The last thing NASA wanted to be doing Thursday was responding to claims that an ancient civilization left artifacts on the moon.
The space agency would have preferred to talk instead about its plans to explore Mars. Or about an educational campaign that was being unveiled Friday by Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell to rekindle public support for space research.No such luck.
Instead, National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials found themselves responding to accusations that they have suppressed evidence of lunar ruins of a lost race.
The charges were made Thursday by a team of scientists led by Richard Hoagland, a science writer and researcher. Hoagland rented a room at the National Press Club to present his findings of "ancient artificial structures on the moon."
Hoagland has attracted attention from frequent appearances on the Art Bell syndicated radio show, "Coast to Coast," which is heard nationwide on about 250 stations.
Hoagland said some of the photographic evidence came from an aerospace engineer who once handled lunar pictures and rock samples for NASA. Hoag-land said he obtained additional photos directly from NASA of various Apollo missions, then enhanced them with a computer.
Hoagland and his group said the computer enhancements reveal "an extraordinary, highly geometric, glittering glass object . . . hanging more than 9 miles above the surface of the moon."
He also displayed a fuzzy slide that he said depicted a bowling-pin shaped lunar feature that "is simply baffling . . . unless it's an ancient artifact from a former civilization which colonized the moon."
"Whatever we're looking at is very old. It is someone who has gone before," Hoagland said. "There is a possibility that this someone, if the human history is a little different than we think it is, may in fact be somehow connected to ourselves. These are the resonant questions that demand and beg for answers."
NASA was not amused.
"It's simply not true that we found any evidence of artificial structures on the moon during the Apollo program," said Doug Isbell, a NASA spokesman.
"There certainly are some scientific questions we don't understand," Isbell said. "But we did not go back (to the moon) because of any alien artifacts. It's clear that we believe their theories are not true."
Isbell said NASA is just as interested in finding signs of life outside the Earth as anybody else.
He cited the Mars exploration program, which includes two planned launches later this year of interplanetary spacecraft to take pictures and analyze rocks.
"In the long term, we're looking at the question of whether there ever was life on Mars, microbial or higher," Isbell said.