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This is the best place I could think of for this, so the mods may change location at they're discretion. But I think anything from the weekly world new is nonsense. Oh I got there via FARK.

PASADENA, Calif. -- A NASA space probe has reportedly discovered a huge mother lode of oil on the moon -- and the astounding find could usher in a new era of peace and prosperity for America!

Scientific data recorded by NASA's unmanned Lunar Prospector spacecraft indicates there are at least 270 trillion barrels worth of "black gold" buried beneath a crater in the lunar south pole -- more than 1,000 times the known oil reserves of Saudi Arabia and enough to meet America's energy needs for more than 100 years to come, a scientist says.

Notoriously secretive NASA officials are still sitting on the mind-blowing March 8 discovery, based on new computer analysis of data beamed back in 1998. But respected astronomer Dr. Gary Wiltts, who has close ties to the U.S. space agency, received a heads up from one of his associates.

"I was told the discovery of oil in the Aitken Basin of the moon's south pole was made with Prospector's neutron spectrometer," he reveals.

"Naturally, this means NASA will hastily renew manned missions to the moon, which had been written off as a useless, 'dead' hulk for decades. For starters, expect to see the planned launch date of the next probe, Lunar A, moved forward from Jan. 1, 2004."

Striking oil on the moon means soon the U.S. may no longer be dependent on foreign oil -- and future wars in the Middle East can be avoided.

"In a short time, the Mideast will no longer be of any real strategic importance to the United States -- we won't have to put our servicemen and women in harm's way every time some tinhorn dictator in the region acts up," notes Pasadena-based Dr. Wiltts.

"In the past, whenever we had a conflict with Iraq, we had to worry about harming their oil supply. That's no longer an issue. Now we can just nuke them back to the Stone Age."

With a massive influx of lunar oil flooding the market, gas prices will plummet to just pennies a gallon.

"Virtually free energy will transform our economy," predicts Dr. Wiltts.

NASA is keeping a lid on the breakthrough, hoping that, through secrecy, U.S. drillers can get rigs set up on the moon well before other oil-hungry countries.

Meanwhile, the agency is quietly conducting a feasibility study on how to recover the oil cost-effectively, the astronomer reveals.

"We have to build a fleet of space tankers that can get to the moon and back -- a round-trip journey of 454,126 miles at a minimum -- without burning more fuel than they transport," he explains.

"The good news is we really have a jump on the rest of the world. America has already planted her flag on the moon -- we've already 'laid our claim.'

"Also, low lunar gravity should make the process of extracting oil easier."

The discovery is also intriguing from a purely scientific standpoint, because of its implications about life on the moon, the astronomer adds.

"Petroleum on Earth comes from organisms such as marine algae, plankton and dinosaurs that died millions of years ago and decayed over the eons," explains Dr. Wiltts. "If there's oil on moon, the only way it could have gotten there is if similar life forms once existed there."