There are many things we don’t know about that have been kept from us by the powers that be. Black operations, classified programs, experimental aircraft, genetic laboratories, you name it. Some of these projects can be in the interests of national security which comes under a very wide dashboard of collateral agendas. From rumors of an alien body preserved in a glass cylinder under the White House exhibition hallways beneath the Capital during the era of Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, to the alleged deal made by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the mid 1950’s that allowed a certain amount of alien harvesting of humans and animals due to the US being technologically inferior to the extraterrestrial threat, there has certainly been wild speculation. An old saying that we can appreciate even today is “Truth can be stranger than fiction.”

A secret project is born

As the story goes due to strange observations of glowing craters, a cloud of water vapor observed in the moon’s supposedly non-existent atmosphere, and an eruption of ejecta observed and filmed by a Crimean astronomer in 1958 on a assumed geographically dead sphere, not to mention a plethora of orbital UFO’s observed by US defense contractors led the US Army to an ambitious undertaking. Just as in 1946 when an Air Force lieutenant speculated that an alien base could be present in our own solar system, US intelligence analysts felt that a US military presence on the moon was a necessity being that they were fairly certain that for another civilization to have base operations perhaps on the dark side of the moon would be of great advantage to them.

New changes take shape

Project Horizon was proposed in 1959. Already a number of booster rocket series including Atlas, Titan, Agena, Jupiter, and Minuteman class rockets would be able to propel a payload into earth orbit and on course for the moon once three stages had been burned and jettisoned. A single stage rocket they determined could cause a 20 G force upon the astronauts that would be fatal, but two, and then finally three stages were decided upon to make the launch survivable and more economical. The US Army was also perfecting the Saturn II rocket for their program as in 1958 NASA was formed as a civilian agency at the insistence of President Eisenhower, this agency replaced the old NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) manned space craft and satellite development agency where both defense contractors and civilians worked alongside each other. Even the CIA was in the act of developing a Langley based space reconnaissance platform that would include manned space flight and orbital satellite surveillance.

Serious concerns necessitate the proposal

The main problem for many of these programs was funding. US defense contractors like Lockheed, Convair, North American, Bell and more were having to invest their own money into the costly research. In the beginning NASA was given the first government funded money at 1.7 billion before Apollo had been proposed toward the Dyna Soar delta winged flat bottom configuration manned space craft that was also closely similar to piloted spacecraft of other contractor designs, but for Project Horizon to plan an orbital course that would escape earth’s gravity and aim toward the moon was a technological leap. For this to be proposed there had to have been some very solid evidence and perhaps even fear that events on the moon needed to be monitored.

Mission directive

Plans for several rocket flights to deliver and assemble pressurized structures that could accommodate a crew that would be intermittently relieved and replaced by new personnel was well into planning. Eisenhower did not want to weaponized outer space neither did Werner Von Braun at NASA, but the Army had a different philosophy wanting to project US national security into space against a potential aggressor. Could the project have succeeded? Maybe with enough funding that may well have necessitated a black budget like the ones we are familiar with today especially with a need to conceal the space shots from the general public from bases such as Vandenberg AFB in southern California.

Overshadowed

With US space agencies in a frenzy to beat Russia into manned orbit priorities soon shifted to competition with the Soviet Union rather than funding for a secret Army program to establish a base on the moon surface. However, this did not stop sightings by scientists of international observatories from detecting puzzling aspects of the moon thought to be simply a geologically dead, sphere of dust and rock with a still debated origin whether captured in earth’s orbit, being a chunk of the earth due to a collision, or perhaps an artificial satellite origin unknown.