[music playing] NARRATOR: The
surface of the moon is scarred with
tens of thousands of impact craters
of various sizes. Scientists suggest
this is due to the fact that there has never
been an atmosphere on the moon to help protect
it from bombardment by space debris. There are no natural erosive
forces, like wind or flowing water, to affect its surface. And there is little geologic
activity to conceal damage done throughout the moon's history. PAUL DAVIES: When you study
the distribution of craters, you find the surface
is totally saturated. That is, that there are craters
within craters within craters, right down to the
smallest scale of size. MIKE BARA: One of the things
that's really interesting about lunar craters is that,
even though some of them are very large and some
of them are very small, they all seem to
have the same depth. And that really shouldn't
happen on a planetary body. There should be
variation in depth. So why are the moon's
craters so uniform? It's really, really
unusual, and it's really not explainable in terms
of conventional or established geophysics. Some of the
craters on the moon are nowhere near similar to
what they should look like. In fact, they are
incredibly wide craters. And wherever the
impact point is, they're convex,
which means there's still the bulge of the moon. So this doesn't make any sense. It's likely that there is
something under the lunar surface which is very resilient,
and which is preventing craters going any deeper than they do. This could only really be
either much harder rock, which it can't be because of
the mass of the moon, or, alternatively,
a metal sphere of some kind which is
preventing more damage. [music playing] NARRATOR: Does the uniform
depth of the craters on the moon suggest some sort
of metallic barrier underneath moon rock and dust? But if so, why
wouldn't mainstream scientists acknowledge this? Ancient astronaut theorists
suggest that, by doing so, they might also
have to acknowledge that the moon may be hollow. MAN: (ON RADIO) Yankee
Clipper, Houston. NARRATOR: November 20th, 1969. During their ascent back
to the command module, Commander Charles Conrad Jr.
and lunar module pilot Alan Bean release the Apollo
12 launch vehicle and crash it back to the moon. MAN 1: (ON RADIO)
Apollo 12, Houston. The LM is on its way down. MAN 2: (ON RADIO) Roger. NARRATOR: Upon impact, something
very unexpected happened. The moon was said
to have seismically reverberated like a bell
for more than an hour. WALTER CUNNINGHAM: With Apollo
12, people referred to a crash. It wasn't really a crash. It was an aimed deorbit
of the rocket used to lift off the lunar module. And the crew separated
the launch vehicle and crashed it back
into the ground right close to where they had
had a seismograph that they had installed down there. Well, it vibrated. So it was kind of an
early clue as to how solid was the surface of the moon. What was amazing
about this is that, suddenly, the moon began
to ring like a bell, and did so for nearly an hour. Dr. Wernher von Braun, who
was then the head of NASA, decided that, for
Apollo 13, they were going to
intentionally crash a heavier portion of the
rocket into the lunar surface. And when they did this,
the moon ran like a gong this time, for over three
hours and to a depth of over 20 miles. ALAN BUTLER: This
was not expected, and it still puzzles a
lot of scientists today. The inference is that the moon
must be hollow because the moon is made predominantly,
on the surface, of a kind of rock called basalts. Although it's a very
lightweight rock, it also absorbs
impact extremely well. And so if the whole of the moon
was made of that kind of rock, you wouldn't expect
it to reverberate when a large impact took place. The reason that
this is played down is because the idea of
the moon being hollow just contradicts what we
know about physics.
