Reports was proposed nuking the moon, newly released documents reveal

The U.S. government's now-defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat
Identification Program (AATIP) spent millions of taxpayer dollars to
research bizarre, experimental technologies such as invisibility cloaks,
antigravity devices, traversable wormholes, and a proposal to tunnel
through the moon with nuclear explosives, according to dozens of
documents obtained by Vice (https://bit.ly/3OqGgmG).
The documents, which include nearly 1,600 pages of reports,
proposals, contracts and meeting notes, reveal some of the stranger
priorities of AATIP – a secretive Department of Defense program
that ran from 2007 to 2012, but only became known to the public
in 2017, when the program's former director resigned from the
Pentagon.
That year, AATIP became synonymous with UFOs, thanks to several
now-infamous videos of an unidentified aircraft moving in seemingly
impossible ways that former director Luis Elizondo leaked to the
press after his resignation. But the new documents suggest AATIP was
up to more than just investigating reported UFO encounters. The
entire cache of 51 documents, obtained by Vice via a Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) request filed four years ago, can be read here
(https://rb.gy/lwrrc8). Related: 9 things we learned about aliens in
2021  Perhaps most intriguing among the documents are the several
dozen Defense Intelligence Reference Documents (DIRDs), which
discuss the viability of various "advanced technolog[ies]." This
collection includes reports on "traversable wormholes, stargates,
and negative energy," "high-frequency gravitational wave
communications," "warp drive, dark energy, and the manipulation
of extra dimensions," and many other topics that will sound familiar
to fans of science fiction.
Many of the reports stress the impracticalities of implementing
advanced technologies. In the DIRD report on invisibility cloaking,
for example, the authors (whose names have been redacted in all
of the reports) write that, "perfect cloaking devices are impossible
because they require materials where the speed of light approaches
infinity." However, cloaking devices that make objects invisible to
microwave-based sensors, such as radars and motion detectors, are
"definitely within reach of the present technology," the report
authors wrote.
Other reports do not shy away from bold, sometimes outlandish
proposals for realizing advanced technologies. In a report on
"negative mass propulsion," the authors propose a plan to look for
extremely lightweight metals in the center of the moon that may be
"100,000 times lighter than steel, but still [have] the strength of
steel." To reach the center of the moon, the authors suggest blasting
a tunnel through the lunar crust and mantle using thermonuclear
explosives.
Of course, the U.S. has not nuked the moon and shows no immediate
intention to; NASA's upcoming Artemis missions plan to return humans
to the moon for the first time since the Apollo era, with the ultimate
goal of establishing a sustainable human presence there. Rattling the
moon with nuclear explosions would likely prove contrary to this
mission.
Whether these DIRD documents ever led to any long-term investments
in advanced technologies is unclear. According to Vice, much of
AATIP's agenda relied on contract research from a private company
called Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS). The
company – run by Robert Bigelow, a personal friend of late Sen. Harry
Reid, who was responsible for the creation of AATIP – was awarded
a $10 million contract for their first year of research for the program,
Vice reported.
This latest FOIA document dump arrives just three weeks after British
tabloid The Sun obtained more than 1,500 pages of documents related
to alleged UFO encounters cataloged by the AATIP. Included among
the documents was a report on the alleged biological effects of UFO
encounters on humans. The report listed paralysis, "apparent
abduction" and "unaccounted for pregnancy" as reported side effects
of alleged UFO encounters, Live Science previously reported.