“The Search for Alien Technosignatures on Mars”
“The Search for Alien Technosignatures on Mars”
Why is NASA Avoiding the Most Important Science Mission of all?
In this second part of my dive into the new Mars documentary film “Blue Planet Red” we cover the question the film raises, of possible technological artefacts and structures that may exist on the surface of Mars today, but which NASA has been completely avoiding.
Small, unusual and highly enigmatic objects have been imaged by several rovers, including Spirit and Opportunity which landed on Mars in 2004, Curiosity in 2012, and Perseverance in 2021. While NASA Mars science teams have directed their rovers to examine many mundane rocks of geological interest, not once have they ventured to approach any of these more geometric, artificial-looking ‘rocks’, betraying a remarkable and unusual lack of both human and scientific curiosity.
In the film, engineer and luxury yacht designer, Tim Saunders, took an interest in some of these unusual objects on the surface of Mars and decided to analyse one in particular that caught his professional eye. Referred to as the "Wheel Hub", he proceeded to give a detailed and plausible analysis of the object as being potentially artificial.
What might be discovered if such anomalies were routinely scrutinized and assessed, instead of being ignored?
It would take no great feat to utilize the rovers as robotic field archaeologists. They could drive right up to these objects, take close-up images from various angles to determine their true shape, flip them over, take samples to gage their composition, as well as examine them with the microscopic imager.
So why don’t they do it? Surely the possibility of discovering signs of ancient intelligent life on Mars would herald the greatest scientific discovery of all time? Or are these missions to Mars curtailed in some way, restricted as to what is only considered to be ‘scientifically plausible’? Or, is it even more obtuse, as Dr. Henry Levin, stated in “Blue Planet Red”:
“They’re not interested in life. They’re interested in geology.”
Not only have odd little geometrical objects been discovered by the rovers, but the numerous spacecraft orbiting Mars over the decades such as Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Express and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, have imaged much larger structures and formations which sometimes defy a natural, geological explanation.
The most famous of these is the “Face on Mars” located in the Cydonia region, which despite being dismissed as a natural mesa by NASA geologists, some independent scientists insist it remains a candidate for artificiality due to its inherent geometrical characteristics.
The film’s director Brian Dobbs asked Dr. John Brandenburg of Kepler Aerospace straight up:
“What is it about the Face on Mars that makes you think it’s artificial in origin?”
Brandenburg simply replied:
“It’s symmetrical.”
Dr. Mark J. Carlotto, a principal investigator and senior scientist with General Dynamics Mission Systems with thirty years of experience in remote sensing, pattern recognition, computer vision, signal/image processing, and terrain mapping, has delved into the Martian structures at Cydonia in more detail, including not only the Face, but also the enigmatic five-sided “D&M Pyramid”, so named after its discoverers Vince Di Pietro and Greg Molenaar, concluding:
“When you have ten, twenty bits of information that’s independent, the way it adds up, or actually multiplies out, is you get probabilities that are easily one in a million or less that it is a natural object. That nature would conspire in so many ways, so many different ways for multiple objects, for it to be an accident.”
The rationale for seriously considering the existence of ancient archaeology and technosignatures on Mars, specifically underground rather than on the surface, was laid out in a paper by astronomer Jason T. Wright, PhD., of Penn State University, entitled Prior Indigenous Technological Species in April 2017.
Professor Wright when interviewed in the film, cautioned that such evidence, were it to be found, could only have originated deep in the ancient Martian past:
“If Mars had developed macroscopic, multicellular life, like animals. And if those animal-like Martians had developed technology, then in principal we could find relics of that technology on Mars.
“Now that’s a very tall tower of ‘ifs’. Because when we look at Mars today we just see a desert. We see it’s lifeless. We know that it’s been that way for hundreds of millions of years. So, if there were any kind of life like that, or technology like that on Mars, it must have happened a very long time ago.”
Professor Avi Loeb, theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and best-selling author of Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth (2021) and Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars (2023), also shares his opinion in the film, that we are more likely to find relics of a previous Mars civilization deep underground. This, he states, is because the Martian surface has suffered massive cosmic bombardment over vast stretches of time:
“Mars was bombarded by asteroids, by rocks over the past two billion years at the level that is more than twenty atomic explosions per square kilometre. And that means that any building will not stay around, it would be demolished. We need to check more carefully if there is any evidence for infrastructure on Mars, or maybe underground that could have survived the impacts. Altogether I think we should be open-minded to the possibility that intelligence emerged earlier elsewhere.”
The discovery of such objects with remarkable geometrical characteristics on another planet other than our own, would, you might expect, be a significant prompt to land a probe and begin a scientific investigation of them. If such were to be found anywhere on the Earth, archaeologists would proceed with haste to begin excavating. On the Planet Mars, however, the potential existence of ancient technosignatures and structures, are summarily dismissed as being geological in origin - merely hills, mesas and mountains.
Cliff Dunning host of Earth Ancients podcast, had a more scathing indictment of NASA and JPL’s rover missions to Mars:
“They’re purposefully picking the most remote and desolate areas to land these things, these rovers. It’s hard to understand why they would not find and land a rover in Cydonia, a place we’ve known about for decades. Why don’t we put a rover down there where we know there’s some very odd things? Well, it’s going to cause a lot of questions.
“[Dr.] John Brandenburg made a very important statement when I interviewed him recently. He said that JPL doesn’t want to find evidence of a civilization because then the manned flights would get activated. They would lose all their funding. Who wants rovers when we have boots on the ground? So that’s a huge issue for JPL...a likely scenario is that if we do find civilizations there, they’re going to lose all their money!”
Well, a picture from the late 1880s in Mexico, indicates just how much history we could be missing from our solar system by not exploring Mars more imaginatively – for us to show more respect for what the universe may be trying to teach us.
Before The Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan in Mexico was uncovered and cleared in the early 1900s, it was presumed to be just an ordinary hill covered in dirt and scrub. Only after centuries of soil were removed, did the obvious signs of artificial construction appear. What mysteries lay just beneath the surface of Mars we might wonder?
We must surely ask why NASA and astronomers in general are reluctant to explore possible signs of intelligent life on Mars and elsewhere in our solar system. What is their problem? Is it due to a certain limited mindset they hold on to?
Dr. Mark Carlotto reflects:
“The current paradigm now is that intelligent life, other than our own, exists either far from the Earth, or existed in distant time – so, long ago in a galaxy, far, far away. Anything closer is regarded with some disdain as being unlikely, not scientific, being pseudoscience, or worse. And I think that’s the dilemma we’ve been in with Mars for many years.”
Biologist Dr. Henry Levin offered another possible reason for their reluctance to explore with vigour and curiosity the fascinating question of intelligent life outside our own planet:
“If life is discovered on Mars, it would indicate there’s life in many areas of the universe, and demonstrate there’s nothing so special about what we have here on Earth.”
Are scientists and sociologists afraid of shattering the belief that life on Earth is somehow unique? Are they even being rational to consider that we may be the only life in the universe, when faced with the enormous odds of literally billions of galaxies and trillions of stars in existence?
Avi Loeb:
“The human species came to Earth only over the past few million years. That’s one part in 10,000 of the age of the universe. And so there could have been a lot of history before us that we are not aware of. And as much as we want to believe that we are the pinnacle of creation, I don’t think so.
“If you come to a play and you are not the centre of stage, the play’s not about you, and you better find other actors who know what the play is about. And that is the reason that I am open minded to learning from neighbours that we might have, on the cosmic street.”
And how would our peoples react if we were to discover tomorrow that we are not the only intelligent beings in the universe, and that we were not alone?
Cliff Dunning:
“Yes they’ll be afraid. Yes, they’d be uncomfortable, for a bit. But to know that we are not alone in the universe, is, number one, a big deal. Number two, we begin to evolve when we know we’re not the only ones, because then it’s like ‘Where do we come from?’”
Some researchers believe that NASA has been constrained by recommendations stipulated at the outset of its formation in 1958, such as indicated in a report written by the prestigious Brookings Institute. Amongst other sociological issues, it raised the serious question of what should be done if artefacts were to be discovered on the Moon, Mars or Venus that had been left behind by intelligent beings, and most importantly, whether such a discovery should be presented to, or withheld, from the public.
If the U.S. government and perhaps other world governments, had decided that such discoveries should be kept secret, and this policy became institutionalized, then this could explain the obfuscation and lack of interest by NASA in the subject of extraterrestrial life close to home. In this case perhaps we would see, as we do now, just a smokescreen of interest in the subject, confining searches for E.T. to the SETI programme and radio telescopes – a harmless search for technosignatures of potential intelligent life many light years away – thus keeping the issue at arms length and as far away from public engagement as possible.
Anthropologist, Dr. Randy Pozos:
“Arthur C. Clarke said it very well. Either we’re alone or there are others around us, and either is terrifying. And I think that’s what this is all about.”
There is one other possible explanation for the reluctance of NASA and government to engage with the subject of extraterrestrial intelligence – the threat of destruction by a hostile intelligent species.
A key theme in “Blue Planet Red” is the theory of plasma physicist, Dr. John Brandenburg, in which he proposes that Mars was devastated by the detonation of a thermonuclear weapon, high in its atmosphere, some 500 million years ago.
Dr. Brandenburg:
“The explosion was massive. It was 10 to a 100 times more violent than the impact which destroyed the dinosaurs on Earth”.
Brandenburg reported his findings to the Pentagon, who told him to go ahead and publish, which he did. The interest of the U.S. military therefore in the Planet Mars might appear rational given such a potential threat – albeit one that theoretically occurred half a billion years ago. But until we know the true history of our solar system, and Mars, we will never be in a position to assess anything of significance.
It surely behoves us therefore to start exploring Mars properly.
We know all about the rocks. Now let’s discover something that will galvanize our human spirit and broaden our minds and horizons forever.
Tip to NASA: How to Search for Technosignatures of a Previous Civilization on Mars
1. Future Missions: deploy orbital, aerial and ground-based science instruments to detect evidence of hollow internal structure on the following sites:
a. ‘The Face’
b. ‘The D&M Pyramid’
c. ‘The Keyhole Structure’
d. ‘The Crater Pyramid’ (see next article...)
2. Get the Rovers to identify and investigate objects with geometric characteristics, and/or revisit objects previously identified as such.
I leave the final say to anthropologist Dr. Randy Pozos from “Blue Planet Red”:
“If we go to Cydonia, or other areas of interest on Mars, we may find nothing. On the other hand, we may find everything.”
What we dare not do, is be afraid to look.
In the next article: “Blue Planet Red and Remote Viewing Mars: Human Consciousness Perceptions of Martian History”
M. J. Craig
Author of "Secret Mars"
© 2024 M. J. Craig
