Just about every culture has stories of people or creatures
living on the moon.
Now an eye-opening video seems to raise the idea
that the legends could be right and that we humans may not have
been the first, or even the most recent, visitors
to our nearest neighbor.
[music playing]
Moscow, Russia, May 2019.
A photographer sets up to shoot a full moon over the city.
He's struggling to get focus when this leaves him
more than a little moonstruck.
HOST: First, three black circles cross in front of the moon.
And almost as soon as they pass, even more come into frame.
HOST: We stabilize the frame and zoom in.
There's no question a cluster of objects
is flying in a loose formation.
Could these circular objects be asteroids
or a fleet of alien craft?
If they are, astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy
calculates their size based on the Moon's
diameter and an estimated orbit 60 miles above the surface.
If these objects were orbiting the Moon,
they would have to be two to three miles wide.
HOST: If they are UFOs, they would
be almost 40 times the size of the largest
craft in Earth's orbit, the International Space Station.
ANDREW MCCARTHY: So who or what is capable
of building so many superstructures
and putting them into lunar orbit?
So are we looking at something huge orbiting the Moon,
like a fleet of UFOs or a cluster of asteroids?
Or are we taking the wrong perspective?
Is it something smaller and closer to Earth?
We ask our experts to shed light on the mystery.
First, astronomer and video effects designer Marc D'Antonio
analyzes the video and confirms it's real, not
photographic trickery.
MARC D'ANTONIO (VOICEOVER): I know this camera very well.
MARC D'ANTONIO: You can zoom in very close to the Moon,
as you can see.
This is an actual image from his camera.
HOST: So could they be oversized satellites we Earthlings
put into lunar orbit?
There are a lot of spacecrafts orbiting the Moon,
but they're not in the same orbits
and they're not in the same areas.
HOST: Another important fact-- hundreds of astronomers
observe the Moon every night.
So you'd think anything odd popping up
in its orbit would have set off alarms around the world, right?
Still, NASA's Bob Anderson thinks
they might be satellites, just not in the Moon's orbit,
but in ours.
BOB ANDERSON: At first, I thought it might be satellites
circling the Earth or a group of satellites
that are orbiting the Earth.
HOST: That would make sense, because it's getting crowded
up there with actual clusters of satellites,
like SpaceX's Starlink network.
The company has launched over 1,700 so far, with the option
to add another 10,000.
This seems to be case closed.
Except in studying the video more closely,
Anderson and D'Antonio both see something that doesn't
match up with satellites.
MARC D'ANTONIO: Right here, these objects
are coming close to each other and then getting far away.
So that negates the possibility that these are satellites.
Maybe we're actually looking at birds.
They fly around willy-nilly, OK, haphazardly through the sky.
HOST: The birds and their flapping wings form
silhouettes that appear on the camera's sensor
as round objects.
MARC D'ANTONIO: It's very likely that we're
looking at migratory birds of some kind.
Satellites don't speed up and slow down,
and the video was shot in May during migration.
So we're going to call this one migrating birds.
Still, the space around the Moon could be getting crowded soon.
NASA's Artemis program aims to return humans there by 2024,
and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk plan to build lunar bases.