A former NASA contractor with top-secret security clearance accused the US space agency of quietly removing evidence of alien life from photos before sharing them with the public.
Stunning allegations made by Donna Hare, who illustrated graphics for the agency, have resurfaced, alleging she was told that NASA photo lab technicians airbrush images of UFOs from satellite images.
Hare, who worked for NASA contractor Philco Ford Aerospace from 1967 to 1981, said she learned from a friend working in the photo lab that the space agency has had a plan in place to keep proof of extraterrestrial encounters hidden for decades.
She claimed in multiple interviews that in 1970 or 1971, while working in the restricted photo lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, a lab technician showed her an image depicting a round white object with sharply defined edges hovering above a field of pine trees.
Hare, who died in 2021, claimed she had never seen an object like this before and asked the NASA worker if it was a UFO, to which the photo lab tech replied: ‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘I knew he meant was “it was” but he couldn’t tell me so I said “what are you going to do with this information” and he said “well, we always have to airbrush them out before we sell them to the public,”‘ she said.
The claims resurfaced online this year after NASA took sharp criticism for the poor photography of interstellar space object 3i/ATLAS, which some in the scientific community suggested may have been a piece of alien technology passing Earth.
Both NASA and the US government have maintained that there has never been any proof that UFOs and alien life exist in the cosmos or have visited Earth.
Former NASA contractor Donna Hare (Pictured) repeatedly claimed NASA photo lab technicians airbrushed evidence of UFOs from satellite pictures
Unidentified objects have been seen in countless photographs over the last 80 years, but physical proof of UFOs has never been presented
Hare first shared her story publicly in May 2001 at the Disclosure Project press conference at the National Press Club in Washington DC.
While she continued to give interviews over the next two decades, the original photo, the technician’s name or any official statement regarding NASA’s airbrushing policy has never been revealed.
The Daily Mail has reached out to NASA for comment on the claims but has not received a response.
During her testimony, Hare became the next in a growing list of Americans to claim NASA astronauts told them aliens were real.
Hare alleged that a NASA worker who worked with returning astronauts during their time in medical quarantine told her that almost every Apollo astronaut claimed they had seen alien craft on the moon.
‘This particular man was in quarantine with them and was part of their debriefing. He said that a lot of them talked about their experience and seeing these craft follow them. I believe there were three on the moon when they landed,’ Hare recalled during her interview with the Disclosure Project.
The former contractor claimed that the astronauts were told to keep quiet in the interest of national security. They also allegedly signed papers promising not to speak under penalty of imprisonment.
However, some Apollo astronauts did eventually go public with claims that they witnessed extraterrestrial activity while in space and during their test flights for the space program.
NASA pilot Edgar Mitchell (Pictured) was the sixth man to walk on the moon in 1971. The NASA astronaut publicly stated he believed he had seen extraterrestrial craft in flight
In an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail last year, the wife of one Apollo astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, revealed the secrets her husband shared before he died.
Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon in 1971, reportedly told his former wife, Anita: ‘There were UFOs out there, because so many of the pilots and astronauts had seen something.’
‘I remember Gordy [Project Mercury astronaut Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr.] telling us at a dinner party in our house that he had seen something,’ Mrs Mitchell said.
‘He said, “Listen, we have nothing that goes that fast and goes that high,” she recalled.
Mitchell, a former US Navy Captain, had also stated publicly before his death that he believed that UFOs were real, that extraterrestrials had visited Earth and that governments worldwide were lying about what they knew.
A documentary called The Age of Disclosure, released in November, allegedly detailed the 80-year global cover-up of alien life and the technology humans have created using pieces of UFOs.
Filmmaker and director Dan Farah spent four years secretly interviewing high-level members of the US government and military regarding the existence of extraterrestrials.
His film debuted a month before the White House would order the Pentagon to begin publicly disclosing all files that have been kept classified regarding UFO encounters and the search for extraterrestrial beings.
As of July 2026, three tranches of files have been released by the Pentagon, including hundreds of pages of files and audio recordings from NASA and the Apollo missions.
No files have confirmed the accounts of Hare, and no images have been released that suggest the space agency doctored satellite photos to remove alien craft.
However, the files did contain several images from the moon landings in the 1960s and 1970s, which featured strange and unexplainable lights and shapes in space.
