I know very little about lunar rilles, except what I have read up about them. I am not a scientist or astronomer, but I have this theory (which I can back up with 'proof') that some types of rilles are not naturally made.

I can see you think this should be in the conspiracy theory forum, but it is an idea that I have not see discussed anywhere - partly because to have a rille made in any other not-natural way, you would have to have something or someone who made it.

However, looking at the Lunar Orbiter gallery I have found something which looks like it is a rille being created at the time when the Orbiter is passing overhead. Sounds unlikely, doesn't it?

So I am looking for explanations from the more knowledgable members and I am also interested in your theories about what causes the rilles that are shallow and little more than 'tracks' on the surface of the Moon.


As a new member, I cannot post URLs yet, so I let me have all your abuse first and then after a few more posts I will be able to post the 'proof' that I have.

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The system blocks the posting of URLs by new members to discourage spammers, which appears to have nothing to do with your wish here. If you wish to link to pictures that may support your theory, perhaps you can ask the moderators to help you post the link immediately.

OK, well the explanation is on my website pelicanbill com which is where this picture comes from (obviously the original comes from NASA and I only cut out part of it to show what I was talking about!) The article is called the mole on the moon under moon anomalies.

I think that after so long believing that the moon is uninhabited, people really dont want to change their beliefs because it raises so many other awkward questions which are often more political than scientific.

If someone can offer me an explanation for these pictures that I can accept as common sense, I will be happier. Currently however, I am leaning towards the theory that some of these 'rilles' are not natural moon-made structures, although I realise there are many different types of 'rille' out there.

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Welcome Mr. 20. Common sense should be inbound shortly.

(If sense was common *I* would have it.)

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Thank you Don, however, you dont offer me any explanation for my pictures. Your opinion would be good, even if it is directly opposed to mine.

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I'd be curious what you are referring to as "rilles" in the image? Most of the lines are image artifacts and not lunar features.

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

top left to bottom right is a 'rille'.

Yes, I know that the Lunar Orbiter pictures were processed on-satellite and digitally sent to earth. There is all kinds of 'hairs' and 'fingerprints' on the pictures and it is difficult to sort out what is real and what is a 'feature' of the on-board processing. However, in my opinion (and I am not an expert at all) there are certain anomalous things that are not caused by the on-board processing.

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For those interested: obligatory link to the Lunar Orbiter wikipage, with some great links to external sites.

I'm not sure they were sent digitally, but sent they were, yes.

Which leaves the door wide open for "anomalies" that are caused before processing (film errors, lens artifacts, etc), and that are caused after processing (scan faults, transmission errors, etc), and of course things that happened between the arrival of the picture in '66 or '67 at NASA, and the moment you see it as a picture in a book or on the internet (compression, scanning, conversion, montage, printing, etc). I'm not saying (yet) that whatever you will present must be caused by anything I just listed, just something to think about while looking at the images.

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Yes, all these things could cause mis-interpretation, however, I dont think the ones I am showing are these kind of things, but I could be proved wrong. I will try to post the url now and see if I am seen as spam....

These are the two strange things I have found and dont know how to 'classify' them. It is difficult for me to see how they could be processing artifacts or after-processing grit/dirt/hairs/fingerprints etc so I need some other people's opinions to be my reality check.

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What's your understanding of the mainstream theory of how the rilles were created? Why do you think it's insufficient in this case?

Well Peter, I think it is insufficient in this case, and I guess you have not seen the rest of the picture that I posted above. (the bit I didn't post)

As I understand it rilles are naturally created structures and this one is not. That would make the present mainstream theory obsolete in some cases, wouldn't it?

Lunar scientists would need to re-evaluate which were naturally made and which were not.

Do you consider this example a perfectly natural rille?

My url of the 'proof' is awaiting moderator approval at the moment.

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善數, 不用籌策 (shàn shù, bù yòng chóu cè)
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“A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is”
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Several questions come up looking at your "evidence":

What is the size of the area that you show?
What makes you think that it is a worm?
How big is that worm?
Are you sure it is not just light and shadow effects changing dips into mounts?

You write:
I am going to put forward a theory that some craters are not craters at all, but exit or entry holes for this kind of machine. If you imagine a lugworm, the kind that sea anglers use as bait and which make wormcasts on the sand.

It is nice if you put this idea forward, but you give no evidence, except for one pic. You need to come up with something more substantial than what you have on your website.

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善數, 不用籌策 (shàn shù, bù yòng chóu cè)
He who is good at counting, uses no counting tools
“A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is”
道德經, 二十七 (dào dé jīng, 27)

Okay, I've looked at the photos. Where is the machine that apparently has a shadow beside it? I can't see anything even resembling a shadow. And I can't see a hole a mole must have emerged from. In each case, can you point to the objects you're referring to?

In any case, have you asked lunar geologists what their interpretation of the photo is? Isn't it a bit precipitate to propose a solution for an anomaly until you've confirmed there actually is an anomaly?

One possible method of finding more information would be to determine the location of your anomaly, and to search for more recent imagery of the same location. Maybe in this Clementine database, and I'm sure you can find others.

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'No, mad's when you froth at the mouf,' said Gaspode. 'He's insane. That's when you froth at the brain.'

But why do you think it's insufficient?

But how do you know it's not naturally created?

Only if you can demonstrate this rille wasn't naturally created. And in fact, even the presence of an alien artifact isn't sufficient to make the mainstream theory obsolete - for all we know, the alien artifact might have nothing to do with the rille.

Yes, if your theory was shown to be true.

I don't have the expertise to determine one way or the other. In such cases I defer to the experts. That's why I've asked you if you've spoken to lunar geologists about this.

And this is a general rule I follow as a skeptic. I accept the mainstream in pretty much every topic because I recognise that experts in each science know a heck of a lot more about their field of expertise than I do. But the important thing to understand is that it doesn't mean I'll defend the mainstream to the death. Rather, I accept it for what it is at the moment, and understand that new evidence may overturn it in the future.

What this means in the case of the rille photos you show is that, for the time being, I'll accept the explanation of lunar geologists for what the rilles are, rather than yours, because of their expertise. But that doesn't mean I say it's impossible the rilles were the creations of aliens. I think it would be spectacular if the first evidence of intelligent alien life was (for want of a better term) alien Moon mining. I just don't think it's very likely.

Incidentally, when I went to your page, the Google ads covered the text on the right of the screen.

That's not a rille, it's a ridge.

Let's use the photo's edges for directions, so that clockwise we have top, right, bottom and left.

Study the shadows and highlights in the craters. The light is coming from the bottom, so the shadows in the craters are at the bottom and the highlights at the top as we would expect. It would be almost the same if your object was a rille, but in fact they are reversed, with the highlight at bottom left and shadow at top right, so it is a raised ridge with both sides rising from the general terrain. (I'm never too happy with that term. Shouldn't it be lurain?)

When you say it "looks like it is a rille being created" are you referring to the break in the ridge? To say more about it I would first want to know what the experts say about it, where exactly the feature is, what its dimensions are, and also to examine other photos of it. As this photo (in Post 1) stands, it appears to me that the surface is darker in the break and I get the impression of a shallow lava-filled basin extending from top centre to bottom left. If that is indeed the case, perhaps the ridge ran right across the basin once but later became covered by lava, or perhaps the basin somehow caused the break in the ridge.

Those are only guesses. My "expertise" in this, if I have any, is as a photographer for 41 years (15 professional), an Apollo nut, a space nut and a moon nut for periods of between 15 and 50 years, but never as an expert in lunar geology.

Thank you for letting me know. I will fix it. What browser are you using? I have tested it in IE6, FF2, Opera9, Safari3.1 (all windows versions) Maybe I need to look again and at the newer versions of IE also?

It is late where I am, so I will post again tomorrow. Thank you all for your comments. :-)

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Internet Explorer of unknown version.

When it comes to the Internet, I'm definitely teh dum.

Boy, ocpaul20, if you are going to analyse photos of the moon you really need to up your observational skills so you can tell a hump from a hollow.

The item at that website that is called a "large pale coloured object that has just bored its way through a hill or mound" is just an elongated crater. Study the shadows again -- they are in the same positions as in the round craters, therefore it is a hollow, not a hump. And I wouldn't be surprised if it's two or three kilometres long and hundreds of metres wide.

Many years ago there was a book by a guy who claimed he could see gigantic x-shaped mining machines in early, fuzzy photos of the moon. I saw the book and thought he had an overactive imagination.

[Fixed typo]

Shouldn't this be in the CT forum?...unnatural Moon structures usually end up there...


...or is this a case of me being a hammer and everything looking like a nail?

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ocpaul20: When presenting lunar photos for us to examine, to save us going on a wild goose chase, please supply the proper identification of the photo in your post, preferably a link, and at the very least, the latitude and longitude of the principal feature. Even the information at the bottom of this post, which is supplied with the Lunar Orbiter 4 Photo, is a good start, but I have refined it further:

Identifying the feature:

In post 1, ocpaul20 has presented the photo rotated 90 degrees clockwise and darker and contrastier than in the LPI link below, where the elongated crater is more obvious. My initial suggestion of a lava-filled basin may not be correct, although the ridge does appear to sink into it.

The elongated crater which is said to have "just bored its way through a hill or mound" is at approximately the following location:

Mare Imbrium
Latitude: 18.9° N (18° 54' N).
Longitude: 31.4° W (31° 24' W).
35 km SSW of the centre of 12 km diameter crater Natasha.
108 km NNW of the centre of 33 km diameter crater T. Mayer.

The area is shown on Map 19, page 65 in Atlas of the Moon, Antonin Rukl, Paul Hamlyn Publishing, London (1991).

Only the hill is shown in Rukl's atlas -- the crater and the ridge are too small to be shown. The elongated crater would indeed be about 2 to 3 km long.

It can be found in the top left corner of Lunar Orbiter 4 Photo 4133_h2 (3MB):
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunarorbiter/images/print/4133_h2.jpg
which has the following information:

Mission: Lunar Orbiter 4

Spacecraft Position:
Altitude: 2673.44 km
Latitude: 13.91°
Longitude: -27.86°

Principal Point:
Latitude: 18.73°
Longitude: -29.69°

Illumination:
Sun Azimuth: 95.86°
Incident Angle: 71.49°
Emission Angle: 8.45°
Phase Angle: 67.95°
Alpha: 3.37°

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Kiwi: thank you for the details. When I downloaded the picture from the Lunar Orbiter gallery, I downloaded the tiff file and the strip with the frame numbers is along the top. In the jpg pictures it shows along the left side. I dont know which is the correct orientation, but I was working from the 17Mb tiff image.

You know, I am begining to see the other side of this - that it is an elongated crater and not a machine. So it seems like my theory vanishes up in smoke. Such a disappointment!

One last clutching-at-straws effort. Please could you also enlighten me as to what these things that appear as 'holes in the hill' then? (orange circles) This oblong crater appears at the end of a rille/ridge and the rille/ridge does not continue between the two 'holes'. Is the 'hill' a hump or is it a dip? If it is a dip, why no ridge/rille across it, and if it is a hump, then why a 'hole' through it?

Have to turn my webpage into a debunking page now!

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Thanks for your reply. As the post you're advised to read in rule 13 says, we may tackle your ideas really hard, but we are mainly here to help. We enjoy this stuff and learn from it. We're sometimes wrong, but we are prepared to change our minds in the face of good evidence. Well, sensible people are.

I'm using the 3,158,945 Byte jpeg of 4133_h2 and it has the correct orientation for a northern-hemisphere view of the moon and is the same as Rukl's atlas. Down here in the southern hemipshere, they are both upside down. In other words, the ridge leads from lower left to the elongated crater at upper right. North is up, east right (where the sunlight is coming from), south down and west left. Your photo is rotated 90 degrees clockwise from the correct orientation.

In answer to your questions, the easiest answer is probably, "Who knows? The moon is a weird place!" In my copy I can only see the usual random humps and hollows, craters and hills of varying ages, and highlights and shadows, all of which are all over the moon, and perhaps you are seeing, in your copy, deep shadows as actual holes. I'd like to think (until somone bowls me!) that the ridge is one feature and possibly once continued through what is now a lava-filled basin. The elongated crater and rille, (or extra crater) behind it, through the hill, may or may not be related to the ridge. Think of the edge of a techtonic plate rotating a little against another that stays still -- it might push up the ridge where they scrunch together, and create the rille where they part. Such things may not even happen on the moon, but I just don't know. I'm no expert so it's just a thought, and anyway, in that case I'd expect the widths of the ridge and the rille to change, which they don't do.

Note that in my orientation, if we continue on toward upper right from the elongated crater, we see what appears to be a continuing, shallower, broken rille or line of small craters leading right up to a bigger, higher hill with a bigger circular crater smack in the middle.* Maybe they're all part of one feature. Maybe not, too! We need a real lunar geologist to help out. Why not ask in Q&A to see if there are any here?

* Above that hill and crater, right on the top edge of the jpeg, is the southern wall of Natasha.

There's plenty more lovely natural stuff in that photo. Southwest of T. Mayer, the biggest crater, is a bunch of lunar domes, some with craterlets on top. Look up Rukl's Atlas, Map 30, for their exact locations. Left of Milichius (13km dia) at bottom centre, is a very prominent dome with its top centre craterlet, and the dome is also peppered with other small craters.

To the left (up in your picture) of your elongated crater and only a little bigger than it, is a feature I immediately called the baby's rattle. A near-perfect line-up of three small craters of diminishing size, and above them, one much bigger one.

Two of a gazillion good lunar features to look at close-up are the Davy Crater chain (Catena Davy, 50 km long, at 11 degress south, 7 degrees west), and the Messier craters, which many of the Apollo craft flew near. From above and filling a big colour photo, they are awesome in the right light, and the twin tails, 120 km long, just add nicely to any distant view. There were some nice overhead colour photos of the Messier craters taken on Apollo 16, but it's a long time since I searched and couldn't find their numbers. Somebody will!

You know, that's a brave thing to say. You'll get a lot of respect from most people here by being willing to change your mind.

Cheers

One last comment that occurred to me today and it may be as strange as my other thoughts, but I will 'share' it anyway. Please bear with me in my search for the "truth".

It is a hypothesis - OK? You can shoot it down like the last ones if you like.

What if this rille WAS made by some machine and the machine does not always bore its way into the earth like a worm but can also go down vertically like a lift - particularly where the ground is soft or granular. Then it would leave an oblong crater-shaped mark on the surface. If it went straight down and then horizontally boring into the earth where the earth was more solid, the depth of the crater above it would represent the height/volume of the machine as it had collapsed down to fill the vertical "lift shaft". A little like a grave does. When the wooden coffin in it rots and disintergrates the earth above it drops to fill the void where the coffin space/volume was.

For example, there are plaice(fish) in the sea that cover and camouflage themselves by going into the sand vertically. All you would need is some mechanism to dig vertically underneath the machine.

This would account for the oblong crater shape at the end. I dont know whether some of the other rilles have particularly oblong craters at their ends but I heard somewhere that some do have craters at the end and in the middle too. I suspect that it is a condition of the surface soil (granular/sandy/ or more solid) that this machine either moves vertically like a lift or like a worm/boring machine.

This hypothesis would account for the oblong crater and the shadow and may account for the rille and the craters at the end of other rilles too.

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Ask Van Rijn's elf, he's an expert on these kinds of supposition.

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"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson
'No, mad's when you froth at the mouf,' said Gaspode. 'He's insane. That's when you froth at the brain.'

You are making your "boring machine" magical in that it can/will do whatever you "need" it to do to validate your "hypothesis".

...and that's not how a scientific investigation "wrks".

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Really? ....and what is magical about a machine going down into soft sand vertically? How limited your thinking must be if you cannot conceive of things outside what is presently possible. For all I know it may be currently possible, I just dont know.

Isn't this how scientists come up with a theory? Dont they propose an idea and then see if it works with the evidence they have about the subject? Surely, every scientific fact must have started with an idea and then developed into currently accepted 'fact'. All I am doing is proposing an alternative hyposthesis so that it can be considered and then discarded or accepted.

How in your opinion does scientific investigation work then?

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