Alien cannonball

Following hard on the heels of yesterday's post about a guy who claims to have had an alien mistress, today we have: a cannonball on Mars proving that there was a war there back in the day.

The origin of this claim comes from one Scott Waring, who has been something of a frequent flier, here at Skeptophilia.  In fact, he's more or less become our resident specialist with regards to unhinged claims about Mars.  Among other things, Waring has claimed that the Mars lander has snapped pictures of:

• a flip-flop
• a coffin
• a fossilized groundhog
• the shadow of a human
• a skull
• a hammer
• a thigh bone
• the rare and elusive Martian bunny

So it's not to be wondered at that I view anything Waring dreams up with a bit of a wry eye.  But without further ado, let's take a look at his evidence:

[image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

What this looks like to me is a concretion, which is a sedimentary rock formation in which concentric layers of a cementing material are laid down around some central core.  It can produce some weird-looking rocks; take a look, for example, at this photograph from Kazakhstan:

[image courtesy of photographer Alexandr Babkin and the Wikimedia Commons]

If I didn't know a bit of geology, I would certainly wonder about what the hell this could be, because it looks to my eye like Kazakhstan received a visit by the rare and elusive giant Martian bunny.  But no, these are just rocks.  Odd rocks, yes, but rocks.

Waring, however, doesn't see it that way.  The rock in the first picture is a cannonball.  And from this, he has concluded that there was a war on Mars millions of years ago, which resulted in two things:

1. the complete destruction of the Martian atmosphere; and
2. a single fossilized cannonball.

Which strikes me as pretty bizarre.  How can he deduce all this from a single alleged cannonball?  Plus, if the warring factions on Mars possessed weapons sufficient to destroy the atmosphere, why the hell would they bother with cannons?  It'd be like Luke Skywalker et al. trying to defeat the Stormtroopers using slings, stones, and catapults.

Oh, wait.  They did that, in Return of the Jedi.  My bad.

But my feeling is still that Waring is batting zero.  A pity, really, because it would be so cool if the Mars lander had stumbled upon some evidence of Martian life.  On the other hand, maybe it's better that there are no Martian bunnies.  I have enough trouble keeping the ordinary terrestrial bunnies out of our vegetable garden as it is; it would suck if I had to worry about an invasion of alien bunnies.

The shadow knows

I'm getting a little fed up with the continual stream of aberrant stuff that the Mars Rover keeps finding on the Martian surface.

So far, we've had:

• a coffin
• a fossilized groundhog
• a flip-flop
• a skull
• a hammer
• a thigh bone
• a rare Martian bunny

With all of this, you'd think that NASA would be all over the news with stories like, "Mars Rover Finds Proof of Life on Mars!"  But no.  Somehow, they're content to cover the stories up, and let Congress slash their budget over and over.  Because that's how scientists roll.  Coverups have a much higher priority than grants and funding, if you're a scientist.

Or, perhaps, the people who are proposing these "finds" don't understand the concepts of "digital artifact" and "chance resemblance" and "pareidolia."  This last one is the reason behind the latest claim -- that the Rover caught a photograph of the shadow of a human (or other bipedal species) in a space suit, reaching out to make an adjustment of something.

[image courtesy of NASA and JPL]

See it, there, on the left-hand side?  Clearly a guy, doing something.  At least that's the claim of Scott Waring, whose name has appeared here before, and always in connection to the aforementioned Martian stuff.  Waring is always finding things on Mars.  You have to wonder if he has a day job, or anything, or if he spends his every waking moment poring over NASA photographs looking for Martian bunnies.

"Someone who wants to remain nameless has found a shadow of a human-like being messing with the Mars Curiosity rover," Waring writes, on his blog UFO Sightings Daily.  "The person has no helmet and their short hair is visible and in high detail.  The person has on air tanks on their back and a suit that covers most of the body except the hair."

This brings up two questions:

1. A human on Mars who leaves his scalp exposed?  Mars is a little cold for that, don't you think?  At least he should be wearing a wool hat.  Someone should probably tell his mom.
2. A vague shadow constitutes "high detail?"

Waring thinks that there's only one solution to all of this, which is that there is a secret base on Mars, and this was one of the guys who lives there, making some kind of repair.  Others, though, have suggested more ominously that this is evidence that the Mars Rover isn't on Mars, but is in some kind of studio on Earth where fake Martian photographs are taken, and the camera accidentally snapped a photo of one of the studio staff who didn't move away fast enough, and the people at NASA are so unobservant that they didn't notice and accidentally put it online for Scott Waring to find.

What's interesting, of course, is that if you look at subsequent photographs, like the one below, you find that the "person" hasn't moved.  At all.

[image courtesy of NASA and JPL]

So the resident of the Mars base or the worker in the earthly film studio (whichever version you went for earlier) must have realized that he had been captured in a photograph, and so he stood there perfectly still so that more photos would be taken and he wouldn't be found out.

Or maybe, just maybe, this is the shadow of part of the Rover itself.

As I've said before, no one would be more delighted than me if we found evidence of extraterrestrial life, whether on Mars or anywhere else.  I would just think that was the coolest thing ever.  But people who are actually using scientific methods to look for such evidence -- like SETI -- are not being helped by wingnuts like Scott Waring claiming that NASA is covering up evidence that socks that have gone missing in your dryer end up on Mars.

So unfortunately, as we might have guessed from the outset, the human shadow claim turns out to be a non-starter.  As have all of the other claims, which mostly have turned out to be weird-shaped rocks.  (Except for the bunny, which was a piece of the Rover's landing parachute.)  So the science-minded amongst us will keep waiting for good evidence, and everyone else will just wait until the day after tomorrow, when Waring et al. will be claiming that the Rover has photographed a giant Martian weasel.

Comet tales

So most of you have probably been following the amazing landing of Philae, from the Rosetta comet study mission, on the comet 67-P Churyumov-Gerasimenko.  It was a triumph of technology -- hitting a four-kilometer-wide target traveling at over 100,000 km/hr from 500,000,000 kilometers away.  Unfortunately, the landing site proved problematic; Philae is apparently in shadow, and its solar cells have been unable to charge the batteries, resulting in a loss of transmission.  There's still hope that as the comet approaches its perihelion, the lander may be exposed to enough light to start functioning again; but at the moment, it's out of commission.

All of which has the conspiracy theorists in a lather.

I should have been expecting this.  They've always had a bee in their bonnet about NASA, whom they suspect of being in collusion with aliens and the Illuminati and heaven knows who (or what) else.  Never mind that Rosetta was a mission from the European Space Agency, not NASA; facts have never mattered much to these folks.

But now we have allegations that the ESA (working with evil, evil NASA) is hiding the mission's true purpose.  In an email, allegedly from an ESA whistleblower, we read:

Do not think for one moment that a space agency would suddenly decide to spend billions of dollars to build and send a spacecraft on a 12-year journey to simply take some close-up images of a randomly picked out comet floating in space.  Comet 67P is not a comet…  Some 20 years ago NASA began detecting radio bursts from an unknown origin out in space…  It would later be known that these had likely come from the direction of the now named comet 67P.

Mmm-hmm.  I've looked at the photographs that came in before the lander died, and they look pretty much like random dirty ice to me.  Which, coincidentally enough, is what comets are made of.

[image courtesy of the European Space Agency]

The whole thing reached another level of silliness when it was announced that the comet was "singing."  The scientists, who would probably be happier not to have their research characterized this way in the media, found that the comet's magnetic field was oscillating at about 40 millihertz, and  after speeding it up by a factor of 10,000, it can be turned into a sound audible to human ears.  The oscillation is still unexplained, but is thought to be an effect caused by ionized particles interacting with the solar wind.

Hoo boy.  An unexplained "song," plus a mission to a comet, plus a good imagination, and you have the makings of a great conspiracy theory.  Scott Waring, who has made Skeptophilia before for his claims that there are alien bases on the Moon and that a digital photographic glitch from a NASA photograph of the Sun proved that a huge cubical alien spaceship was harvesting the Sun's energy, has weighed in thusly:

In my opinion, this is not a code. It is how a species of aliens communicate to one another without speaking — [something like a] form of telepathy put into primitive radio signals … It's the only way this species can communicate to us.  This is their thoughts [because] they don’t talk.  Is it a message of greetings, or is it a warning of what’s to come?  We, the people of the world, need to find out.

Well, if it's a message, the aliens need to work on their language skills.  You can listen to the "song" here.  Remember: this is sped up by a factor of 10,000, so whatever this bit of the "alien communication" is, it would take ten thousand times longer to listen to if you played it at its actual speed.

And, of course, the failure of the lander's batteries has added a whole extra layer of suspicion.  No way would scientists design a multi-million-dollar probe that could so easily lose contact.  It's still transmitting, say the conspiracy theorists; but what it's sending back is so shocking that the scientists don't want us to know about it.  You know, aliens and spaceships and whatnot.

The usual stuff.

What's funny about all of this is that if there really is this great big conspiracy, covering up First Contact with an alien race, the head honchos at NASA and the ESA are being pretty sloppy about it.  First they make the mission public, with thousands of press releases and so on; they post photographs of the comet all over the place.  Then they make the unfortunate announcement of the lander's radio silence.

Why go through all of these gyrations, when they could just have launched the thing in secret in the first place, and not told us anything about it?  It's not like some amateur astronomer is going to look through his backyard telescope and see Philae sitting on the surface of the comet, or anything.

So if these people are in a conspiracy, they should resign and let someone take over who actually knows how to run one.  Because they're kind of an embarrassment.  Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones did a much better job in Men in Black, with their little memory-wipe devices.  Also, those were some cool alien languages.  I'd learn to speak those, if I could make noises like that.

Alien rock mania

In the last week or so, there's been a sudden rash of claims of discovering alien artifacts on the Moon and Mars.

To which I respond: will you people please get a grip?

It's often hard enough, here on Earth, with the actual item in your hand, to tell the difference between a human-created artifact and an object with entirely non-human origins.  Chance resemblances and oddball natural processes sometimes result in rocks (for example) with strikingly organic-looking appearance.  For example, what do you make of this?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Looks like coral, right?  Or maybe some sort of fossilized plant?  Nope, it's a fulgurite -- a rock that forms when lightning strikes sand.

So chance appearances don't tell you much.  Especially when you are looking at a grainy photograph of the object in question.  And especially when you want very much for there to be something impressive there.

For example, we had a claim a couple of days ago over at the International Business Times that the Mars rover Curiosity had photographed what appears to be a thigh bone.  "None of the National Aeronautic and Space Administration scientists have spoken about it," the article states, with some asperity, "but the news has been going viral."

Well, when you look at the photograph, you'll see why NASA really didn't want to spend their time debunking it:

[image courtesy of NASA]

It's a rock, folks.  Being a biology teacher, I know what a thigh bone looks like, and this ain't one.  It's a rock.

Oh, and to the folks over at the IBT: you do not improve your credibility by following up the story on the Martian thigh bone with the statement, "In the past, there have been claims of noticing objects on the surface of Mars like a dinosaur spine, dinosaurs, mysterious light, a toy boat, an iguana, a cat and a half-human and half-goat face."  Just to point that out.

Then, over at The UFO Chronicles, we had Skeptophilia frequent flier Scott Waring claiming that what is almost certainly a digital imaging glitch was "clearly an alien base on the Moon."    Here's the image:

According to Waring, you can see all sorts of things in this, like a wall and the entrance to an underground facility.  Me, all I see is a black blob.  Not the first time that imaging glitches have caused a furor; remember when a glitch in a NASA photograph of the Sun caused all the conspiracy-types to claim that the Earth was about to be attacked by the Borg cube?

Then just this morning, we had another report from Mars over at UFO Sightings Daily that there's an outline of a wolf on the Martian surface.  Here's that one, which made me choke-snort a mouthful of coffee:

Helpfully colored in so that you can see it.  Sad for Mr. Wolf, however -- he seems to be missing one of his hind legs.  Maybe with the lower gravity, you can get by with three.

So anyway.  I really wish people would stop leaping about making little squeaking noises every time one of the lunar or planetary explorers stumbles on something that has a vague similarity to a familiar object.  Aren't there enough cool real things out there in space to think about?  You have to invent Moon bases, thigh bones, and three-legged Martian wolves?

I'm sticking with the science.  That's always been plenty awesome enough, as far as I'm concerned.