Harvest Moon Battle

Did the USSR destroy a secret US Moon Base in 1977?

April 19, 2019
Michael Salla

A Wikileaks document that referred to the destruction of a US moon base sometime in the 1970s has recently gained renewed attention. The document is dated January 24, 1979, and is titled “Report that UR Destroyed Secret US Base on Moon.” It was correspondence involving one or more officials from the U.S. State Department to Samuel L. Devine, a Republican member of the US Congress.

The document has tags “Operations–General | UR – Soviet Union (USSR)” which reveals that “UR” stands for the USSR. The document was marked unclassified, which suggests that the content of the correspondence did not contain classified information, and involved open source material widely available at the time. The fact that officials were discussing such a topic raises the question, did the USSR destroy a secret US moon base sometime before January 1979?

Wikileaks included the document in its dump of State Department diplomatic cables that it began releasing online in November 2010 and ended on September 1, 2011. Julian Assange’s arrest on April 11, 2018, sparked renewed interest in him and Wikileaks document dumps over the years.

Arjun Walla published an article in Collective Evolution that discussed Assange’s arrest and examined the controversial Wikileaks’ Moon base document. Walla discussed it in relation to a host of Moon-related information that has been leaked over the years. This included a Congressional statement on building a permanent Moon base; CIA concern over Soviet plans to build a Moon base; Soviet concerns over the US plans to use the Moon as a military base of operations; and whistleblowers discussing photographic evidence of moon bases. I recommend reading Walla’s article for a succinct overview of this data.

However, to explore the question of whether or not the USSR destroyed a secret Moon base in the 1970’s we need to go back a few years to the remarkable audio letters of Dr. Peter Beter. Beter was the General Counsel of the Export-Import Bank (1961-67) and had high-level sources who confided to him what was happening behind the scenes in space from the 1960s to the early 1980s. In this modern era of whistleblowers, it’s worth emphasizing that Beter was the first genuine insider to come forward with details about secret space programs.

He described how the US and USSR were fiercely competing both in a race to the Moon and in the development of particle beam weapons that could operate between the Moon and Earth. It was clear that whoever first developed a particle beam weapon that could operate from the Moon would possess an overwhelming strategic advantage.

According to Beter, while the US was forging ahead in the race to the Moon, the Soviets were ahead in developing particle beam weapons. In his Audio Letter 26, released on September 30, 1977, Beter wrote:

By 1972, these experiments still were a long way from a suitable weapon for deployment on the moon. But ominous developments in the Soviet Union led to the decision to cut off the Apollo program prematurely so that the construction of the secret moon base could be rushed ahead.

According to Beter, Diego Garcia was used as a spaceport for building the moon base:

Early in 1973, soon after the supposed end of the American moon program, we began hearing about a place called Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Supposedly we were merely building a communications installation there, yet the drastic step was taken of relocating all the 20,000 or so natives of this little island to other areas. More recently, we have heard about Diego Garcia as the site of a new American naval base; but, my friends, you still haven’t been told the whole story. Diego Garcia, my friends, is the new space-port from which secret missions to the moon have been launched during the building of the moon base.

Diego Garcia was the ideal location for a space launching pad according to Beter:

Unlike Cape Canaveral, where Saturn rocket launches are impossible to hide, Diego Garcia is remote and isolated, and even the natives are no longer there to watch what goes on. What’s more, Diego Garcia is practically the perfect moon-port, located as it is almost on the earth’s equator, and a space vehicle launched eastward into orbit from Diego Garcia passes over a nearly unbroken expanse of water for more than half the circumference of the earth. The only means of monitoring the early flight of a space craft launched from Diego Garcia, therefore, is from ships.

In his 1977 newsletter, Beter wrote about the information he had received from his sources about the US moon base:

I was first alerted to the existence of a secret base on the moon last November 1976–but it has been one of the best kept of all Rockefeller secrets, and it was only a few weeks ago that I was able to confirm its existence and learn the complete story; and since that time, events have moved with lightning speed.

Beter went on to give details about the deadly race to develop particle beam weapons as it played out in 1977:

Throughout this year an unseen but deadly race has been underway to see who would get an operational Particle Beam first: the Rockefellers, at their secret moon base; or the Soviet Union, in earth orbit. By late spring, a Salyut manned space craft was launched that carried out preliminary tests of beam-weapon techniques, using lasers in order to simulate the Particle Beam.

Beter next gave details about the race between the USSR and US to develop particle beam weapons for deployment in space and/or the Moon. The Soviets succeeded in developing the first operational particle beam weapons in Earth orbit, and destroyed the newly built US moon base:

By the 26th of September, American personnel at the secret Rockefeller moon base nestled in Copernicus Crater were almost ready. Their Particle Beam was almost operational–but they were too late. By late that day, the Soviet Union began bombarding the moon base with a Neutron Particle Beam. Through the night, and all day on September 27 the moon base was bombarded without mercy with neutron radiation just like that produced by a neutron bomb; and by that evening as Americans looked up at the peaceful full moon overhead known as the Harvest Moon, the last few Americans on the moon were dying of neutron radiation. America had lost the Battle of the Harvest Moon.

It’s not clear what the contents of the document titled “Report that UR Destroyed Secret US Base on Moon” discusses. Given its unclassified status, and the date it was created, the most plausible explanation is that it involved a discussion between Congressional and State Department officials about Beter’s “Harvest Moon Battle”, or some other unclassified material regarding destruction of a US Moon base and the development of particle beam weapons.

Why would Congressional and State Department officials be interested in such information; and, more importantly, what did they have to say about it? A Freedom of Information Act request will help answer such questions.

Tag: Harvest Moon Battle

Did the USSR destroy a secret US Moon Base in 1977?

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