As one or both of you might recall, in June of last year I had started to write (with all good intention) a reasonably brief review of Dark Mission by Richard C Hoagland – founder of The Enterprise Mission, recipient of an Angstrom Medal, former science advisor to CBS News and Walter Cronkite, author of The Monuments of Mars, co-creator of the ‘Pioneer Plaque,’ originator of the ‘Europa Proposal,’ and principal investigator of The Enterprise Mission – and Michael Bara. The original intent at the time of its inception was to do a three-part review. However, as I explained in those admittedly fairly lengthy posts, it morphed into a major research project and was expanded well beyond the envisioned three parts.
At a certain point in the discussion of the all-important Apollo 17 mission, I made a point of announcing my full intention to also compose a post – and probably more – regarding the problems equally inherent in some of the research and conclusions reached by Hoaglandite, Keith Laney.
This is not that post.
Instead, I would like to share a few curious items I have found whilst doing research; things which did not seem to fit entirely well into either the aforementioned posts or other potential future posts…
Very often the relics of a prior civilisation may not always be immediately recognised for what they are. There are not always going to be colossal structures, such as the pyramids, or vast decaying monuments poking up from a sandy beach to blatantly alert the casual observer who happens to be riding along with a scantily-clad Linda Harrison on the back of their horse to former grandeur. Sometimes one needs to look more closely.
Following in the aftermath of a catastrophic, extinction level event and the passage of perhaps many thousands of years, the likelihood that one would be able to quickly distinguish a pile of random debris as the remnants of a once-great culture is fairly slim. Even without the benefit of a cataclysmic event to help eradicate virtually all identifiable evidence, pinpointing a previous civilisation is often no mean task. On Earth, analogues to this are evident at Tell Brak.
At first glance, the casual observer might never realise that this seemingly innocuous rolling hill on the plains of northern Syria was first inhabited nearly 8000 years ago and became a major urban and administrative centre of ancient Mesopotamia. Even climbing the 130-foot tell, it might be difficult to quickly determine the signs of once-continuous habitation and the region’s importance as a point of contact between the Sumerian (and later Akkadian) Empire and the Levant.
With this in mind, what would it take for someone to look at images of, oh, let’s say the planet Mars, just for fun, and recognise the remnants of a lost civilisation?
Though most scientists would probably agree that there was a time when Mars was once a warmer and wetter planet than what we see today, there are many very often conflicting theories about how Mars became what we are told is a cold, dead world. One theory is the Exploded Planet Hypothesis which, very briefly, states that Mars was once a tidally-locked satellite of a planet occupying what is now the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. When, for any variety of reasons, that planet finally exploded, the sheer ferocity of the event spun Mars off its axis, debris scoured it as it tumbled backwards, its oceans raged across the planet and then the waters – and most of the Martian atmosphere – boiled off into space.
Other theorists and writers, such as Immanuel Velikovsky, have put forth very similar ideas, but the bottom line is that many people believe Mars suffered a planet-wide catastrophe which left it in the state we see today. It’s all just theoretical at the moment, until we can actually go there and observe and study for ourselves. But it may be a while. We raced a man to the moon in under ten years at the behest of JFK and then immediately rushed into doing almost nothing in the four decades since.
So when we look at the images beamed back to us from satellites or from the Martian surface from rovers, would we recognise the signs of civilisation as we know it? What constitutes cultural artefacts on another world? What differentiates them from their common surroundings? And would we immediately recognise their significance?
In 2005, the Mars rover Spirit, 513 days (or Sols) into its 90-day mission, was cruising about Gusev crater and captured, amongst other things, two images containing this particular item. Gusev is an impact crater thought to have later become a lake in Mars’ earlier days. (The original image can be found here at the NASA/JPL site dedicated to the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. And, yes, you would be correct in pointing out that I have made use of this image in the past).
Later, in 2008, the Spirit rover, now 1526 days into its three month mission, captured a seemingly unimportant landscape panorama on its jaunt along the Martian surface, a considerable distance away from Gusev crater. And yet if you look to the very bottom of the image, just left of centre, you can see this interesting little curio staring back at you, bleached white just like the other rocks in the area aren’t.
Of course there is a very high probability (how high I cannot say because I am terrible at math and, as you know, I must use a calculator which, at this moment, would require me to go and find it but, because I am on a roll, I won’t) that these two objects are likely just simple examples of pareidolia – the phenomenon in which one sees things which are not likely to be real, such as faces in clouds or women who like me.
And it could be entirely coincidental that in June 2008, the Phoenix Mars Observer, plodding round the cooler climes of the Martian Arctic at 68 degrees North and 233 degrees East, just happened to capture an image of this object strewn about in the rubble on the 18th Sol of its Mission. (The original image is here at the Phoenix Mars Mission homepage).
Phoenix also captured this object in June of 2008, not very far from the skull-like object seen above. In the original image, this strangely unnatural- and manufactured-looking item can be found by looking just about an inch above the top right corner of the black rectangle in the left-hand side of the photograph. There is a curiously straight line trailing out well behind the object and some of the ‘rocks’ scattered about seem oddly square.
Returning to the little Spirit Rover back at about 14.57 degrees South, this photograph – so it is explained by NASA – was captured on 11 November 2004.
The rover was on an uphill approach to an area dubbed, rather curiously, ‘Machu Picchu,’ which means that this object is not debris from the Spirit landing site – which was a considerable distance away. Nor is it something left behind by the rover, given that the rover had not actually been to the hill as yet and was still moving towards it.
To see the image in context, click here – or, better still, here – and look in the upper left corner, roughly at the top of the mosaic near the ‘50’ marker.
Strangely, NASA happily post these images on their various web sites and yet make no comment regarding the occasionally peculiar content found in them, though it seems they are perfectly willing to immediately dismiss, deny, and debunk claims that there are signs of previous life, or fragments of a long-dead civilisation, in them. They are eager and willing to tell you precisely what these things aren’t, but rarely what they are.
Just recently there has been some debate regarding the nature of these rocks found in a HiRISE image captured by NASA/JPL and the University of Arizona – all of which is nicely encapsulated in a 6 August 2009 article at The Daily Mail. One of the attempts to dispel further interest is a quote from Yisrael Spinoza of the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Lab who states:
In reality it's more likely that this boulder has been created by breaking away from the bedrock to create a rectangular-shaped feature.
Three times. In the same region. In the shape of a triangle. With a circular shape in the middle. Oh. Okay.
Eventually the tiresome repetition of the more than thirty year old ‘trick of light and shadow’ response begins to wear a bit thin. It isn’t my intention to suggest that these or any other other anomalies are, indeed, the very clues scientists or researchers (or anomaly hunters) have been searching for as absolute proof of one-time life on Mars. I am merely playing Advocatus Diaboli, asking basic questions, attempting to poke a few holes in the fabric. But even if these peculiarities are just that – peculiarities – one must still periodically ask, ‘Why is there a broken dinner plate in Gusev crater?’
So I'm guessing that the author of this story had the sad misfortune of meeting my ex-wife...
Obviously the surprising element of this particular photograph isn't the spectacular lack of composition or forethought involved in its planning or execution but rather the apparently considerably large object at the centre of the frame; a fairly massive and, one could reasonably argue, demonstrably non-terrestrial object which is quite clearly flying through the city of London at an alarmingly low altitude, entirely thoughtless of the trajectory that places it in dangerous proximity to the surrounding cityscape; wending its casual way through the night as if about to dock in Kubrickesque fashion with The Eye.
