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July 18, 2014, 10:34 PM GMT / Updated July 18, 2014, 9:22 PM GMT

The pixels in a photograph can be funny things, as demonstrated time and time again in "Aliens on the Moon: The Truth Exposed," a TV documentary airing on Sunday's 45th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 moon landing.

What one person sees as a overly magnified image with distortions that merely form strange patterns, another person sees as incontrovertible proof that extraterrestrials have left giant antennas, spaceships and industrial complexes on the moon.

"There's no doubt that these structures exist," Robert Kiviat, producer of the two-hour SyFy Channel show, told NBC News. (NBC News Digital and SyFy are both part of NBC Universal.)

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Is Kiviat serious? He sounds like it. "My goal would be, right upon the airing on Sunday night, maybe even the day after, to approach the NASA administrator in Washington ... and pretty much say, 'Look, here are these photographs, here's what we know from the NASA data, we would love to work with this under NASA auspices,'" he said.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden might not rush to join the search for aliens on the moon, but that sort of quest is right up Kiviat's alley. He was behind the "Alien Autopsy" TV show that made such a splash in 1995 with purported footage of alien bodies from Roswell. The footage was later proven to be fake, but in his defense, Kiviat says he acknowledged that in follow-up programs.

"I'm not telling you that I'm ashamed of my work on that," he said. "I'm not."

Photos old and new

The heart of "Aliens on the Moon" is a review of decades-old photographs from the Apollo missions, with commentary by sources ranging from former Apollo astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Edgar Mitchell to old standbys on the UFO scene (MUFON analyst Marc D'Antonio, "Dark Mission" co-author Mike Bara and physicist John Brandenburg, plus photo lab workers Donna Hare and Ken Johnston).

First, about those photographs: Many of the cases have long been part of Apollo UFO lore, and have been addressed on websites such as The Emoluments of Mars. It's fun to see those cases reviewed, as long as you know the history.

Watch for the case of the Asada Crater satellite dish, the tale of the lunar pyramid (also known as the Daedalus ziggurat), the picture of the Apollo 17 skull (also known as Data's Head) and the paperclip on the moon (which has been traced to lint on the picture). Rational Wiki lists the greatest hits on the lunar anomaly list.