Apollo 17 was the last crewed landing on the Moon. In December 1972 Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent three days in the Taurus-Littrow valley, driving a battery-powered Lunar Roving Vehicle between sampling stops and shooting thousands of Hasselblad frames. Every one of those frames was scanned, numbered and cataloged, including the ones that went wrong. One of the failures, AS17-135-20680, has become the most famous pyramid that is not on the Moon.
What happened
The frame comes from magazine 135, which the crew loaded during the second moonwalk. In NASA’s photo index it carries the terse note “LRV floor? Sunstruck,” meaning the camera, which the astronauts wore on their chests and fired without a viewfinder, was pointed down at the rover while sunlight flooded the lens. The scan is a wash of white with a faint dark wedge in the middle. In August 2014 a Russian television story claimed NASA had labeled the frame “blank” for four decades and that raising its contrast revealed a stepped pyramid standing on the lunar surface. Websites repeated the claim with enhanced crops in which the wedge became an angular structure against a bright sky, and in March 2015 The Black Vault, a site that publishes declassified documents, posted the full-resolution scan and asked readers what they saw.
A second family of claims uses pictures taken from orbit. In 2016 a Finnish enthusiast announced an “alien spire” several miles high in frames from the 1967 Lunar Orbiter program. In May 2019 the UFO blogger Scott C. Waring published a “pyramid” he had found by brightening and zooming a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter image, PIA13510, and suggested it proved that the Egyptian pyramids were built by beings from the Moon.
The investigation
Nobody at NASA has had to investigate because the data were public from the start. The frame is indexed, scanned and downloadable, and the Project Apollo Archive put a 4,000-pixel version on Flickr in 2015 with the magazine and moonwalk identified. What the enhanced crops leave out is the sequence around it. Frames 20679 and 20682 show the rover from close range; between them Cernan swapped the magazine, and the camera on his chest looked down at the seat while he worked. Members of the Metabunk forum compared the shape in 20680 with the rover’s seat back and the shadow it threw on the floor pan, and found that the “pyramid” has the proportions of the seat corner seen from above.
There is also a plain physical objection. The Moon has no air, so there is no bright sky for a distant structure to stand against; every lunar horizon in the Apollo pictures is a hard line between gray ground and black space. A triangle floating in a luminous haze is what an overexposed close-up looks like, not what a monument on the horizon looks like.
The orbiter images answer themselves. NASA’s own caption for PIA13510 says the frame shows the central peak of Tsiolkovskiy crater on the far side, where boulders have rolled down the slope and left trails behind them. The image is 890 meters across and was taken with the Sun 2 degrees above the horizon, which stretches every rock into a long black wedge of shadow. Waring’s pyramid is one of those boulders. The 2016 spire is a steep hill photographed the same way, which is why a UFO author interviewed at the time put it down to shadow from a cliff face.
The explanations
The common thread is pareidolia, the habit of the human visual system of finding familiar shapes in noise, and the common tool is the contrast slider. Stretching the brightness of a nearly white frame turns compression artifacts and film grain into edges, and the mind supplies the rest. The specific pyramid shape is not even unusual: a low-angle shadow of any rounded object is a triangle. The claim that NASA hid the frame fails on the record. A catalog entry that reads “blank” or “sunstruck” is a description of a wasted exposure, not a classification, and the picture has always been available to anyone who asked.
Where it stands
The Apollo 17 pyramid still circulates with the same crop and the same claim about a forty-year secret. The orbital pyramids are replaced every year or two by new ones found in the same way, from the same public archive, at the same low Sun angles. The Moon has mountains, craters, boulders and shadows. It has no pyramids, and the photograph said to prove otherwise shows the seat of a car.