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.
Watch Video :
From : Discovery Channel
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