Secret Apollo Missions 18-20 — Lunar Mothership Recovery

NASA officially canceled Apollo missions 18, 19, and 20 in 1970 due to budget cuts — the Saturn V rockets and spacecraft had already been built. The hardware existed. The infrastructure existed. The personnel existed. In 2007, a person identifying himself as William Rutledge, a former USAF test pilot and astronaut, uploaded videos to YouTube under the username 'retiredafb' claiming he participated in a secret Apollo 20 mission in August 1976. He stated that Apollo 18, 19, and 20 were conducted as classified joint US-Soviet missions after the public program ended with Apollo 17 in December 1972. The alleged purpose: to investigate an enormous cigar-shaped object approximately 3 miles long on the far side of the Moon in the Delporte-Izsak region, which had supposedly been photographed during Apollo 15's orbital mapping. The videos showed what appeared to be the interior of a crashed alien craft and a preserved humanoid body dubbed 'Mona Lisa' — a female being with a third eye and cable-like tubes attached to her body. A video also circulated showing someone displaying a mission patch for an Apollo flight number beyond 17. Rutledge claimed a joint US-Soviet crew was necessary because both superpowers had independently discovered the anomaly. The claim explains several oddities: why NASA suddenly stopped going to the Moon despite having the hardware, why the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (1975) established US-Soviet space cooperation, and why no nation has returned to the lunar surface in over 50 years. According to Rutledge, the craft had been on the lunar surface for an estimated 1.5 billion years based on the cratering around it. Apollo 19 allegedly attempted the mission first but suffered a catastrophic failure — the crew was lost, which is why Apollo 20 was launched as a recovery/retry mission with a joint US-Soviet crew. The age of the craft, if the claims are accurate, would mean non-human intelligence was operating in our solar system over a billion years before life on Earth left the oceans. The videos remain unverified — either an elaborate hoax or a leak from one of the most closely guarded secrets in space history.