Truth is stranger than fiction, especially when it comes to the very recent history of one of the USA's Department of Defense’s most secretive programmes: the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The AATIP operated from 2007 to 2012, gobbling millions of taxpayer dollars with little oversight (via Live Science).   

Lack of accountability coupled with an endless cash flow inspired officials at the AATIP to dabble in some genuinely bizarre technologies. We’re talking the kind of stuff you expect to see in an episode of Star Trek or a Harry Potter film: traversable wormholes, antigravity devices, and even invisible cloaks. But the scheme that takes the cake remains a proposal to tunnel through the moon using nuclear explosives.  Yep, you read that right. Here’s the story of one of the most hair-brained and scary military plots you’ve never heard of.

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THE AATIP MEETS FOIA

The New York Times first announced the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) in 2017. According to Popular Mechanics, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) funded the AATIP. In turn, the AATIP studied phenomena related to UFOs. Of course, this revelation sparked the intense scrutiny of individuals fascinated by the alien question.

But searching the night skies for flying saucers was far from the only thing that the AATIP participated in. We know this because of a four-year-old Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Vice for dozens of documents that was filed recently. The FOIA request resulted in a cache of 51 documents, numbering just under 1600 pages. The documents enclosed in these pages include contracts, proposals, reports, and meeting notes.

While these might sound like run-of-the-mill documents, the papers have revealed some surprising and mysterious AATIP activities. These documents detail everything from stargates and negative energy to wormholes that can be navigated. There are also discussions of warp drive, communications utilising high-frequency gravitational waves, and something referred to as “extra-dimensional manipulation.”

Yep, this all looks a bit strange and hard to believe, right? Read more on this story by clicking here. And just to tickle a bit more of your conspiracy fancy, according to the New York post, this isn't the first time the "theory" of blowing up the moon has surfaced.  A June 1959 report entitled “A Study of Lunar Research Flights” outlined plans to explode a bomb on the moon’s “terminator” — the area between the part of the surface that’s illuminated by the sun and the part that’s dark. Read that full article by clicking here.