That back in 1972, astronauts from the Apollo 17 mission found the head of popular Star Wars android C-3PO lying in what can only be described as an extraterrestrial scrapyard in a crater on the Moon.
My source for this astounding revelation is a website I unearthed via the always entertaining Reddit r/conspiracy forum. If you look closely, you can see the alledged “head” slightly above and to the left of the centre of the photograph. Following Hoagland and Bara’s example, I have made my own blow-up of the image and paired it with a pic of the dyspeptic droid (and with apologies to George Lucas for the blatant copyright violation) to highlight the uncanny similarities.
If you’re a conspiracy theory nut, this must be terribly old news (well, given the photo was taken almost 40 years ago, I guess it is old news), but it’s delightfully new and wacky news to me.
In an extended excerpt from their book on supposed NASA “cover-ups”, the site’s authors recount the EVA-ing astronauts’ increasingly “bizarre” observations of orange soil (woo!), “strange objects” resembling “large chunks of broken machinery” (wow!) and a large number of “highly polished metallic boxes” with “unusual spectral qualities” (really?).
Clearly overcome by all this bizarreness, they fail to appreciate the irony of describing “a pump mechanism or engine housing” as looking like a turkey.
Later, the intrepid whistleblowers abandon the C-3PO hypothesis and suggest that the abandoned head may in fact be that of Lieutenant Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Which may come as a shock to the actor who played him.
So what is the secret of Shorty Crater? Do these tantalizingly grainy images show the nation’s favourite Xmas treat, or a broken engine housing? An alien robot head, or Brent Spiner’s cranium?
Actually, I suspect they are all just rocks.
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