Maaneli "Max" Derakhshani is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher of physics whose academic work on the foundations of quantum mechanics preceded a highly public turn, in 2026, toward alleged anomalies in NASA imagery of the Moon and Mars. Through repeated appearances with Ross Coulthart on NewsNation's Reality Check and on Jesse Michels's American Alchemy, he became the most visible scientist arguing that some Apollo-era photographs may show artificial structures and that the space agency's public archive has been inconsistently handled.

Derakhshani's research has centered on stochastic mechanics, semiclassical gravity and objective-collapse models of quantum theory. His doctoral thesis, "Stochastic Mechanics Without Ad Hoc Quantization: Theory and Applications to Semiclassical Gravity," was completed in 2017, and he has co-authored papers with physicists including Lajos Diósi, Catalina Curceanu, Guido Bacciagaluppi and Michael Kiessling, among them a 2023 Physical Review A study of collapse models. A speaker biography says he worked at Rutgers University on grant-funded research in quantum mechanics, quantum field theory and quantum gravity with collaborators in the United States, Italy and Hungary. He is also listed as a fellow of the Foundational Questions Institute and of M31 Capital, and the same biography says he has briefed members of Congress on Moon and Mars image analysis.

His lunar work reached a wide audience in May 2026, after the Department of War's UAP files release included Apollo-era material. On Reality Check he said a structure near the Plaskett U satellite crater stands roughly 95 feet tall, a figure he derived from its shadow and the known sun angle, and that it appears blurrier in public-facing NASA images than in project scans. Later episodes examined a triangular object in an Apollo 17 photograph, where he questioned why only a low-resolution version had been released, and the STS-48 shuttle footage, which he suggested might show an object evading a weapons test. He disputed Avi Loeb's view that cosmic rays explain the STS-48 flashes, and a July episode applied the same approach to proposed ruins on Mars.

On June 24, 2026, the Disclosure Foundation named him to an executive committee, led by former NASA official Mike Gold, that will review NASA archival material for UAP-related data using machine-learning tools and share findings with the public and interested agencies. In a July American Alchemy interview he described what he considers evidence of altered Apollo photographs, including two versions of an Apollo 14 image that he says differ in whether a blue orb appears. He has also argued on social media with skeptics, challenging Michael Shermer's dismissal of new physics and science writer David Whitehouse's view that planetary scientists would have been first to spot genuine anomalies.

Derakhshani's credentials in mathematical physics set him apart from most lunar-anomaly researchers. Those credentials have given his readings of the imagery, from the Plaskett structure to the STS-48 object, a hearing on national television and a place in an organized re-examination of NASA's archives, even as skeptics continue to dispute them.