574: Project Redsun: NASA's Secret Manned Missions to Mars
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In 1957, a small metal sphere blinks its way across the night sky. Sputnik, the first human-made satellite, marked the beginning of the space age. The American public was terrified. The US government responded by creating NASA in 1958. NASA presented itself as a civilian agency focused on science and exploration. The truth was different. NASA had one mission: beat the Soviets to the moon.

They planned three stages to reach that goal. Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. Mercury proved Americans could survive in space. Gemini showed they could work outside their spacecraft. Then came Apollo. 20 missions designed to land humans on the moon.

Apollo succeeded. Neil Armstrong stepped onto lunar soil in 1969. That was Apollo 11. Apollo 12 followed. Apollo 13 famously had a problem. But Apollo 14, 15, 16, and 17 were also successful. Moon landings had become routine. Then, suddenly in 1973, Apollo was shut down with three missions to go. Budget cuts. At least, that's what we were told.

But there is another theory, that Apollo 18, 19, and 20 weren't canceled. They were carried out in secret and were successful, and there's footage to prove it. But it's not footage of a moon landing. In 1973, NASA landed on Mars. ♪

The space race began as soon as World War II ended. America struck first, launching fruit flies on a V-2 rocket to study radiation's effects on living organisms. Oh, you had the V-2 designed by Wernher von Braun? Yes.

Did you know that, uh, Von Braun was a Nazi who joined the SS, won two medals, and attained the rank of Major? Yes, I knew that. Oh! Did you know, uh, Von Braun's rockets were built using slave labor from concentration camps? Yes, I- The rockets killed nine thousand civilians in London, but-

20,000 prisoners died building the rockets. Multiple survivors said von Braun ordered this, though he denied it. I know. But when von Braun agreed to work for the United States under Operation Paperclip, his war crimes were forgiven. He became the first director of NASA's Flight Center. Okay, that's all true, but every time we talk about von Braun, are you going to bring up the Nazi stuff? Every time. Okay, let's... Every time.

Fine, cool. By the way, Von Braun got along really well with Walt Disney. What does that have to do with anything? A few people out there know what I'm talking about. The Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957.

It was their first victory in space over the United States, but not their last. Both nations poured billions into their space programs. To the American public, the space race was about technological superiority. Landing on the moon became the ultimate prize. But behind this public competition, something else was happening. The U.S. and Soviet Union were working together in secret, and their goal wasn't the moon. It was to establish a human colony on Mars. They called it Project Red Sun.

The project was inspired by earlier plants, specifically Project Horizon.

Proposed in 1959, Horizon was a plan to put a nuclear-armed military base on the moon. A lunar base would give America unmatched military power over the entire planet. The Soviets would be defenseless. "This station is now the ultimate power in the universe. I suggest we use it." But as nuclear arsenals grew, both sides realized a war would destroy humanity. So they created a backup plan.

If nuclear war or a natural disaster threatened Earth, the human race would continue on Mars. Getting there wouldn't be easy. The Moon is 239,000 miles away, a three-day journey. Mars is a different story. Its distance from Earth varies between 34 million and 250 million miles as both planets orbit the Sun.

America had the Saturn V, the only rocket powerful enough for the journey. The Soviets had better safety systems and life support technology designed for extended space travel. The trip to Mars would take six months. Alone, neither side could do it, but together, Mars was within reach.

On March 23rd, from a secret facility deep in the Amazon jungle, the most powerful rocket in the world was launched. Hang on. What? Why are they launching rockets from the jungle? Well, NATO and Warsaw Pact nations tracked every launch from the US, Europe, and Asia. But a rocket lifting off from Brazil in the southern hemisphere, no one would notice.

That rocket carried humanity's most advanced spacecraft, the Interplanetary Space Vehicle, or ISV Columbus. Its crew included two Americans, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Ilyushin.

Columbus touched down on Mars 158 days later. The crew documented everything they saw. Their logs, films, and video recordings went straight to NASA's classified archives. The public couldn't know about Project Red Sun. So why hide mankind's greatest achievement? Because once the crew landed on Mars, it didn't take them long to realize they weren't alone.

In 2011, Italian journalist Luca Scantamburlo held a press conference to announce that Project Red Sun was real. He had witnessed statements from Project Red Sun workers, emails, documents. But that wasn't the big reveal. At the bottom of his statement was a photograph that silenced the room. A grainy image of Buzz Aldrin walking on Mars. When it comes to Mars, Buzz gets excited. And that's when he lets secrets slip.

Fly by the comets, visit asteroids, visit the moon of Mars. There's a monolith there, a very unusual structure on this little potato-shaped object that goes around Mars once in seven hours. When people find out about that, they're going to say, "Who put that there? Who put that there?"

Now maybe Aldrin only saw images of the monolith, but other astronauts dropped similar hints. Gene Cernan was the last person to walk on the moon. He spoke about going back to Mars. Buzz does want to go back to Mars, and I support that, but I believe we should do it in a logical stepping stone process. Okay, maybe he misspoke, but a minute later, he said it again. Good to talk to you. Thanks.

"John, can I just say one other real quick thing? I'm not going to be there when we go back to the Moon or Mars. And it may not be this president or those who follow." Scantamborlo had more. A whistleblower he called "Bravo X Sierra 24" smuggled photographs out of NASA's archives.

I introduce to you a press release testimony I have written to discuss the presumed existence of a hush-hush military space program called Project Red Sun, carried out in the 1970s of the last century to build a stationary base on Mars, the Red Planet. My source of information, named by me, Bravo Ex Sierra 24, contacted me by email.

It is possible to reproduce the pages of the press release and the picture presented here as well.

The images are blurry but unmistakable. Astronauts collecting samples on rust-colored terrain, a temporary habitat, a rover. One photo shows astronauts examining an artificial object in a crater. Behind them stands a pyramid reminiscent of ancient South American structures. NASA denied everything. Of course they did. Never a straight answer. The denials made sense. The photos aren't terrible. But Scantamberlo wasn't finished.

As word of Project Red Sun spread, more whistleblowers emerged, and now he had evidence of a 1973 Mars mission. Actual video footage. Now, to be honest, a lot of people have requested I cover Project Red Sun, but a press release and some blurry orange photos didn't sound like much of a story to me. Then someone sent me the video, and I was hooked. The footage opens with NASA's logo and an internal use-only warning.

A title card appears. Welcome to ISV Columbus. Date, 1973. The next shot shows Earth through a spacecraft window. Holy s***. Then quick shots of the astronauts aboard. Another card marks day 10 of their journey. Earth and the moon drift past the windows. At 1 minute 7 seconds, the shot reveals they've traveled much farther from the Earth. Day 100. More glimpses of the crew.

Beyond those early views and brief interior shots, we don't see very much. But then at 1 minute 46 seconds, we're at day 158. They should be close to Mars. An astronaut moves past the camera. A reddish blur crosses the frame. Wait, wait, wait. Was that Mars? Did they really show Mars on this thing? They do. We're only halfway through the film, and you're not going to believe how it ends.

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The Columbus journey lasted 158 days. Soviet life support systems and radiation shields kept the crew alive, along with experimental technologies inspired by Project Horizon. The crew logged everything they saw. Years later, their records leaked. Then came the film. Columbus approaches the Red Planet. Holy s***! I know. And watch your mouth. Sorry, sir. This is unbelievable. Oh, just wait.

As we get closer, we can see Mars' features more and more clearly. At 2:06, the planet's terrain fills the windows. Some quick crew shots, then the camera captures Columbus' exterior. Below is Valles Marineris. The image finally focuses as we zoom toward the canyon at 2:59. At 3:12, Mars' surface appears in stunning detail. More surface features, a little more inside the ship, and then this amazing view of Victoria Crater.

A few more shots of the crew, then we begin the descent to the surface. "Oh, I'm gonna need my glasses." Yeah, the Apollo missions had this problem too. The astronauts took actual film so the images are pretty clear, but the external cameras were television cameras recording video so they're not good at all. Still, we can get a sense of the landscape and the speed.

Finally, the landing module touches down. But look closely. What the hell is that? I don't know, but it's not wind. Something is definitely moving down there. It looks like it's under the surface. Ah, Shia Lude. They're the sandworms from Dune. I know what they are.

Anyway, the video ends there. NASA continued to deny Project Red Sun. Sure, the film could be fake, the photos could be fake, but NASA fakes photos and film too. Nobody knew who to trust. Then came the bombshell. A new witness stepped forward. Not only was he part of Project Red Sun, he said it was still operational and had been to Mars that year. And he brought video to prove it.

Secrets don't stay buried forever, especially something as big as a hidden mission to Mars. Decades after Project Red Sun's supposed landing, insiders began talking. Jackie, a retired NASA employee, called into the Coast to Coast radio show. George Norrie. Jackie described watching a Viking lander's live feed from Mars in 1979. The camera captured two men in protective suits walking toward the lander.

Jackie said there were six other witnesses watching the feed with her. NASA cut the feed when they realized their mistake. Jackie said the Viking program wasn't searching for life on Mars. It was covering up missions already there.

William Rutledge came forward in 2007. The retired astronaut claimed he flew on the ISV Columbus and ISV Melbourne. He said Apollo 19 and 20 continued in secret. Their missions were to retrieve alien technology from both the moon and Mars. Rutledge described finding alien tools, spacecraft pieces, even a preserved body. ♪

We covered Apollo 20 in another episode. It's one of my favorites. And if you've never seen it, you're not going to believe the photos. Apollo 20 video down here in your chatterpot. According to Rutledge, NASA and the Department of Defense launched several manned missions to Mars through Project Red Sun, some as recent as 2011. And here's video from that mission. A distant shot of Earth. Then we get closer to Mars. You can see the color is much better now.

Here's a shot of the astronauts. There's Mars out the window as we get closer. Now the video becomes spectacular. Through the window, we can see Martian terrain very clearly. I know. And what'd I tell you? That video and the testimony of Jackie and William Rutledge align perfectly with records leaked by another whistleblower, Gary McKinnon.

Gary is a Scottish computer engineer, and he accessed Pentagon and NASA systems in 2002. You'll hear reported that Gary hacked into NASA. He didn't. He scanned their networks and found computers that had weak passwords or no passwords at all. He said he was looking for evidence of UFOs, but he stumbled onto something bigger, a spreadsheet labeled non-terrestrial officers and a list of Navy ships that don't appear in any official registry.

We go into all the details in our Solar Warden episode, which is about America's secret space program. Link to Solar Warden down here.

Physicist Dr. John Brandenburg has a theory that an ancient Martian civilization was destroyed by a nuclear attack from an alien race. He believes NASA is hiding evidence of this ancient conflict. His theory is grounded in science, and we explored this in the Face on Mars episode. NASA dismisses these stories with vague denials. Whistleblowers are branded disgruntled or untrustworthy. It's a common tactic.

raise questions about their credentials, question their motives, and watch the media mock their claims. But if these claims are fantasy, why monitor and intimidate whistleblowers? There are a disturbing number of cases where whistleblowers report being followed by what we'd call men in black. And soon after, they end up in fatal car crashes or have heart attacks. Are all these cases a coincidence? Nope. It's murder. Murder most foul. It sure seems that way.

But those are pretty aggressive measures to protect a fantasy. Denials will only work for so long. For every whistleblower that's silenced, another emerges with more details. They can't suppress them all. Not with stakes this high. If Project Red Sun is real, it's humanity's greatest achievement. It doesn't belong to a select few gatekeepers. It belongs to all of us. We own the information. We're not going to learn the truth by asking for permission. We have to demand it.

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The story of Project Red Sun is a frustrating one. Like I said earlier, lots of people asked me to cover this, but the images were so bad I didn't think it was worth it. The story's obviously fake, but then someone sent me the video, which got me interested. Then I started researching and saw there might be something to the story after all. But first, let's dismantle the hoaxes. Yes, both videos are fake. Frame 1, the NASA logo, fine. But look at the pixelation. Now the warning.

The text is crisper. This is an edit. We're not off to a good start. This shot of Earth was taken from Apollo 8, rotated and blurred. Who said I use fake images of a fake moon mission to make a fake video about a fake Mars mission? Can we just focus on this for now? Link to fake moon landing episode down in your chum bucket. Bill Anders, Apollo 8. Here's the Earth-Moon system from space. Scale is all wrong, but the scale is right in this shot.

That was taken from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission in 2022. Gene Cernan, Apollo 17. More Apollo 17. But the shots are taken out of order. Day 158, Mars approach. Wait, Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14. That's from the Mars Global Surveyor mission in 1999, blurred and brightened to wash out the color. Oops, film sprocket holes are supposed to be on the left and right side, not top and bottom.

More Apollo 14. Global Surveyor again. Now we can match up the features. I love this one. That's from a photo of the Soyuz TM-33 docking with the International Space Station on October 23, 2001. But the Soyuz was pulled out. The original was from Wikimedia Commons. Martian North Polarized Cap, 1999. Lifted directly from Wikipedia. Destiny Module, 2001.

Apollo 14. And then this amazing shot of Victoria Crater taken from Wikipedia. And before landing, we have this perfect shot from Apollo 7. And here's the Mars landing. This is from the movie Alternative 3 released in 1977.

As far as fakes go, I thought it was pretty good. The original fake was created by someone named The Faking Hoaxer, and you could see his watermark on the video. But most people post his video cropped in without the watermark, and most versions have the Apollo footage removed so it's not quite so obvious. Well, this has been thoroughly disappointing. Sorry. Now, I can't debunk the entire story of Project Red Sun. But I can shred that second video. Oh, no. Gene Cernan, Apollo 17.

Some images from Lucas Gantamburgo's report. Most of these are also Apollo 17. This one is obviously out of place. It's from the BBC documentary, Exploring Mars. The same Mars surveyor photo from before, but this time the color is more visible. Mariner 7 mission. Expedition 40 in the summer of 2014. Astronauts Steve Swanson and Reid Weissman on the ISS. This is a good one. You can tell this is the ISS from the windows.

Here's how they did it: grab an image from the ISS and pull it into After Effects or some kind of video editor. Mask out the window. Throw some orange behind it. Crank up the contrast. Dirty up the windows. Make everything just a bit blurry. I know my version isn't perfect, but I did that in about 8 minutes. And if you look at the hoaxed video, you can see they were just as sloppy with the mask as I was. The edges aren't round.

That's someone who doesn't know their way around a Bézier tool. Bézier what now? Bézier. It's the tool that lets you draw curves. Then call it a curve drawing tool. Bézier sounds elitist. It's French. Exactly. These shots are nice too. They're from the European Space Agency. We've got the Yanni Chaos region, the Coriolis Chaos,

Why do they call these areas chaos? Because they're chaotic. That's it? That's it. I was hoping for something more outer space-y sounding. How about this? This is Cassie Vallis and Sacre Fosse.

Kase is the Japanese word for Mars. It literally means fire star. Valles is Latin for valleys. And sacra means sacred or holy. Fosse is plural for the word fossa in Latin, which means ditch. So sacra fossa means... Holy ditch. Basically, yeah. Now we're talking. Another area of Kase Valles. And the video ends. So both videos are thoroughly debunked. Yeah!

It took me well over 100 hours of searching Apollo footage and images from every space program and Mars mission going back to the 1960s. I don't wonder that. Yeah, it's called commitment. Yeah.

I can't argue with that. So the videos are definitely fake. As for Jackie from NASA, I couldn't confirm anything about her story. She didn't sound like a scientist to me, but who knows? She might be telling the truth.

William Rutledge is considered debunked. There's no record of him being an astronaut, and it's not like there are that many astronauts. There are records of all of them. Yeah, not if they're secret astronauts. That's true, and that's what Rutledge says. There's no record of him because it's classified. Which brings us to Gary McKinnon. He says that he found proof of a secret space program, and I believe him. It was an Excel spreadsheet, and there was a lot of terrestrial officers placed there.

and I can't remember the file name of the spreadsheet but the heading on the column was non-terrestrial officers obviously it wasn't aliens it wasn't you know little green men I took it to just because it must be evidence of an off-earth fleet you know if you have non-terrestrial officers you must have spaceships that are

based in maybe geostationary orbits who knows now i don't know if there really is a secret space program but i believe gary found something and whatever he found was so sensitive that president obama the dod and the doj tried to have him extradited to the us they wanted to put him in prison for 70 years for accessing computers with no password i was just on him the charges filed against gary say that he wasn't authorized to access those systems

The charges fail to mention that NASA and the DoD were sloppy with their network security. That's one of the reasons why the UK didn't allow the extradition. He will not be going to the United States anytime soon.

Yeah, yeah, God save the Queen, pip-pip. Yeah, that was a pretty big deal. The United States isn't used to hearing no. And I trust that this will get resolved in a way that underscores the seriousness of the issue. The coalition came into power. They blocked the extradition. But also underscores the fact that we work together and we can...

find an appropriate solution. He will not be going to the United States anytime soon. Now, what doesn't help the story is that movie I showed you before, Alternative 3, that aired in 1977 as a mockumentary about a secret space program to Mars by Apollo astronauts in coordination with the Soviets. We obtained an acceptable picture, which you're now about to see as we saw it. ...

And when it aired, people thought it was real. And Project Red Sun seems to follow along with that plot almost exactly.

So some of the evidence of Project Red Sun can be dismissed, but not all of it. A lot of Project Red Sun's claims were later proven to be true. Like there was once water on Mars. Lots of it. Tonight, for the future of everything, we're going back three billion years into the past. Picture Mars as a world with water. According to NASA, oceans covered as much as 20% of the red planet. And the documents leaked to Scantamborlo have coordinates that overlap with rover landing sites.

Now, if I were a conspiracy theorist... Truth, Stieker. Right. If I were one of those, I would be suspicious. It's almost as if NASA is carefully managing the flow of information and expectations about Mars exploration.

Now, I don't think it's a coincidence that this is happening at the same time that space exploration is becoming privatized. And if you warm Mars up, there's a bunch of frozen CO2 that will evaporate, densify the atmosphere. Get your ass to Mars. You'd actually want kind of global warming on Mars. As companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin head toward Mars, they'll operate with less public oversight than government agencies. Open your mind.

You know that if Elon Musk lands on Mars, he's going to tell us what he finds. The U.S. government doesn't want Elon exposing them for lying to the public. You mean exposing them for lying to the public again. Right. So while SpaceX prepares to go to Mars, NASA can slowly release more and more information. So that by the time SpaceX gets there, there are no more surprises. How do you know that?

And NASA's probably okay with this. Elon thinks he'll be making history by landing human beings on Mars. But it may very well turn out that all he did was create the perfect cover for a classified space program that truly never ended.

Thank you so much for hanging out today. My name is AJ. That's Cyclefish. I've been Samurgatroyd. This has been the Y-Files. Get fun or learn anything. Do him a favor. Subscribe, like, comment, share. That stuff really helps us out. And like most topics we cover on the channel, today's was recommended by you. By lots of you.

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I played for Libya, scenario 51, a secret code inside the Bible said I was. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music, so I'm singing like I should. But then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends, and it never ends. No, it never ends.

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The Mothman's sightings and the solar storm still come to have got the secret city underground. Mysterious number stations, planets are bold to propagate and where the dark watchers found.

We're in a simulation, don't you worry though The black knight said a lot, he told me so I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish Heck, we'll fish on Thursday nights with AJ too And the white balls of me beat all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth So the white balls of me beat all through the night

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because she is a camel

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