109: Martian Mysteries: What NASA doesn't want you to know
33:22 Share

Plug in a Hyundai EV and the extraordinary happens.

From the charge time and range in the Ioniq 5 and 6 to the adventurous spirit of the Kona Electric to the 601 horsepower Ioniq 5N, Hyundai EVs make the extraordinary electrifying. There's joy in every journey. EPA estimated 303 mile driving range for 2024 Ioniq 5 SE SEL Limited Rear Wheel Drive and 361 mile driving range for 2024 Ioniq 6 SE Long Range Rear Wheel Drive with fully charged battery. Actual range may vary. Visit HyundaiUSA.com or call 562-314-4603 for more details.

Hey, it's your buddy AJ from the Y-Files. And Hecklefish. Right, and Hecklefish. We just wanted to tell you that if you want to start a podcast, Spotify makes it easy. It'd have to be easy for humans to understand it. Will you stop that? I'm just saying. Spotify for Podcasters lets you record and edit podcasts from your computer. I don't have a computer. Do you have a phone? Of course I have a phone. I'm not a savage. Well, with Spotify, you can record podcasts from your phone, too.

Spotify makes it easy to distribute your podcast to every platform and you can even earn money. I do need money. What do you need money for? You kidding? I'm getting killed on guppy support payments. These 3X wives are expensive. You don't want to support your kids? What are you, my wife's lawyer now? Never mind. And I don't know if you noticed, but all Y-Files episodes are video too. And there's a ton of other features, but... But we can't be here all day. Will you settle down? I need...

you to hurry up with this stupid commercial. I got a packed calendar today. I'm sorry about him. Anyway, check out Spotify for Podcasters. It's free, no catch, and you can start today. Are we done? We're done, but you need to check your attitude. Excuse me, but I don't have all day to sit here and talk about Spotify. Look, this would go a lot faster if you would just let me get through it without...

On July 25th, 1976, a NASA scientist was studying the images of a region of Mars called Cydonia when something caught his eye. He had to take a second to process what he was seeing. He grabbed a magnifying glass. There was no doubt: on the surface of Mars, 140 million miles from Earth, was a structure in the shape of a human face.

It was huge, about a mile wide, and showed two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Around the face were pyramids and structures that didn't look natural. They looked like they were built by someone. The following day, NASA held a press conference. Of the thousands of photos sent back from Mars, all anyone asked about was the face. Who built it and why? Is it a message from an advanced civilization now long extinct?

Is it a religious artifact? Is it solid like the Great Sphinx? Or could it contain chambers like the Great Pyramid? Then NASA threw cold water on the speculation. They said there was a second photograph of the area taken shortly after. And that photo showed that the face was nothing more than an optical illusion. Small problem. That second photo doesn't exist. So why did NASA lie? Well, the answer to that question is in the other pictures.

For centuries, we've been captivated by the mysteries of the Red Planet. The ancient Egyptians saw Mars as a god. The Greeks named it after their god of war. But it wasn't until the 19th century that we began to unravel some of its secrets. In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli made detailed observations of Mars. He saw strange markings on the surface that he called canali. Oh, I love those. It's like an Italian sweet cheese taco.

That's cannoli. Delicious. Cannoli means channels in Italian, but the media thought it meant canals. And this led to speculation that the canals might have been built by an intelligent race of Martians. And as technology improved and with the space race in full swing, getting close-up photos of Mars became a priority. In 1965, the Mariner 4 probe flew past Mars and sent back 22 images. Even though the first pictures of Mars were exciting, they were also disappointing.

There were no vast cities or canals or any evidence of an ancient culture. Mars looked like the moon, harsh, barren, pockmarked by meteors, completely lifeless. But as technology continued to improve, the idea of life on Mars became less far-fetched. Yes, Mars is cold and barren now, but years ago that wasn't the case.

Mars was once covered with vast oceans of water flowing into rivers and lakes all over the planet. It had a thick atmosphere that kept the surface warm. Mars had volcanic activity and even a global magnetic field, just like Earth. It was a long time ago, but the red planet was, at one time, a blue planet.

with all the ingredients necessary to support life. In 1975, NASA sent two spacecraft to Mars, Viking 1 and Viking 2. These probes each contained an orbiter with a high-resolution camera and a lander. In the summer of 1976, Viking 1 and Viking 2 finally reached Mars.

Both orbiters took thousands of photographs of the Martian surface. NASA scientist Toby Owen was one of the first researchers assigned to look for landing sites. And when Owen found the face on image 35-A72, he was beyond excited.

NASA released the image to the press as a way to increase public interest and attract attention to Mars. This worked, but a little too well, because the face was the only thing the press wanted to talk about. It became such a big story that NASA had to release a follow-up statement about the face, saying it was just an optical illusion, and they took another photo to prove it. Isn't it peculiar what tricks of light and shadow can do?

When we took another picture a few hours later, it all went away. It was just a trick, just the way the light fell on it.

Except that second photo was never produced, and nobody thought to ask. Face or not, Cydonia was the top contender for the landing site of Viking 2. The terrain is flat, visibility was good, and there are interesting rock formations to explore. But a few days after the release of the face photo, Viking 2 landed in a barren, rocky region called Utopia Planitia. One scientist working on the mission complained...

that this was like landing in the Sahara Desert and expecting to find a garden. So why the last minute change of the landing site? Is there something going on in Cydonia that NASA doesn't want us to see? Well, the answer is yes, lots of things.

Monuments are not built in isolation. The pyramids found in Egypt or in Central or South America were not single structures. They were part of sprawling complexes of buildings, town squares, and temples. If an ancient culture living on Mars created a monument of a humanoid head, we'd expect to see other structures close by. And that's exactly what we see.

There's a cluster of pyramids near the face that people call the city square, and near those is an object nicknamed the fortress, which appears to be a collapsed pyramid. There's a formation called the DNM pyramid, named for NASA imaging scientists Vince DiPietro and Greg Molinar. DNM is a massive five-sided, one and a half mile tall structure. This is three times the size of the largest pyramid in Egypt.

But what's really interesting about the DNM pyramid is that it's symmetrical around two different axes. Now, it's easy to dismiss these findings that it's nothing more than a coincidence that all these weird looking structures and pyramids are within a few miles of the face. But then a professional satellite imaging specialist named Errol Torin started looking into it. He worked for the Defense Mapping Agency, and his job was literally to analyze satellite images and decide which objects were natural and which were artificial.

He said that all the objects, including the face, were not of natural origin. But the DNM pyramid really blew his mind. The geomorphic natural hypothesis is thus left with no mechanism that can explain the formation of the DNM pyramid. This object's five-sided shape and bilateral symmetry is unlike any landform seen to date in this solar system.

Torrin called this pyramid the Rosetta Stone of Mars. He found all kinds of mathematical relationships between objects in the area. And as more photos came back from Mars, we found more strange objects. A lot more. Over the past 50 years, thousands of images have come back from Mars. And if you look through those images, you'll find all sorts of things that look out of place. This is an extremely tall, almost perfectly rectangular monolith. Whoa.

Here's another monolith. This one stands over 10 miles high. If this were on Earth, it would extend up through the clouds. The top is so high that even the largest airliners would fly below it. This object has been nicknamed the shipwreck because it looks like the remains of a boat. Is it an ancient craft? Or maybe the foundation of a structure? In May 2022, Curiosity Rover found a doorway carved in the rock face. I wonder where it goes.

Here are giant tracks on the surface. Giant. What kind of machine could make this? Now, this object doesn't look like a natural rock formation. This one is called the Martian totem pole. You can make the argument that erosion created most of the odd features on Mars, but this one is very strange. I don't see how erosion could do this. Curiosity took this picture in 2015. It looks like something is hanging onto the cliffs. Here's a dome or the top of a sphere.

These structures were famously called glass worms by Arthur C. Clarke. Here's an object that's definitely not a rock formation. A series of still images shows an orb of light moving around the Martian landscape. Skeptics say this is a dead pixel, but dead pixels don't move around the frame. Besides, whatever this is, it's larger than just a pixel. Here's one that blows my mind.

This looks like the imprint of a valve or a gear. This was taken with the Opportunity's microscopic imager. Could this be the imprint left by the piece of an ancient machine? How could this mark be formed naturally? How about this? This was taken by the Mars Global Surveyor in the year 2000. This saucer-shaped formation or structure really stands out from the surrounding landscape.

And these are just a few of the anomalies found on Mars. There are many, many more. A few years after the release of the infamous face photo, DiPietro and Molinar decided to look for the original so they could analyze it themselves. Now, at first, they had trouble locating it. Turns out it was misfiled. Eventually, they found 35A72 labeled head in the Viking image files. And after reviewing the photo, DiPietro and Molinar felt that, despite what NASA claimed,

There was more to the face than a trick of light and shadow. So they looked for the second image, the one that NASA said proves the face is just an illusion. How did they find it? Well, it was misfiled, but they did find a second photo of the face. And this one has even more detail.

Oh.

Oh yeah, they lost those too. NASA sure does hire a lot of butterfingers. That does seem to be the case. You know, it's a good thing the moon landing was fake. Otherwise that would have been really embarrassing.

They also couldn't find the quote-unquote "disconfirming" photographs that Gerald Soffin mentioned five years earlier. But even though it was filed in the wrong place, they did find a second photo of the face on Mars. And this second image showed more detail and less shadow on the left side of the face. There appeared to be two eye sockets, a nose, and even a mouth. But the weirdest thing was that the structure had two parallel and even-length sides.

both hundreds of yards long and perfectly straight. And the top and bottom edges were both curved and had the same radius. It looked like a symmetrical framed platform for the face itself. According to geologists and imaging experts, the face's base, if that's what it is, is different than anything you'd likely see in nature. DiPietro did more analysis and found evidence of a pupil in the left eye socket. NASA scoffed at the new findings, so the two researchers sought some outside help.

And this is where science journalist Richard Hoagland stepped into the picture. He organized an independent research group and began studying the images in greater detail. Computer imaging specialist, Dr. Mark Carlotto was brought onto the team. His new image enhancement techniques

showed what looked like teeth in the mouth and an odd stripe pattern on the frame areas. Excited by what they found, Hoagland arranged for a briefing on the results with Carl Sagan at NASA. Carl Sagan? The millions and billions guy with the turtleneck sweaters? Yep, that's him. I have trillions, billions, billions, trillions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, millions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, millions,

At the meeting, Carl Sagan acted impressed, but he attacked the face on Mars theory in the newspapers. Hoagland pressed NASA for more photos, but NASA said it was unnecessary. Mystery solved. But NASA didn't realize that Richard Hoagland had a platform. A big platform.

From the high desert and the great American Southwest, how did you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in whatever time zone, wherever you are in the world. This is Coast to Coast AM and I'm Art Bell. Great to be here.

Art Bell, host of Coast to Coast AM, reached millions of people. And Richard Hoagland was on the show all the time. With access to Art Bell's audience, Hoagland was able to generate letter writing and call-in campaigns to force NASA to take new pictures of the face and pyramids at Cydonia. Now, NASA didn't agree immediately, but the pressure was starting to mount. Because in just a few more months, NASA was going back to Mars. ♪

In 1993, NASA launched the Mars Observer, the first mission to Mars since the Viking days. And liftoff, liftoff of the Titan III rocket with the Mars Observer and America's return to the Red Planet.

And NASA wasn't even going to include a camera. But an uproar from the public forced NASA to include one. There was a lot of excitement about the Mars Observer because the new camera was good enough to finally end the debate about the face and the pyramids in Cydonia. At least, that was the hope. The reality was somewhat different.

Even after the launch, NASA maintained that they had no interest in photographing the face or Cydonia. The debate went back and forth until about three days before Mars Observer was inserted into Mars orbit. - The probe insertion. - Don't be an infant. That Sunday morning, before the maneuver-- - The maneuver to insert the probe. - Stop it.

The Sunday before the observer was placed into orbit, NASA sent out the Mars Observer Lead Project Scientist, Dr. Bevan French, to debate Hoagland on Good Morning America. Now to put it gently, it did not go well for Dr. French or NASA. We now have a set of data so extraordinary that it demands in the venue of any decent science simply testing the hypothesis.

The problem is that there are some folks in NASA in charge of the next mission going back, specifically that camera I referred to, who seem less than overwhelmingly inclined to perform the simple test. They will not guarantee, strange as it may seem, that taking new pictures is on the Mars Observer agenda.

By the end of the debate, even the host was asking NASA, "Why don't you just take the pictures and prove these guys wrong?" Dr. French didn't have a good answer for that. But what happened next was even more suspicious. Less than five minutes after the debate aired, NASA made an announcement. The Mars Observer Probe had disappeared. They'd lost all contact with it. - Wait, what?

So it didn't matter who won the debate. There would be no pictures of Mars. They lost this thing too? Yep. You know, NASA might want to invest in some air tags or something to help them keep track of all this stuff. Good idea. You know, at the end of the day at NASA, I picture 400 scientists just wandering around a parking lot there, you know, looking for where they left their cars. And here's an interesting side note.

Hoagland and others claimed they were getting leaked information from NASA insiders. According to the leakers, the Mars observer was still out there and running just fine. In fact, it was taking pictures of the face and all kinds of other weird objects on Mars. But even if NASA had those pictures, they couldn't show them publicly, especially if they showed the face was an artificial construction. NASA continued to claim that the face was nothing more than a pile of rocks. But since they couldn't take a photo to prove it, they did the next best thing.

they created one. Five years after the Mars Observer fiasco, NASA launched a new probe called Mars Global Surveyor. "Three, two, one, we have ignition."

And we have liftoff, says Mars Global Surveyor, as America begins its journey back to the red planet. And even though there were newer, better cameras available, NASA insisted on using the old ones. And once again, NASA didn't want to take pictures of Cydonia or the face. But after public pressure, they finally agreed to take a few pictures. Then NASA finally made a big announcement. On April 5th, 1998, NASA finally released a highly detailed picture of the face on Mars. ♪

What the is this? What was released was a grainy, noise-filled image of the face in bad lighting, bad weather, and with multiple filters applied. That night on the Art Bell program, Hoagland and his team were upset.

Bell said that from his perspective, the image looked like something my kitty would scratch up in her cat box. And from that moment forward, it would be forever known as the cat box image. But it looked like this image was deliberately manipulated by NASA. Len Fleming, a NASA contractor, went back to the source data and tried to reproduce the cat box image. At first, he couldn't. But eventually, after applying 14 different Photoshop filters, he was able to do it. And he realized this could not be done by accident.

JPL removed most of the tonal variation in the original image that gives the observer the visual cues to the real three-dimensional shape of the object. They added false visual cues to give the object its rough, jumbled appearance, inadvertently falsifying the appearance of the surrounding terrain as well.

the tap box is not a poor enhancement as it is often called it is a crude but very effective fraud perpetrated by employees or contractors to the united states government even if the face is proven to be completely natural this is inexcusable misconduct and a gross abuse of power if the face ultimately is proven to be artificial the

The cat box will certainly come to be regarded as the greatest, most malicious and most destructive scientific hoax of all time. Ever since the first color images came back from Mars, they've always been suspicious.

The colors were dominated by this weird orange haze. NASA said this is because of all the carbon dioxide and red dust in the atmosphere. Well, a carbon dioxide atmosphere would still be blue. Not a deep blue like on Earth, but a grayish blue. But the image is from Mars, so the sky is this weird reddish green color. So what's going on?

These photos make the surface of Mars look like a weird alien world, but it's not an accurate representation of color. Nothing is so uniformly one color like this. For some reason, before releasing images of Mars, they ran the images through an orange filter.

Now, in the 1990s, nobody would really question this. But modern digital photography software like Photoshop can tell if a single color is applied to an image uniformly. This is a simple calculation for software. It's how white balancing is achieved in photography and video. It's such an easy calculation that current versions of Photoshop give you a one-click way to solve for false color. The function is called, well, auto-color.

So look at this early, very blurry image of Mars. That looks like Mars. Well, the version of Mars that's been fed to us for years. But remember, Photoshop can correct for false color. If we auto-color this... Right. Now that's a very different image. Let's do a few more. Whoa!

NASA eventually learned that their orange filter technique was easily spotted. So recent pictures of Mars no longer have the weird orange tint. Now even NASA's pictures show a blue-gray sky and a lot of different colors in the landscape. But why would NASA not want us to know that Mars has blue skies? Some say it's to discourage people from wanting to visit Mars. The more alien it looks, the better. So Mars had oceans and a thick atmosphere.

and could have supported life. If intelligent life did evolve on Mars, and the face and other artifacts are not piles of rocks, but are actually ruins of a long-lost society, we have to ask,

What happened to that ancient civilization? Well, the answer to that question could be the reason that the governments of the world have lied to us about Mars for so many years. Because there is evidence, scientific evidence, that millions of years ago, the planet Mars was devastated by a massive global nuclear war.

Curiosity Rover arrived on Mars in August 2012 and started analyzing samples from the surface. NASA scientists were expecting to find soil containing heavily oxidized iron, which they did.

But what nobody expected to find was evidence of a massive nuclear war. Chemical analysis revealed that the top layer of Martian soil contains a large amount of Xenon-129. There's only one known process that creates this particular isotope of xenon: the detonation of nuclear weapons.

Now, over the course of 70 years, over 1,000 nuclear tests have been conducted on Earth. And every time a nuclear bomb is detonated, the explosion leaves behind small traces of Xenon 129. The amount of Xenon 129 in Martian soil is two and a half times higher than Earth. Dr. John Brandenburg is a former NASA physicist and a well-known Mars researcher.

He was a scientist who accompanied Richard Hoagland to NASA to present their findings about the face in Cydonia. Dr. Brandenburg believes that a humanoid civilization lived on Mars and died on Mars. I have shown this to several nuclear weapons experts and they have affirmed that this is nuclear weapons signature. There is no other process that can create such a xenon spectrum.

For so much xenon to be deposited on the surface, the nuclear weapon would have to be the size of the Empire State Building, with an energy equivalent to 1,000 megatons. For comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 20 kilotons. So we're talking an explosion 50,000 times more powerful. And Dr. Brandenburg found two hotspots on Mars where radiation levels are higher than anywhere else.

And right in between those hotspots is Cydonia, the location of the face, the pyramid, and the other structures. Dating the isotopes places the explosions somewhere between 150 and 300 million years ago. Mars was at one time a blue planet like Earth, covered in oceans and a thick atmosphere. But nobody knows for sure how Mars lost its atmosphere. A nuclear explosion of this size would answer that question. Now, this is a frightening theory, but it gets even more disturbing.

If an intelligent race created the face and other structures on Mars, they wouldn't have been that technologically advanced. They were maybe an Iron Age civilization. Those people would not have the technology to create such a devastating nuclear weapon. This means the weapons were detonated by...

Someone else. Don't say aliens. Don't say aliens. Aliens. Oh, no. At the time of this event on Mars, the most advanced creatures on Earth were reptiles. Dinosaurs hadn't even evolved yet. Maybe whoever destroyed Mars ignored us. Reptiles wouldn't pose much of a threat to them. But what if they return?

Another theory is that intelligent life on Mars did reach an advanced level of technology, advanced enough to destroy themselves in a nuclear apocalypse. But before that catastrophic event, a small group of these humanoids escaped off world. So who were those Martians that managed to escape annihilation? Well, they're us.

For a show like this, the exploration of Mars is a gift that started giving in the 1960s and just keeps on giving. We've got ancient civilizations, government cover-ups, alien invasions, a nuclear apocalypse, and more conspiracies than I can count. But how much of all this is true?

Well, I can't really debunk most of this episode because, well, Mars is another planet. It's not like we can go see for ourselves, at least not yet. The flow of information comes from a single source, the United States government. Well, assume everything they say is a lie. Well, that's a pessimistic point of view. What can I tell you? I've been hurt before.

But let me give you some perspective. First, every single object on Mars that looks artificial could be attributed to pareidolia. That's a word you'll hear a lot from NASA. Pareidolia is the human tendency to find meaning in random stimuli, like the imperfections of a piece of wood that look like a polar bear, or a stadium that looks like a UFO. Or a cloud shaped like a crab kit. Right. Seeing animals is common, but the most common thing we see? Faces. Faces? Faces. What'd I say?

In fact, if you look at the wiki page for pareidolia, the picture of the face on Mars is the main example. What do you mean? Wikipedia isn't biased.

But is the face on Mars an optical illusion? Or is there something there? Well, plenty of scientists, NASA scientists, thought there was something there, though we don't hear much from them anymore. Most scientists think it's just an illusion. When NASA released their detailed picture of the face, which showed it as a pile of rocks, they thought they put the conspiracy to bed.

The problem is NASA does alter images. In fact, they alter every image they release to the public. And now Chris Martinez is introducing us to two of the artists behind some of the most iconic space art in the galaxy.

NASA says this is to make the images easier to understand or to make them more visually appealing. Even NASA uses filters on their Insta. They do. Now, I don't like that NASA has artists on staff to Photoshop images, but I understand that some photos have to be adjusted to make them more digestible to the public.

But there are some really weird NASA photoshops. Here's the famous photo of the Earth taken from Apollo 17. And here's a 3D model of the Earth released by Google and the US Navy. The model is supposed to be mathematically perfect. But the land masses don't line up. Like, not even close. Here are examples of NASA copy-pasting clouds on a picture of the Earth. The copy-paste technique has been used on Mars images too. These are from the Curiosity rover.

Now, maybe there are good reasons for faking these images, though I can't think of any. But if you fake one image, we can't trust any of them. So when you see this picture of Mars, people say this looks exactly like Devon Island, the uninhabited island in Canada where NASA trains crew members and tests its rovers.

NASA Public Relations, this is Jerry. Hey, Jerry, I wanted to talk to you about this picture from Curiosity. This looks like Devon Island, but with an orange filter on. No, no, that's Mars. Yeah, but it's the red planet. Yeah, no, I know it's called the red planet, but I'm pretty sure this picture of Devon Island got slipped in accidentally. No, no, no, that's not Devon Island. That's Mars. OK, then why is this animal hiding behind the rocks?

That's not an animal. That's just a rock. Okay, but that sure does look like an Arctic lemming. What the hell is an Arctic lemming? Well, an Arctic lemming is a type of small rodent that hides in the rocks all over Devon Island. Hello? All right, you know what? F*** you and your stupid YouTube channel. You can take your Arctic lemming and shove it straight up your a**.

So how much you trust NASA is up to you, but I wouldn't trust them 100%. But some people go to the extreme with the Mars images. Now below this eagle is a whole city of bird and deer formations in the Sedona area. There's a parrot looking. There's the parrot again. Now if you're looking at this area directly below the crater that has the eagle in it. They see parrots and dolphins and all sorts of things in the pictures.

Now, I don't see these things unless they're specifically pointed out to me. I think most of those images are a stretch, but I don't need anyone to hold my hand with a picture of the face. That one I can clearly see. As for Richard Hoagland, you've heard me talk about him a lot, especially on the After Files livestream.

He was always one of my favorite guests on Art Bell. Very well-spoken guy, very entertaining. But he has plenty of detractors. He's been a favorite target of sites like Bad Astronomy and Skeptical Inquirer. He's been accused of exaggerating his credentials and his experience. But let me come to Richard's defense a little bit. All scientists do that.

Richard Hoagland might be wrong about some things, and I think he's probably wrong about most things, but he's provided a valuable service, and it's something I don't think he gets enough credit for. He got millions of regular folks interested in the space program, and because of that, he was able to sway NASA into taking pictures of Mars that we might not have ever seen. And he's shown us that we have to keep an eye on NASA. We need people like Richard Hoagland out there. We need watchdogs.

specifically watchdogs with access and with the ability to influence policy. Now, as for Dr. John Brandenburg and his nuclear war on Mars theory, Dr. Brandenburg is well-respected and well-credentialed. His earliest papers on the Mars theory was that a nuclear event happened naturally on the planet. There's a uranium mine in Gabon, Africa, which shows evidence of nuclear fission occurring naturally.

So it's not a stretch to think this could happen on Mars. But after a while, Dr. Brandenburg claimed that what happened on Mars did not happen naturally, that the only way we see isotopes of Xenon 129 is from the discharge of a nuclear weapon. Now, I've read both sides of this argument, and I'm not sure who's right. But Dr. Brandenburg's Mars nuclear war theory was rejected for peer review. But that's mainstream scientists, though. They're not always correct.

but they always have an agenda. Right or wrong, it's an interesting theory that deserves attention and study, not ridicule. But you can't talk about Mars without being ridiculed. Yes, most everything we see in photographs from Mars can be explained, but there are a couple of things that can't.

We've sent mission after mission to Mars, and I can't for the life of me understand why we haven't sent a rover through Cydonia and right up to the object that's supposed to be a face. NASA says there's nothing there, so it would be a waste of resources. But with all due respect to NASA, their resources come from we the people. And we the people want to know what the face on Mars really is. Now, until we have close-up photographs of Cydonia, close-up photographs that we can trust are undoctored,

The story about the face on Mars is not going away. And not as long as it generates clicks, eh? True. And look, I completely agree that the chances of the face being an artificial structure are almost zero. But almost zero isn't zero. If there's even the slightest chance that the face and the pyramids were created by a civilization on Mars, we deserve to know. But more importantly, the people who built those monuments, they deserve to be remembered.

Thank you so much for hanging out with us today. My name is AJ. You know, hecklefish. This has been the Y files. If you had fun or learned anything, do us a favor, like comment, subscribe, share that stuff really helps the channel. And like most topics we cover here today's was recommended by you. So if there's a story you'd like to see or learn more about, go to the Y files.com slash tips and special thanks to our patrons who make this channel possible. You guys are the engine that keeps this thing going.

And if you'd like to support the channel, consider becoming a member on Patreon or grab something from the Wafile store. Limited edition Face Unmask t-shirts are available. Are they really limited edition? Hey, I mean, I'm just talent. They give me a script, I read it, I cash my check. Fair enough. That's going to do it. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

you