Karl Wolfe

Military Service and Clearance

Karl Wolfe served in the United States Air Force for 4.5 years beginning in January 1964, holding a top-secret encryption clearance. He was assigned to the Tactical Air Command at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia, where he worked as a precision electronics technician in photographic surveillance laboratories.

The Lunar Orbiter Encounter

In 1965, while working within a classified NSA facility supporting NASA's Lunar Orbiter Project, Wolfe was shown photographs processed directly from the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft. The orbiter had been mapping and photographing the moon in preparation for the Apollo program. While alone in a darkroom with another technician, an airman casually remarked, "By the way we've discovered a base on the backside of the moon," and proceeded to show Wolfe composite mosaic images.

Wolfe described witnessing clearly artificial structures on the lunar surface: mushroom-shaped buildings, spherical domes, tall towers, and objects resembling radar dishes. The structures were non-natural in appearance and suggested intelligent construction. The revelation was presented to him as an established fact within the facility, not as speculation.

Decades of Silence

Wolfe remained silent about what he had witnessed for approximately 36 years. He was deeply concerned that revealing classified information could result in prosecution under espionage laws, despite his growing conviction that the public had a right to know about the discovery. The psychological burden of this secret—what he understood to be irrefutable evidence of artificial structures and non-human intelligence—weighed heavily on him throughout his adult life.

Public Disclosure

On May 9, 2001, Karl Wolfe made his first public testimony at Steven Greer's Disclosure Project event held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Over twenty military, intelligence, government, corporate, and scientific witnesses came forward that day to establish the reality of UFO/UAP phenomena and extraterrestrial life. Wolfe testified under oath regarding what he had seen, providing technical details about the Lunar Orbiter documentation process and the specific nature of the structures photographed. His testimony stands as one of the most credible accounts from a military witness with direct access to classified space imagery.