Rare Martian Image Gallery 3

A couple of years ago, when the Mars Global Surveyor was circling Mars and beaming snapshots back to Earth, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke lectured remotely to an audience gathered at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Speaking from his home in Sri Lanka, Clarke informed the crowd that the images he'd downloaded from NASA's Web site showed something growing on the planet's surface. "I'm quite serious when I say I have a really good look at these new Mars images," Clarke said. "Something is actually moving and changing with the seasons that suggests, at least, vegetation."

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What caught his eye is a genuine enigma: a forest of large round blobs with branchlike structures that visibly expand and shrink over the seasons, which Clarke said looked like "banyan trees." Clarke finds further signs of life in the images taken earlier this year by the rovers Spirit and Opportunity. "I've seen the latest microphotos, and some of them look very biological to me," he wrote.

When Spirit began transmitting in January, space fans downloaded 35 terabytes of visual data from NASA's servers in less than a week. And they're not just loading up on screensavers. They're putting their image-processing software to the test, hunting for signs of life, past and present. Since the 1960s, when NASA probes sent back the first shots of Mars, amateurs have filled their files with curiosities. Their conclusions: worms, trees, UFOs, pyramids, subway stations, giant fungi, fossils, buried cities, and, of course, the famous face. According to EBTX.com, a Web site devoted to "figuring out the universe" and run by 56-year-old "E.B. from Texas," amateur investigators don't look for the sorts of general principles that attract most scientists. "We look to the anomalous features."

A healthy skepticism goes a long way, but it doesn't get us out of the Martian woods completely. It does not explain why Clarke's so-called banyan trees change with the seasons, for example. Nor does it help much with the "worms" that pop up on scores of Global Surveyor images. Some of these formations look like enormous sausages, while others appear to be glassy tunnels, some more than a mile long and around 150 feet wide, regularly marked with ribs. Plait hypothesizes that these aren't convex tubes at all but concave gulleys lined with ridges of sand. Sounds reasonable, yet the pictures themselves seem to tell a different story. But what story? The reality behind Dune? Lava poop? An uptown extraterrestrial subway line?

The difference with Martian anomalies is that hundreds of millions of people can directly point their Web browsers at the same cloud. "Because hard visual evidence is available and readily verifiable in NASA and JPL's own official science data, everyone can then make up their own mind as to its merit," writes Joseph Skipper on MarsAnomalyResearch.com, perhaps the best one-stop shop for Martian enigmas. "No one's interpretation of the visual evidence should be considered established fact."

Skipper's site includes scores of annotated images, as well as claustrophobic commentary that scrolls on endlessly. In a report titled "The Real Smoking Gun as to Life on Mars," he discusses one of his most important discoveries: Photoshop. The graphics program, which allows the 61-year-old Florida insurance investigator to sharpen detail in NASA's images, "lifted the scales from my eyes." Besides finding evidence of life, Skipper also claims that NASA is tampering with the Mars images, removing evidence of alien life.

On EnterpriseMission.com, Hoagland has posted images of angular rubble that he suggests is artificial junk left over from the cataclysm that destroyed the builders of the face. He's also keen on what he calls the Crinoid Cover-Up. On the 33rd day of its mission, the rover Opportunity moved in on a jagged outcropping and took a close-up shot of a segmented, shrimpish rock that Hoagland considers a possible fossil. To analyze the material, NASA's science team then directed the rover to grind the rock into powder with its abrasion tool. "No sooner did they take the image than they obliterated the evidence," fumes Hoagland. "It's bizarre. NASA's mission is sold as a search for life, but they do next to nothing about the evidence that's there."

The following list of facts are from several individuals who are working or who have worked or been linked with NASA in some way over the years. For obvious reasons people will not now use their real names. The list below represents some of the information from three people: one is currently working in DOD missions for NASA; another started working with NASA & DOD when JSC (Johnson Space Center) was built. The third is a scientist who has worked at NASA and other facilities(and with) Edward Teller.'

There are buildings on the Moon. There is mining equipment on the Moon.

Photos, NASA photos, do exist which clearly show both of these. Hundreds, but probably thousands, of NASA photos have been tampered with. Specifically, by careful use of an airbrush, flying saucers and other UFOs can be removed, and then the photo is released to the public and/or press.

Film taken by astronauts clearly show UFOs, IFOs, Alien Vehicles, etc. The NSA screens all photos before release to the public. Everything that NASA has launched has been closely monitored by at least one 'alien' culture.

There has been

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