“Mysterious Moon Tower” Claim Is False: Image Is a Digital Illustration

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A viral post claimed that a leaked photo, supposedly drawn from China’s Chang’e mission data and NASA survey data, showed a mysterious tower more than 200 meters tall on the far side of the Moon. It hinted at an ancient alien base and a cover-up, then closed by saying nobody could call the story true or false. We examined the image, the coordinates and the space-agency data. Here is the post that spread.

Social Media Posts:

“There are rumors that a mysterious tower stands on the Moon’s far side and that a photo of it has been released. You may have seen that a photo leaked last night from China’s Chang’e mission data and NASA’s LRO survey data. Social media claims the photo shows a black, antenna-like tower over 200 meters tall at coordinates 44.2°S 179.1°E on the Moon’s far side. Such a tower has been discussed on several occasions since 2004. A classified document allegedly describes the structure as ‘STRUCTURE IS NOT NATURAL.’ Though it is said the China National Space Agency deleted the original file within hours of the leak, deleting it everywhere would not be possible if it existed.

Some people have suggested it could be an old alien base or built by a separate civilization that reached the Moon before us. Some say, like the Black Knight Satellite talked about since 1960, it has stood there for thousands of years. Nevertheless, NASA has never officially announced anything about this tower discussed since 2004, nor said anything about the photo allegedly leaked yesterday. So, without a reliable report, no one can definitively call this true or false!” the post stated.

A comment on the post also included the image below, labeled “ZOND-3 (Soviet Moon Probe – 1965).”

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We set out to verify whether this is true or false.

Fact-Check:

The image in the post is not from LRO data

The post’s main image is labeled “LRO SURVEY DATA.” It shows a ground-level view of a tall structure with antennas and dishes, a NASA-emblazoned rover at its base and a “CLASSIFIED – EYES ONLY” stamp. LRO orbits the Moon and photographs it from above, so it cannot capture such a ground-level view. The only credit at the bottom is a creator name, “UXCHARCOAL,” and there is no evidence that NASA or any official body released the image. By our visual inspection, it resembles a digitally created illustration rather than a photograph.

No such tower is recorded in official NASA or Chinese data

The post says a photo of a tower over 200 meters tall on the Moon’s surface was recently released and then removed. If that had happened, international media or other reliable sources would have reported it. We found no mention of any such release in any official source, and the post’s author gives no evidence for it.

Photos and data from the camera (LROC) on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which studies the Moon’s surface, are openly available to researchers and the public through the LROC Featured Image Archive and the LROC Planetary Data System (PDS) data archive.

LROC’s Wide Angle Camera (WAC) produced a global mosaic map covering the Moon’s entire surface at 100 meters per pixel. The GLD100 topographic (elevation) map built from this data covers 98.2% of the surface. The Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) has also imaged large areas at meter-level resolution. None of the data and reports we examined mentions any artificial tower or unnatural structure over 200 meters tall, including on the far side.

China’s Chang’e 4 became the first spacecraft to land on the Moon’s far side, on January 3, 2019. Chang’e 6 landed in the far side’s Apollo basin on June 1, 2024, in the first mission to return samples from that side (more).

Photos and scientific data from the Chang’e 4 lander and the Yutu-2 rover have been publicly available since January 2020, and the China National Space Agency (CNSA) also publishes official mission information. We found no record of such a tower in this data either.

If an artificial structure over 200 meters tall were found on the Moon, no organization could easily keep it secret or suddenly erase it from the internet. Independent astronomers and amateurs worldwide constantly analyze this data, so such a discovery would spark a global scientific debate.

The alleged tower’s location is near the Chang’e 4 landing site

The post’s coordinates, 44.2°S 179.1°E, are on the Moon’s far side, which never faces Earth. Only 59% of the Moon’s surface can be seen from Earth, at different times, because of libration (Far side of the Moon). A structure there cannot be observed from Earth, so our conclusion rests on LRO and Chang’e data.

The coordinates lie inside Von Kármán crater (44°27′S 176°15′E, about 186 km in diameter). The Chang’e 4 lander touched down in this crater on January 3, 2019, at 45.457°S 177.589°E. LRO’s NAC camera imaged that site at 80 cm per pixel. Our calculation shows that the post’s coordinates are about 50 km from the Chang’e 4 landing site. A structure over 200 meters tall in such an area should have appeared in these observations, yet no source mentions one.

Similar claims of unnatural towers on the Moon have surfaced online before

We set out to identify the photo shown in the comment on the post. The image has long been used on social media to promote the idea of a tower on the Moon. As the comment states, it is a photo taken on July 20, 1965, as the Soviet Union’s Zond 3 spacecraft passed near the Moon’s far side. Some alien-believer groups and social media accounts have long described the small mark rising above the Moon’s edge as a mysterious tower or an alien construction.

Zond 3 was launched on July 18, 1965, and on July 20 passed about 9,219 km from the Moon (Zond 3). Photos from its camera were processed automatically on board and scanned line by line for radio transmission to Earth. All frames were sent in low resolution at 67 lines, and selected frames were retransmitted at a higher resolution of 1,100 lines. The smallest details visible in these images were about 5 km across (Drew Ex Machina).

The Soviet lunar image archive page lists the photo frames from the Soviet Zond 3 spacecraft (image below). The exact image in the post cannot be identified among those frames. As the page itself notes, noise arises at every stage of photographing, printing and scanning Soviet space images.

There is no evidence that the “tower” mark in the Zond 3 image is a tower

We did not identify an original frame matching the post’s image, so we cannot confirm whether it was edited or is an enlarged part of an original frame. Even so, three points are clear.

First, the images have a resolution of about 5 km. A mark visible in them, if it were a real structure, would be kilometers across, not 200 meters. The 200-meter tower in the post and the mark in this image therefore cannot be the same thing.

Second, small marks at the Moon’s edge (limb) can arise from ordinary causes, such as noise during imaging, scanning and radio transmission, or the shadow of a crater rim. We cannot confirm this precisely, but there is no evidence that it is a tower.

Third, LRO’s global topographic data and the other observations we examined record no such kilometer-scale tower.

There is no evidence for the post’s other claims

The post does not say what the classified document describing the “STRUCTURE IS NOT NATURAL” is or who issued it, and we found no identifiable source for it. The post also says such a tower has been discussed since 2004, but cites no source, and we found no 2004 report.

The Black Knight Satellite story concerns a mysterious object allegedly orbiting Earth, not the Moon. In 1960, TIME reported a dark object identified by the US Navy, later identified as debris from the Discoverer 8 satellite (Space.com). A photo taken during the 1998 STS-88 mission showed a thermal blanket lost during a spacewalk (Snopes). It is not evidence of a tower on the Moon.

The 2016 tower story was also explained as a shadow or crater rim

In 2016, a social media post also claimed that a photo of the Moon’s surface showed an unnatural tower. Finnish UFO hunter Mark Sawalha called it an “antenna” about 3.6 miles (about 5.9 km) tall, based on a 1967 NASA photo (HNGN). Daily Mail reported that UFO author Nigel Watson said it could be a shadow on a slope, while a lunar expert explained it as the rim of a small crater inside a larger one.

A similar case is “The Shard,” which Richard Hoagland called a “mile-high tower.” LiveScience reports that the original Lunar Orbiter 3 photo showed only a small bright spot near the horizon, which digital processing such as contrast changes and smoothing made look like a structure.

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Conclusion:

Our fact-check found that the post claiming a tower over 200 meters tall at 44.2°S 179.1°E on the Moon’s far side is false. The post’s image resembles a digital illustration, not a photograph, and LRO cannot capture such a ground-level view. No such tower appears in NASA’s LROC data or in Chang’e 4’s public data, and we found no official or media report of a photo being released and removed.

The Zond 3 image in the comments is a low-resolution 1965 image, and there is no evidence that its small edge mark is a tower. The “classified document,” “2004 discussion” and Black Knight Satellite claims have no reliable sources.

Earlier tower stories, including the 2016 case and “The Shard,” were also explained as shadows, photographic artifacts or digital alterations. The post is false.