The moon is the exact right size to create a perfect solar eclipse — not close, not approximate, exactly right. It doesn't rotate, which means one face has never been seen from Earth. It rings like a bell when struck. Its craters are inexplicably shallow for their width, as though something stopped them from going deeper. The mathematical odds of a natural object having this precise relationship to the sun and earth are, to put it politely, not in favor of coincidence.
The man who spent years perfecting the simulation of space on a sound stage for 2001: A Space Odyssey directed his masterpiece one year before Apollo 11. NASA knew exactly what he was capable of. The rest is theory — but it's a theory that has never been convincingly dismissed. Apollo 20 never officially launched. What its crew allegedly found on the far side has never been officially confirmed or officially denied. The structures photographed on the lunar surface by multiple space agencies sit in the same bureaucratic limbo as everything else that doesn't fit.
And then there's the theory that sits at the darkest end of this particular rabbit hole — that the moon is occupied, that it has been for a very long time, and that whatever is up there has a vested interest in what happens down here.
This is the collection for everyone who looks up at a full moon and wonders what's looking back.
