Imitation claims levelled at 'pretenders' in orbit of Mars

Erecting a three-metre-high monolith on a soundstage in London is one thing, copying the exercise in a sandstone canyon in the Utah desert is another but when a giant plinth shows up on a Martian moon it’s hardly surprising that people start scratching their heads.

Ever since the release of movie-icon Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, monoliths have become synonymous with the presence of extraterrestrial intelligence so when one appeared in Mars Global Surveyor images of Phobos it certainly got tongues wagging.

Adding to the mystery was another feature captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on the surface of the red planet itself. According to scientists at the University of Arizona, this object is projected out of the Martian surface and appears to be perfectly rectangular.

But Yisrael Spinoza, a spokesman for the HiRISE department of the university’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, warned in 2009 that: “It would be unwise to refer to it as a ‘monolith’ or ‘structure’ because that implies something artificial like it was put there by someone for example. In reality it’s more likely that this boulder has been created by breaking away from the bedrock to create a rectangular-shaped feature.” However, nothing in the vicinity of the monolith has a similar shape or size, so it remains something of an anomaly.

And the debate surrounding it heated up after Buzz Aldrin, the second man to land on our moon, weighed in. “We should visit the moon of Mars, there’s a monolith there, a very unusual structure on this little potato-shaped object that revolves around Mars once every seven hours. When people find out about that they are going to say: ‘Who put that there? Who put that there?’ Well, the universe put it there, or if you choose, God put it there.”

With a radius of about 11 kilometres, Phobos is one of two moons orbiting Mars, the other being it’s smaller companion Deimos. The anomaly on Phobos, described as a “building-sized” boulder, is a bright object that casts a prominent shadow near the Stickney Crater. It was discovered by researcher Efrain Palermo, who did extensive surveys of the Mars Global Surveyor images, and was later confirmed by the NASA Johnson Space Center which suggested it was just one of many physical anomalies found throughout the solar system.

Aldrin’s participation in the Phobos monolith mystery encouraged UFO enthusiast Scott Waring to look into it and in 2020 he witnessed the object on a European Space Agency (ESA) image of Phobos.

“Last night, I decided to take a look at the ESA site and the first photo I came across was in HD… and was of the Mars moon Phobos,” Waring wrote on his blog, adding that the image had been uploaded in December 2016.

He added that as only 25 per cent of the moon was visible because of a shadow over the rest of it he decided to add light to the HD photo to explore it in greater detail “and low and behold I made a huge discovery… the Buzz Aldrin monolith”.

“It’s much bigger than any of us thought,” he continued. “We all assumed that the monolith was this tall rectangular structure that was found about five years ago, but it wasn’t. That was nothing. This new structure is very big and must have been smudged out using Photoshop on most other Phobos photos in existence. The ESA editors must have missed this one because it’s 100 per cent evidence that aliens have constructed it and used the Mars moon as a space station.”

While not focusing on the possibility of any extraterrestrial implications, NASA has been seriously considering sending an unmanned probe to the tiny moon for some time, citing the scientific benefits it would offer ahead of any future manned mission to Mars. And, if going ahead with it, it would seem to make sense to have it survey the area around the Stickney Crater and the strange structure many observers believe provides conclusive proof of an alien presence on Phobos and the red planet... now or sometime in the past.

Indeed, whether Phobos is a naturally occurring celestial body at all has been the source of much speculation for more than 50 years. Even former United States President Dwight D Eisenhower’s advisor on space developments, Siegfried Singer, questioned whether it could be an artificial satellite orbiting the red planet.

In a 1960 Astronautics newsletter commenting on this hypothesis put forward by Soviet astrophysicist Iosif Shklovsky, whose theory that it could be hollow implied it was of artificial origin, Singer wrote: “I back Shklovsky, that if the satellite is indeed spiralling inward as deduced from astronomical observation, then there is little alternative to the hypothesis that it is hollow and therefore Martian made.”

In fact renowned US astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan also agreed with Shklovsky’s interpretation, co-authoring a book, Intelligent Life In The Universe, with him in 1966.

And even naturalised American science-fiction author Isaac Asimov, a fan of the collaboration who was born in Petrovichi, Russia, got in on the act penning a tale – All Aboard For Phobos – which appeared in his 1989 release, The Tyrannosaurus Prescription and 100 Other Essays, in which Phobos was a derelict generation starship that had been accidentally captured by Mars’ gravity.

It was released a year after the Soviets had launched two unmanned probes towards Mars, Phobos I and Phobos II. Their primary purpose was to investigate the mysterious moon but unfortunately both were lost as they approached it.

Phobos I operated normally until a planned signal on 2 September failed, with controllers unable to regain contact with it due to a software error and the craft was lost completely.

Phobos II was somewhat more successful, returning 37 images of the moon before it was also lost in very bizarre circumstances. It arrived safely in January 1989 and entered into an orbit around Mars as the first step in its mission towards Phobos, when it was to change trajectory to fly almost in tandem with the moon before dropping two instrument packages onto the surface.

All went well until the probe aligned itself with Phobos but on 28 March the Soviet mission control encountered communication “problems” with it. Tass, the official Soviet news agency, reported: “Phobos II failed to communicate with Earth as scheduled after completing an operation yesterday around the Martian moon Phobos. Scientists at mission control have been unable to establish stable radio contact.”

However according to Boris Bolitsky, a science correspondent for Radio Moscow, just before radio contact was lost with Phobos II “quite remarkable” images were radioed back to Earth. The final image transmitted was believed to have shown a gigantic cigar-shaped spaceship – about 20 km long and 1.5 km in diameter – on the Martian surface or orbiting just above it.

At the time London Science Museum spokesman John Becklake described it as “something that is between the spacecraft and Mars, because we can see the Martian surface below it”.

A report published in the New Scientist on 8 April that year noted: “The features are either on the Martian surface or in the lower atmosphere. The features are between 20 and 25 kilometres wide and do not resemble any known geological formation.”

After that last frame had been radio-transmitted back to Earth the probe mysteriously disappeared; with a strong possibility being that it was knocked out by an energy pulse.

So what was it that knocked Phobos II out of commission? In October 1989 Soviet scientists published a series of technical reports on the experiments Phobos II did manage to conduct, which confirmed the probe was spinning out of control due to a computer malfunction or as a result of an impact with an unknown object shortly before contact was lost.

It’s interesting to note at this point that according to Russian-American author Zecharia Sitchin the last vestiges of the Anunnaki – extraterrestrial inhabitants of the Earth for eons before a devastating nuclear war between rival factions – fled the planet following the fall of Babylon in about 539 BC, first for Mars and then for their home planet Nibiru... a distant wanderer in the solar system alleged to orbit the sun every 3,600 years.

Now if there’s any substance to Sitchin’s theory, it would be logical to expect the red planet to exhibit remnants of the Anunnaki’s presence there, which many theorists suggest it does, the monoliths on Phobos and the Martian surface just some of countless anomalies allegedly revealed by the probes sent there from Earth since Mariner 4 in November 1964.

One of the earliest Martian rock formations to capture interest from observers was the infamous “face” spotted by NASA’s Viking 1 satellite in 1976 but images sent back by Mariner 9 revealed something even more puzzling, Angustus Labyrinthus near the planet’s south pole, nicknamed the “Inca City” due to its superficial resemblance to ruins of the pre-Columbian empire along the spine of the Andes.

At the moment Mars is attracting huge attention because of an intruder named 3I/Atlas, the third interstellar comet to enter our solar system in the last eight years, identified in July by the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy.

Uncharacteristic of normal comet behaviour, 3I/Atlas has also generated speculation that it too could be an artificial probe sent by some extraterrestrial intelligence to study our solar system due to its anomalous nature and remarkable trajectory that takes it extremely close in astrological terms to Mars (yesterday, 3 October), the sun (end of this month), Venus (early November), Earth (middle of December) and then Jupiter (March) next year.

Even its timing has shocked observers with its proximity to the sun obscuring it from Earth-based telescopes as it passes Mars and Venus until the start of December shortly before it closes in on our world just before Christmas.