American ufologist Scott Waring, widely known for his hypotheses about aliens in the protection of the US President and the artificial origin of the Saturnian moon Enceladus, recently suggested that NASA's Curiosity rover saw an underground portal to Martian civilization.
According to him, an artificial source of light, fixed in the photo, beating from somewhere from the depths, may mean that intelligent Martians are hiding in the depths of their planet. Perhaps the Martians are signaling someone, using light signals to communicate with their satellites - Phobos and Deimos.
Martian artifacts
In support of his words, Waring cites many years of observations of various lights and flares on the Red Planet. At the same time, the ufologist strongly rejects the official version of NASA about the natural nature of the glow, which is sun glare from a shiny stone surface.
After NASA experts switched to the version of the camera defect, Waring, in turn, started talking about a new Martian "conspiracy theory". According to the ufologist, NASA specialists deliberately conceal information about all the unusual phenomena that are encountered on Mars missions, and even correct the data, changing and destroying information about artifacts and UFOs.
Of course, the "pillar of light" is not the first Martian anomaly. Prior to that, starting with the famous "face of the Sphinx", ufologists periodically found in photographs all kinds of "turtles", "iguanas" and even "Martians" frozen on a piece of rock in thoughtful poses.
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In the beginning there were "Martian channels", discovered in the nineteenth century by astronomers J. Schiaparelli, P. Lowell and E. Antoniadi. Then, in the middle of the last century, observations of strange seasonal color changes and very rare outbreaks followed, which greatly fueled interest in the processes on the Red Planet. But then the space era has already come, and numerous interplanetary stations rushed to Mars.
High-quality orbital images of the Martian surface generated a real stir among ufologists, who found on them both the "face of the sphinx", and the figure of the "seated humanoid", and the "monolith" with "caves" …
Finally, the time has come for the most serious exploration of the surface of the Red Planet, and the "toy" rovers Spirit and Opportunity have replaced the Curiosity rover with an onboard SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) chemical laboratory on board. There has never been such a scientific landing in the history of astronautics, and the discoveries were not long in coming. Recall that the mission reached the surface of Mars on August 6 this year. On board the superrover there are 10 scientific complexes with a total weight of about 75 kilograms. All this should have allowed the rover to determine whether there was life on Mars and whether at least some simple organisms remain of it today.
The mysterious planet has attracted the attention of astronomers since ancient times. It was observed by N. Copernicus, T. Brahe, I. Kepler, H. Huygens and other outstanding scientists. Ideas about the habitability of other worlds were expressed by the ancient Greek sage Epicurus, the Roman philosopher Lucretius, the great heretic Giordano Bruno, the thinkers I. Kant and P. Laplace. Suddenly, the hypothesis of the existence of intelligent life received strong confirmation.
In 1859, observing Mars, the astronomer A. Secchi noticed thin straight lines on its surface, which he conditionally called "channels". However, at first, the astronomical world did not pay much attention to this.
Channel legend
In 1877, during the great opposition of Mars, the Italian astronomer Schiaparelli discovered what he called "Mars" on the surface of the dark Martian land. In the Italian language this word has many meanings, but it was the "canals" that got into the English translation as artificial irrigation structures. Schiaparelli himself at first did not at all put such a meaning in these Martian formations. The Italian astronomer mapped the hemispheres of Mars, on which he drew a grid of thin straight lines of 113 channels connecting the dark spots of the seas.
Scheme of "channels of Mars"
For many years Schiaparelli observed Mars during oppositions, opening periodic "floods" and "bifurcations" of the channels. It was only after the great opposition of 1892 that Schiaparelli came to the conclusion that the canals were artificial. At the same time the American astronomer W. Pickering discovered Martian "oases" at the confluence of the channels. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the American astronomer P. Lowell took up the study of Mars.
He compiled the globe of Mars and wrote a number of articles and books in which he argued that the Martian channels are of artificial origin and, therefore, there is highly organized life on Mars. According to Lowell, the geometrically correct network and straightness of the canals did not allow them to be interpreted as riverbeds or crevasses. Lowell believed that the grooves on the Moon and Mercury are cracks, but the Martian channels are the result of the work of intelligent beings.
Since in summer, during the melting of the polar snow caps of Mars, the channels darken in the direction from the poles to the equator, Lowell argued that water is deliberately launched into the channels and vegetation appears along them. In the oases, located among the Martian desert, there are settlements.
Lowell's fantasies received unexpected support from the outstanding Russian astronomer G. A. Tikhova. During the great confrontation of the Red Planet in 1909, the staff of the Pulkovo Observatory found out that the Martian polar caps have a greenish tint and resemble ice in appearance. Based on this, Professor Tikhov suggested that the polar caps melt in spring, causing waves of darkening of the "channels" and "seas" from the poles to the equator. Consequently, the scientist believed, the "seas" are covered with vegetation, which along with the thawed flood blooms along the Martian channels.
Today, the tasks of searching for life on the Red Planet are reduced only to finding its indirect signs or traces in the distant past, which in itself would be a tremendous success. But the Martians do not and have not been in the history of the Red Planet, so the intelligent beings who created the network of irrigation canals will remain only in science fiction novels.
Wonders of nature?
The latest missions of robotic rovers have shown that the Red Planet was once warmer and there was water in a liquid state. And it is possible that traces of the Martian civilization, so many times and colorfully depicted by science fiction writers, will someday be found. Unfortunately, today no traces of life have been found in the soil or in the rock of Mars. The situation can be clarified by the upcoming international expedition of a manned spacecraft to this planet. It should take place in the first quarter of this century.
Today we can imagine a strange six-wheeled vehicle the size of an average SUV climbing slowly but stubbornly up an exposed layer of dry and cracked rock, covered with reddish-brown sand, somewhere around 365 million kilometers away. Stopping on a hillock under kilometer-long rocks piercing a dirty yellow sky hiding the pitiful remnants of a once dense atmosphere, he twisted a metal turret for a long time, examining with several lenses the area called Yellow Knife Bay in Gale Crater.
Then the mechanism was pushed in with an articulated manipulator, at the end of which a drilling device gleamed. Having penetrated a few centimeters into the soil, the iron hand in a couple of minutes pulled out a small container filled with gray powder from the well. A few more motions, and a metal crane lowered the samples into the housing through a narrow opening. There the gray powder got into a laboratory cuvette and was subjected to a long series of all kinds of analyzes.
At this time, long columns of numbers and symbols were running across the monitors of NASA's Mars Mission Control Center. The planetary specialist who decoded them right from the screen gave a cry of surprise. The sample clearly contained a special type of clay - smectite, which can be found on our planet on swampy plains, abundantly washed by monsoon rainfall.
So, it turns out that the last point in the reality of Martian artifacts can only be put by detailed soil samples that have preserved traces of a hypothetical civilization. It looks like Curiosity has indeed discovered traces of the planet's rich geological past. It is possible that the curious rover really stumbled upon a place where living organisms could once have lived. Sometimes such analyzes really carry a lot of unusual things. It can be an abnormal concentration of heavy water, reminiscent of some kind of atomic catastrophe, or traces of decomposition of some creatures in the depths of the soil.
It is difficult to say what the ancient Martians were like - bacteria, mosses, lichens or real humanoids, but one thing is clear - for the first time outside the Earth, an oasis was encountered, where some life could really exist …
The further the Martian missions deepen into the sand dunes and rocky plateaus of the Red Planet, the louder the questions of specialists, enthusiasts and ufologists sound. How to solve the riddle of life, and along with the artifacts on the surface of the Red Planet?
Any astronaut with a crowbar and a small set of equipment could provide answers to these and many other questions, but, apparently, inhabited missions will not land on the surface of the Red Planet soon. In the meantime, the next NASA rover can only record more and more mysterious artifacts and phenomena.
Oleg FAIG