The facility was on Langley Air Force Base, where the NSA was bringing in the information from the lunar orbiter. I packed some tools and went over where a couple of officers took me into a very large hangar and a laboratory. There was an Airman Second Class in there―I was an Airman Second Class as well. He turned the equipment on and put it through its paces. It didn’t do what it was supposed to do―and I saw what was going on with it. I said to him, “We’ll have to take this thing out of the lab; I can’t work on it here in the darkroom environment.” It was about the size of a small apartment refrigerator… not easily moved. So he called someone to get some people to come in and move it.
Everyone left the darkroom except this Airman Second Class and me. While we were waiting, I asked him how they got the images from the lunar orbiter to the laboratory. He went through the process, describing how the various radio telescopes around the world were linked and they telemetered the data into Langley Field. At the time, I didn’t know what the real purpose of the darkroom or this operation and the facility was. I thought this was where they were bringing the data in and then releasing the images to the public. I had no idea that there were other issues involved.
He starts telling me all of this information, and I knew that what we were doing was classified and that he could only share a certain level of what he was doing with me, because of the compartmentalized nature of our jobs. At any rate, he told me how everything worked―he showed me the equipment where the digital information came in, where it was converted to photographic images. They were doing 35mm strips of film at that time, which were then assembled into eighteen-by-eleven-inch mosaics. There was a digital signature and a gray scale on every 35mm strip and those strips were from successive passes around the moon. They would take and build up a photograph. They would scan one section of the moon and then another and another and then they would get a larger image. So this mosaic then would be put in that contact printer and printed.
As he was showing me how all this worked he said, “By the way, we’ve discovered a base on the backside of the moon.”
I said, “Whose?”
“What do you mean, ‘whose’?”
At that moment, I realized what he was saying and I became a little terrified, thinking to myself that if anybody walks into the room right now we’re both in trouble, because he shouldn’t be giving me this information and I shouldn’t be listening to it.
He pulled out one of these mosaics and showed me this base on the moon. In the particular shot I saw, there were several buildings clustered over a fairly large landscape. There was one structure that had a dish-like shape to it but it was a building. There was another building near it with an angular top that was truncated. There were towers, there were spherical buildings and there were very tall towers and things that looked somewhat like radar dishes. Some of the buildings were very tall, thin structures. I don’t know how tall they were, but they must be very tall. They were angular shots with shadows. There were spherical and domed buildings that were very large. They stood out very clearly; they were large objects. It’s interesting because I tried to relate them in my own mind to structures here on Earth, and they don’t compare to anything that you see here in scale and structure. They’re similar to a degree. I tried to relate them to metal structures and I couldn’t see a metal definition, they’re more like a fabricated stone.
Some of the buildings seemed to have very reflective surfaces on them. A couple of structures that I saw reminded me of cooling towers at power generating plants, they had that sort of a shape. Some of them were just very straight and tall with a flat top. Some of them were round, some looked like a Quonset hut, with a dome, like a greenhouse.
I didn’t want to look at it any longer than that, because I felt that my life was in jeopardy. Do you understand what I’m saying? I would have loved to have looked at it longer; I would have loved to have had copies… but I knew I couldn’t. I knew the young fellow who was sharing this was really, really overstepping his bounds at that point.
Donna Hare had a secret clearance while working for NASA con-tractor, Philco Ford.
From 1970 to 1971, I worked in Building 8 of NASA for a contractor, Philco Ford. I worked in the photo lab and in different areas of the company on and offsite.
On one occasion I entered the NASA photo lab in one of the restricted areas―I had a secret clearance―where they developed the film from the moon and satellite pictures. One of the techs I had been friends with drew my attention to an area of this mosaic which was several panels put together to form a larger picture. They were satellite pictures―aerial shots looking down. I commented that they were interesting.
With a smile on his face he said, “Look over there.” In one of the photo panels I saw a round white dot. It was very crisp, with very sharp lines on it. I asked, “What is that? Is that a dot on the emulsion?” He’s grinning and says, “Dots on the emulsion don’t leave round shadows on the ground.”
I looked and there was a round shadow at the correct angle with the sun shining on the trees. I looked at him and I was pretty startled because I had worked out there several years and had never seen anything like this, never heard of anything like this. And I said, “Is this a UFO?” And he’s smiling at me and he says, “I can’t tell you that.” What I knew he meant was, it was a UFO but he couldn’t tell me it was a UFO. I asked him what he was going to do with this information. He said, “Well, we always have to airbrush them out before we sell them to the public.” And I was just amazed that they had a protocol in place for getting rid of UFO pictures on these things.
I also met a security guard that was forced to burn a lot of UFO pictures. He came into my office and he was very frightened. He said, “Donna, I heard you were interested in this subject. I used to work out there. And one day some soldiers came in fatigues and had me burn pictures.” He said that he was burning them and he was forced not to look at them. But he was tempted. He looked at one of them and it was a UFO on the ground. Shortly thereafter he was hit in the head with the butt of a gun and he still had a scar on his forehead.
Now, this gentleman… he was scared out of his mind. And he said that in the picture was a UFO with little bumps on it. It looked like it had just landed.
It’s very hard knowing about this. But again, I have talked, and the people that know about it, know about it. It’s like a little underground. They will come to me and talk to me in private. Most of them are very afraid. I guess I’m not afraid because I wasn’t debriefed. There was a point in time when I had some people come out and tell me I shouldn’t talk about this. They didn’t threaten to kill me but I got the message. And like I said at the [1997 CSETI] congressional briefings, I really started feeling like this topic was like sex. You know, everybody knew about it but nobody talks about it in mixed company. I’m waiting to tell more whenever there’s a congressional hearing where I could be protected. I want it to come out when it’s necessary and proper and can do some good. I don’t want people going around that are trying to get rid of these people or hurting them or challenging them or making them so frightened they move away like this one particular man I know of who has just disappeared off the face of the Earth.
This particular man used to be in quarantine with the astronauts returning from space… he was part of their debriefing. He told me a lot of the astronauts talked about their lunar landing experiences… seeing these ET craft follow them. I believe there were three on the moon when they landed. And I think that the code word for these ET craft was Santa Clause.