Do the Mars Rovers See Martian Leprechauns?

June 22, 2009

What I love about NASA conspiracy theorists -- you know those folks who think we never went to the moon and the Air Force is  hiding alien bodies -- is that they want to have their cake and eat it too.

At a recent convention called, you guessed it, Conspiracy Con 2009, self-styled Mars sleuth, Andrew Basiago, accused NASA of hiding evidence of Martian life in photos taken from the rover Spirit.

But I will bet money that when NASA eventually releases images showing manmade artifacts at the Apollo landing sites, to be photographed from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO, which will enter lunar orbit tomorrow) conspiracy flakes will accuse NASA of faking the PR pictures.

The idea that NASA is hiding any data from Mars is patently absurd and beyond your everyday paranoia. Tons of images from NASA’s Mars Rovers, Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) can by accessed online. The MRO images show details as small as one meter across. Feel free to go looking for the elusive Martians yourself.

The paranoia about “hidden pictures” can be traced back to the Mother-of-all-Mars cover-up allegations, the infamous “Face on Mars.”

In1976 an innocuous photo taken by the Viking 1 orbiter and quickly released to the public by NASA showed a striking formation that looks like a face, actually more like a hockey mask, peering up from the Cydonia plains.

This predictably got traction that it was an extraterrestrial artifact inexplicably made to look humanoid. If the aliens were really smart they would have put such a sculpture at on the moon and made it big enough to be seen in amateur telescopes.

In the 1980s a pair of NASA contractors at the Goddard Space Flight Center  (but not scientists being paid to do such research), did their own amateur analysis on the image and claimed the object was too symmetrical to be natural. Conspiracy buffs hatched a myth that the “real” nature of the face was being hidden from the public.

Finally in April 2007 the MRO photographed the “face” at higher resolution and a different sun angle. What was left? A flat-topped mesa (or, an eroded face according to some Mars artifact diehards).

This same silly Rorschach test is now being applied to images from the Mars rover Spirit that is now sitting at Gusev Crater. Basiago, a lawyer turned amateur photo analyst, claims that “little people” can be seen in the rover Spirit photos (what? are they looking for their Lucky Charms?). Of course this life-on-Mars claim conveniently sidesteps the fact that there are no pictures from orbit that show any evidence of civilization: roads, buildings, farms, or even the legendary canals.

Rover photographs are “a cosmic treasure trove of the humanoid beings, animal species, carved statues, and built structures on Mars that reveal that the Red Planet has been a harbinger of life for eons and is inhabited today,” Basiago said earlier this month (who’s bio and press releases describe him as an “environmental scholar,” “genius,” and former “whiz-kid”).

Basiago says five types of beings can be discerned in the shadowy rock formations in the Spirit images of a pretty lifeless-looking rock strewn landscape. They include not just O-scale people with clothes, but also creatures with bulbous heads and spindly bodies, forms that are all head, and hybrids that combine human traits with insect and lizard ones.

I sincerely believe Basiago could fine a creature in a fuzzy image of elephant dung. Put another way; “one man’s noise is another man’s data.”

But why are these creatures Tinkerbell-sized?  In a concoction of totally ad hoc science mumbo jumbo, Basiago says it’s because Mars is much smaller than Earth, oh I get it! Therefore, life evolved in a smaller biosphere, and that past catastrophes favored the emergence of smaller organisms.  Never mind that the planet’s lower gravity would allow for evolution to try making tall, spidery multicelled life forms under the right conditions.

What’s missing is that the infinite variability of evolution on another planet would yield totally different looking organisms. Or are we to believe that the little people from Mars hitchhiked to Earth on a meteorite and then evolved to be taller after they landed? This is about as fanciful as those ridiculous Sea Monkeys (brine shrimp) sold to kids in packages illustrating miniature underwater people.

It’s also curious that we don’t have pictures showing the purported wee people walking up to and surrounding NASA’s mechanical envoy from the stars. Maybe even genuflecting to the towering space robot.  If the pictures are real, the little Martians are blithely going about their business among the red rocks, and don’t seem to care that an ominous-looking mobile giant could crush them. You’d think that for the sake of good interplanetary diplomacy, they’d at least dig out the stuck wheel on Spirit.

What’s conspicuously missing is any purported evidence that any of these fanciful shapes has actually moved between exposures, which would be a little more convincing. But the back door to this debunking is that Basiago claims some of the objects are in fact miniature statues.

Of course NASA knows all about the Martian Lilliputians he says, but is altering the scale, color, and brightness of its images from Spirit to hide them.  Instead, NASA distracts us with minor discoveries – like finding evidence of water -- and covers-up major Mars discoveries.

Why? Supposedly because of some alleged CIA report from 1952 that directs the government to hide evidence of extraterrestrial life.  Since 70 percent of the public believes in space aliens, such evidence would not come as a huge shock to our culture. In fact, a new bunch of conspiracy theorists would pop up like Whack-a-Moles to prove the NASA’s evidence for alien life was faked.

Now just think about this for a moment. NASA’s space science budget is essentially flat for the coming decade. This means NASA can only afford one major “flagship class” science mission per decade. If true evidence of life off the Earth were presented to the public, just imagine the flush of funding that would come from Congress to make friends with the aliens before the Chinese do.

When the high-resolution LRO images start coming back from the moon, I have no doubt that Mr. Basiago will find shapes of the Keebler elves and Travelocity gnome among other fairy-tale creatures.

Comments

[jamerz3294]

Oh wait... I just took a picture of a slime mold on my tub that *proves* that the Moon Landings were faked, that Big time Wrestling is real, and that JR shot JFK...

[way2ec]

Keep the images coming... I LOVE the "scientific speculation"... why look how it helped us with the WMD, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq!

[MrDrProfessorDude]

judging by how the media portrays these conspiracy theorists, I think that they were all started by NASA so that they can get more attention....and at the same time, they really did fake the moon landing, hid data, and Paul McCartney is dead and Elvis is Alive!

[Rob]

The last in the series of photos with this article appears to be a phallus. Does this mean we can assume Martians are anatomically correct and have incorporated it into their art or religion?

[topher]

this is all completely retarded why is it that every one is grasping in the dark for some shred of life on other planets. people are so willing to believe in things like evolution and think that maybe there might be life on another planet. they say that the conditions had to be "JUST RIGHT" for life to form on this planet and mars being completely different in almost all aspects. if you look at the probibility of evolution, it is clear that it is a farce and the same goes for other planets. if you have a brain in your head AND you use it, its not that hard to figure these things out.

[Edward Metcalfe]

Just maybe the 1976 photo was an early hacker and NASA is too proud to admit it. Consider the likelihood of the alternatives.

The space industry is staffed by fallible human beings and lapses of honesty will occur there from time to time. Just look at peak-oil, global warming/cooling, etc. All sections of society are dishonest. The trouble with space is that its hard to check the facts.

However a proven act of dishonesty does not prove anyones wild speculations.

[pBrane]

NASA hiding the existence of Martian life forms, eh? OK, Andrew, what's the motive? In order to get an absolutely unlimited budget all NASA would have to do is agree with you. Then again, that would make them look pretty stupid and they wouldn't want to compete with you on your home turf.

[Ibrahim Ba.]

NASA is the only company in space, and NASA is with the Government - Which means they give us what THEY want us to believe.

Imagine only company A controls the Sea & Sea Research, and they say there are no deep water fish or no Blue Whales exist anymore. You have a choice to disbelive them?
Person: Look! A blue whale!
Person2: No, they are extint as A says. It might be a big whale that's it.
Person3: Well it's huge and dosent look like other whales?!!
Person2: Whale XY can grow and.......
While company A hides the fact (Country D is home country for A & are funding A)

[Summer]

I have a relative who works for NASA. Believe me, it's not government conspiracy/cover-ups. What you are seeing are shapes in the landscape. When the light hits them a certain way poeple tend to see what's familiar to them - faces, forms...most people tend to see anthropomorphic shapes. Since we are human, we tend to anthropomorphize everything anyway, because it is what we know and currently, what we understand.

[ImaginaryUnit]

Why did you not show the pictures with the right-angle structures? Wind erosion and such do not produce right-angle structures.

see for example

http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/mars/nermarsanom.html

and

http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=117774966&blogID=270492651

[stelarapas]

Nasa folks are trully sad, and their disclosure project is the most unethical act in the known earth history. Some of them are trully enlighten though. check that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6QNzH4x1rY&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.examiner.com%2Fexaminer%2Fx-2912-Seattle-Exopolitics-Examiner%257Ey2009m6d19-NASA-moon-bombing-violates-space-law--may-caus&feature=player_embedded

[ray]

Stay tuned folks, I'll be blogging about Mr. Wolfe's alleged "mushrooms structures" on the lunar farside (from the previously mention YouTube video).

Gee, maybe the Keebler Cookie elves do live on the moon!

[6Days]

That first image looks like they cut and paste that famous big-foot image into it.

[charles kafka]

i love mobs....
the new science!
err any word, as to what any qualified scientists say these are, or is this just a "lets make ourselves feel good by shooting down the other guy" article.
i don't know which is worse, people who stake their entire lives on putting others down in an attempt to make themselves look or "feel good about themselves" or the mobs that are willing to join in the chorus.
now chances are, these are just strange looking rocks, fossils that are millions of years old. if on the off chance they turn out to be slime mold running around on the surface of the planet, it wont matter, the mobs will change their opinion, with immunity, you all will laugh at this article, citing "We were wrong nostalgia" but the purpose of the article will still be accomplished to have made someone "look " bad..
my congrats to you.
and to the mobs gleefully jumping up and down, at this article... awe never mind... mobs are forever, a useless appendage of being part of the human race.. just go on being mobs, we will love you anyway. (not)

[David Ebert]

As Mars dried out, the inhabitants moved underground, taking the water with them. They have developed a system of competing colonies, rather like anthills. Martians have evolved an altruistic hive-life with highly differentiated, morphologically distinct castes, intelligent but not individualistic, ensuring survival of the colonies. They have evolved beyond most technology- their tools are mostly biological rather than mechanical; living water pumps, biological harvesters and living, self-replicating crops, aphid-like cows, biological digesters for atmosphere and waste conversion, etc. These "Morlocks" are still there. This explains the occasional plumes of methane vented from their caverns. Ordinarily they would recycle all the energy-producing gas, but the population produces too much waste gas, so they periodically vent some. They keep all the oxygen and nitrogen they can, but some does escape. It ends up combining with hydrogen as water, and freezing at the poles, where it is eventually harvested as ice and brought back into the closed cycle of the habitats. Some inhabitants explore the surface once in a while, principally seeking mineral resources, and if they miraculously stumble upon our robots, may or may not recognize the landers as extramartian. They would probably think of them as artifacts from other underground colonies and leave them alone. We need to turn to E. O. Wilson to try and learn how we may communicate with them when we find them. They will teach us how to survive our own planet's desertification period.