Established in 1968 at the height of America’s race to the moon, the Lunar & Planetary Institute (LPI) in Houston is where you go for the final word on archived material. LPI’s website describes its pedigree as “managed by the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), a national, nonprofit consortium of universities chartered in 1969 by the National Academy of Sciences at the request of NASA.” Got a question about, say, something on the moon? No problem — ask LPI.

Shades of the “Phoenix Lights” UFO — strange, what corrupted pixels can do …/CREDIT: raman50.wordpress.com

Except, of course, when LPI is nowhere to be found.

Here’s the rub. On Jan. 15, roughly 20 years after the U.S. Air Force dispatched a satellite on a lunar mapping mission, an anonymous YouTube poster commemorated that anniversary in a very splashy way. Using Google Moon and zeroing in on lunar coordinates 28°19’29.43″N 150°16’35.45″E, “WowForReel” pulled up a weird image from inside a crater in the Mare Moscoviense region. A chevron array of what looks like seven lights was perfectly situated in shadow, where the contrast made the anomaly more striking.

Clementine, the orbiting photo platform, spent 71 days shooting low- and high-rez images of the moon in 11 different wavelengths and producing hundreds of thousands of photos. Twenty years later, a single image is reminding the world of what Clementine did. Some analysts who’ve taken a peek suggest we’re looking at “stitching artifacts” unique to Google Moon, or that images available in the public domain were hacked. Metabunk.org makes a convincing case that the delta-shaped configuration is an accident of corrupted pixels from photo overlays. But as a former FBI investigator told Huffington Post, “If the raw images from NASA contain the same anomalies, we may be on to something.” HuffPo calculated the object’s size — if, indeed, this is an object — at 500 by 420 feet.

It’s been more than a week now since De Void began dropping multiple phone messages and emails on LPI trying to get at least one of the original Clementine scientists to weigh in. Not even a nibble so far, which is understandable, since nobody reads De Void anymore anyhow. On the other hand, “WowForReeel” has gotten a ton of mileage out of what he/she/it is putting out there as “Alien Base on Moon?” More than 2 million visits so far. And not one official rebuttal.

Maybe LPI figures it’s beneath its stature to comment on anonymous YouTube postings. Maybe they’re right. A certain percentage of people will believe what they want, regardless. But there are others who’ve seen UFOs that resemble what may or may not be those allegedly corrupted pixels. Not all eyewitnesses are conspiracy freaks. But when authorities say nothing, they could well break that way. And god knows there’s not enough paranoia going around these days.