In 1979, UFO researcher Robert Todd asked the Air Force about something called Project MOON DUST. They said it didn’t exist. Then he found references in other declassified documents and asked again. Suddenly, MOON DUST existed, complete with a 1961 Air Force Intelligence letter detailing its mission: recover “descended foreign space vehicles” and “objects of unknown origin.” The same teams publicly debunking UFO sightings were secretly deployed worldwide to recover crashed mysteries, from a three-ton aluminum cube in Sudan to metal fragments in the Congo explicitly labeled as UFO debris.

This episode exposes the beautiful hypocrisy of Cold War intelligence through declassified documents that read like satire but are deadly serious. We examine the 1965 Kecksburg incident where MOON DUST teams recovered something the military claims didn’t exist, the personnel crisis of maintaining secret recovery teams for non-existent phenomena, and how classification stamps hid this contradiction for decades. Through FOIA releases from the Defense Intelligence Agency, State Department, and NASA, we reveal how the government built elaborate infrastructure to handle the very problems it told the public were imaginary. Sometimes the cover-up really is more interesting than what’s being covered up.

Let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?

-Daniel P. Douglas

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