The US government once made plans to nuke the moon whilst researching invisibility cloaks.

The top secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) saw millions of dollars spent between 2007 and 2012 as defence officials looked into experimental technologies including wormholes, warp drives, and anti-gravity devices as well as invisibility cloaks.

To further this research, Department of Defence officials developed proposals to use nuclear weapons to tunnel through the moon to harvest "lightweight materials".

The revelations have come to light after VICE obtained 1,600 pages of documents through a Freedom of Information request.

One of the reports, discussing "negative mass propulsion", outlines the shocking plan to mine the moon.

The authors write that materials "100,000 times lighter than steel, but still [with] the strength of steel" can be found in the centre of the moon.

To reach these materials, they proposed using thermonuclear explosives to blast through the lunar crust and tunnel through to the mantle.

The AATIP's existence only came to light after director Luis Elizondo resigned in 2017 before going public with UFO reports.

Although the programme has now been scrapped, US officials aren't ready to give up on the idea of mining the moon.

NASA is still moving ahead with plans to mine space rocks from the celestial body, which is said to hold "hundreds of billions of dollars of untapped resources", according to NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine.

Taking to Twitter in 2020 he declared the space agency's intention to buy "lunar soil from a commercial provider", adding: "It's time to establish the regulatory certainty to extract and trade space resources."

"We are putting our policies into practice to fuel a new era of exploration and discovery that will benefit all of humanity," he wrote in a subsequent blog post.

As part of this "new era of exploration" NASA is also aiming to return humans to the moon by 2025.

The Artemis missions will aim to establish a permanent base on the moon, as well as land the first woman and person of colour there.

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