slew of other science fiction-themed programs.
"Given the current rate of success, the continued study of these subjects will likely lead to technology advancements that in the immediate near-term will require extraordinary protection", former Senator Harry Reid, the creator of AATIP had said at the time per Republic World.
"The technological insight and capability gained will provide the U.S. with a distinct advantage over any foreign threats and allow the U.S. to maintain its preeminence as a world leader," he further said.
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Reid made many such recordings public following his retirement from the Pentagon in 2017, since the program also focused on analyzing UFO encounters.
Feasibility of Futuristic Concepts
The same Vice report said Hundreds of Defense Intelligence Reference Documents (DIRDs) that explore the plausibility of these notions. The writers' identities have been removed from these studies, but they discuss the benefits of technology and the difficulties in applying them.
According to Live Science (via Science Alert), the DIRD research on invisibility cloaking states that "perfect cloaking systems are unattainable since they need materials where the speed of light approaches infinity."
Although lightweight invisibility shields are currently available, the AATIP was most likely aiming for military-grade cloaks that would function in any situation.
AATIP programs would very certainly have gone to the moon in their hunt for the greatest materials, aiming for materials that were as strong as steel but 100,000 times lighter.
According to the authors, such incredibly light metals would most likely be present near the moon's core, and the only way to get to them would be to tunnel through the lunar crust and mantle. The writers suggested using thermonuclear bombs to complete the task, which has happily stayed on paper.
Vice reports that it will dig deeper into the records and offer additional details on what the program, which lacked an in-house research and development department, debated during its existence.
If you're curious to learn more, the materials have been made publicly available here.
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