Main Article / Jul 12, 2026

Reality Check put a moon monolith claim in front of a Disclosure Foundation review of NASA archives

By Jan for UAP Logbook / Published

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Luis Elizondo told the Disclosure Tonight podcast in early July 2026 that he has seen photographs of large monolithic structures on the lunar surface with right-angle cuts that have not been made public. NewsNation's Reality Check has been building a visual case for the claim since at least late June. Mike Gold, sitting on the Disclosure Foundation's new NASA archive review, told host Ross Coulthart the foundation would push NASA for answers. No photograph has been published. NASA says the claim does not match its data.

AI-generated editorial illustration of a 1960s NASA archive desk. A faded lunar surface photograph sits at the center of the frame, with a red-pencil question mark handwritten in its margin. Beside it: a thin manila file folder stamped with a partial 'ARTIFICIAL STRUCTURES' label, a brass-rimmed magnifying glass, a fountain pen with its cap off, and a single sheet of vellum showing a coordinate grid. Warm walnut wood surface. No people, faces, microphones, or logos. Mid-Century-Modern palette in muted cream, soft teal, warm brown, and rust accents. Painted execution, not photographic.
Editorial illustration by UAP Logbook. It represents a NASA archive review desk during a working review of lunar image material. It is not a photograph of any named person, office, document, or released NASA record, and the visible markings are editorial, not source imagery or evidence.

The newest UAP claim attached to the Moon didn't start on NewsNation. It started on a smaller podcast feed, and it landed in front of an institution that had already committed to testing exactly this kind of claim.

On a Disclosure Tonight episode with host Thomas Fessler that aired around July 6–8, 2026, and was picked up by mainstream press on July 11–12, Luis "Lue" Elizondo — the former head of the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, now a public advocate for a UAP transparency role at the National Security Council level — said he had seen photographs showing what he described as large monolithic structures on the lunar surface with right-angle cuts. The photographs, he said, had not been made public yet, and might be released soon: "There's also photographs that I don't believe have been made public yet that show on the lunar surface what appear to be large monolithic structures with right angle cuts... They are certainly very intriguing looking at these objects from space."

On July 8, host Ross Coulthart picked up the line on Reality Check, in front of co-host Megan Medic. "It's great to see Lou acknowledging these artificial rectalinear structures on the moon," Coulthart said. "Of course, Reality Check was one of the first shows to start raising this."

The image work behind that claim is older than the segment suggests

Coulthart didn't produce the underlying image on air. He pointed back to an "exclusive series" built with someone he called Dr. Max Derek Shai — rendered elsewhere on the show as Dr. Max Derek Shnie — who Coulthart said "has taken us through some quite extraordinary series of images about rectalinearia artificial, potentially artificial structures on the moon's surface."

That series is not new. Reality Check aired a lengthy episode on May 12, 2026, "Mysterious moon towers: Are there bases on the lunar surface?", built entirely around a sit-down with theoretical physicist Maaneli "Max" Derakhshani discussing alleged anomalies in NASA's lunar photography. Derakhshani had also supplied rectilinear-structure imagery — three large rectilinear objects near the crater Paracelsus C, with a calculated length of roughly 77 to 129 meters and a height of around 28 to 30 meters — to independent researcher Maurice van Veen's channel as early as February 6, 2026, credited there by name. A later analysis of the same Paracelsus C features was published in a peer-reviewed paper in the TSI Journals. Coulthart has not publicly confirmed that the on-air "Dr. Max Derek Shai" is Derakhshani, and the show's on-air spelling of the name has been inconsistent. But the overlap in first name, credentials, subject matter, and outlet is close enough that treating the two as very likely the same person — while still short of confirmed — is the more accurate framing than treating the identity as an open question.

What the public record does show without ambiguity is that the lunar-anomaly image work Reality Check has been airing since at least May is now being carried forward, separately, by a physicist who sits on the Disclosure Foundation's new NASA archive review — the same review now being asked to test the claim Elizondo just amplified.

What NASA says

NASA has not agreed the claim is on the table. A NASA spokesperson told the New York Post, in coverage picked up by NDTV, the Economic Times, Amedpost, and Democratic Voice USA between July 11 and July 12, that the agency has mapped and photographed the entirety of the Moon's surface and is unaware of any monolith-like structures in its data: "We are not aware of any monoliths in our data."

That statement answers a broader question than the one actually in play. The claim from Elizondo and the imagery Derakhshani has been circulating isn't that NASA missed something in its own standard mapping — it's that the material in question sits in a different category: older, harder-to-access, or classified imagery the standard maps don't incorporate. None of the reporting so far shows NASA addressing that narrower version directly.

The Moon-photo line isn't new for Elizondo, either, though it has shifted shape. In a May 20, 2026 interview with Los Angeles magazine, he argued that newly released UAP file material contained Apollo-era lunar photographs and audio that "appear to contradict decades of public statements from NASA claiming it held no significant UAP-related evidence in its archives." That was an archive-completeness dispute. The current claim is a structural one about objects on the surface itself. Coverage has tended to blend the two.

The review this claim has been pinned to

The institutional layer here is the Disclosure Foundation. On June 24, 2026, the Foundation announced a private review of NASA archival material for UAP-relevant information, led by an executive committee named as Mike Gold, Jordan Flowers, Beatriz Villarroel, Maaneli Derakhshani, Travis Taylor, Reggie Brothers, and Stephen Bruehl. Gold also sits on the Foundation's separate advisory board — an overlapping role, not a second project.

Gold, a former NASA associate administrator for space policy and partnerships, president of Redwire Space, and former member of NASA's UAP Independent Study Team, is the review's public face. In a July 6 Reality Check interview with Coulthart, "Inside NASA's UFO coverup culture," he framed the Foundation's task as carrying out one of the Independent Study Team's own recommendations: using AI and machine learning to scan public NASA archives for material that warrants closer study.

He also drew a hard boundary. The Disclosure Foundation is independent of NASA. It cannot compel the agency to open files, access classified databases, or force the Defense Department to release space-surveillance records. His narrower claim is that enough public NASA material already exists to start asking sharper questions: "Not having all of the data is not not having none of the data" — the line that has since traveled furthest from the interview.

What Gold did and didn't promise

Gold didn't confirm the strongest version of the claim. He didn't validate Derakhshani's rectilinear-structure imagery, and he didn't name a specific photograph, coordinate, mission, or sensor. He did say the Foundation's review will treat alleged artificial lunar structures as a working target and will seek answers from NASA and other agencies.

Coulthart told the audience on July 8 that he'd put a specific sub-question to Gold: whether NASA had touched up or modified lunar photographs. Gold's answer, per Coulthart, was that the images had long been in the public domain and that NASA hadn't been trying to hide them. Coulthart said he was "not happy" with the depth of that answer, calling it too narrow to address the strongest version of the touching-up claim.

That's the second time the touching-up question has surfaced publicly in two months. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who sits on the UAP caucus and has been promising an imminent UAP-related announcement since at least July 2, told Glenn Beck the same day that the UAP-relevant material now released is, in her words, "for the most part, everything that we have been able to discuss in a SCIF that we can now talk about publicly." She has not addressed the touching-up sub-question directly; her broader argument is simply that the phenomenon is real and that the administration will say so.

What would actually move this forward

Nothing here has yet produced a document. The photographs Elizondo described haven't surfaced. Derakhshani's image work has aired across at least two shows since February, but the source missions, resolution, and date ranges behind it haven't been catalogued in one place. NASA's response is a denial of the broad claim, not a review of the narrow one. The Disclosure Foundation has a committee, a spokesperson, and clearly stated limits on its own authority.

Four things would change that, if any appeared in the coming weeks attached to a name and a document: the photographs Elizondo referenced; a specific NASA archive target the Foundation names as under review, with mission ID and sensor; an on-the-record NASA response that goes beyond "we are not aware of any monoliths"; or on-record confirmation, from Coulthart or Derakhshani directly, of who "Dr. Max Derek Shai" actually is. Until then, this is a claim two shows have now amplified and one institution has inherited — not a record anyone has produced.

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