Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this. Imagine you're looking at a satellite image, right,
but it's not Earth. It's an alien moon, Mars's tiny
sort of potato shaped satellite, Phobos.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Phobos. It's small, heavily cratered, really should be totally
unremarkable geologically, just a captured asteroid.
Speaker 1: Most exactly, except rising three hundred feet into the well
the alien sky, casting this long, unmistakable shadow. There's this
massive structure that's almost as tall as London's Big Ben
just sitting there in this little chunk of rock where
I mean, frankly, nothing that large and solitary should exist.
Speaker 2: And that's the hook, isn't it That immediate sense of wait,
what is that? It forces you to confront the scale
of things out there totally.
Speaker 1: Is it some kind of geological freak accident, or is
it well, something far stranger?
Speaker 2: That feeling, that breathtaking disorientation is precisely why these celestial
anomalies grab our attention so powerfully. It makes us question
if our Earth based ideas about geology, or engineering or
even life life are just too narrow for the rest
of the universe.
Speaker 1: Couldn't agree more, And that's really our mission. Today, We've
got this really remarkable stack of sources detailing various celestial
mysteries that cameras have caught. We're talking the moons of Mars,
lunar orbit, the Martian surface.
Speaker 2: Itself, whole range of settings, right, and we're.
Speaker 1: Going to dive deep into the most let's say, dramatic speculations, modoliths,
alleged Martian animals, even alien fleets, you name.
Speaker 2: It, really out there stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but then we'll also get into the meticulous, grounded
scientific explanations from the experts. We're exploring that tension, you know,
the joy of asking what if? Versus the satisfaction of
understanding how why does the universe keep playing tricks on
our eyes?
Speaker 2: Well, the underlying theme here, I think is pattern recognition.
Our brains are just wired for it. We've evolved to
spot patterns, intelligence, familiar shapes, faces threats instantly. It's a
survival thing, makes sense. So when you're faced with thou
dozens of ambiguous pixels beamed back from some dusty world
millions of miles away, our instinct is to try and
impose order, maybe even intelligence, onto that visual noise.
Speaker 1: Right, find the signal and the noise exactly.
Speaker 2: And our job today is to understand that impulse, but
then apply critical analysis to the actual data, whether it's
from the Mars Global Surveyor or the Perseverance Rover or
even an amateur astronomer's gear. Does that first impression hold
up under scrutiny?
Speaker 1: Okay, so we're covering three big mysteries today. Each one
is really captured. The public imagination launched a thousand theories online,
probably more. Oh easily, let's start with the one that sounds,
i mean, straight out of science fiction movie, the one
that demands an explanation just based on its sheer scale,
The Phobos monolith.
Speaker 2: Ah, yes, the monolith. Let's definitely unpack that enormous structure
on a very very small moon.
Speaker 1: So the story kicks off back on September twelfth, nineteen
ninety eight, the Mars Global Surveyor MGS. It was two
years into its mission Mars in.
Speaker 2: Its moons, a really crucial mission for understanding Mars systemically.
Speaker 1: Totally, and its high res camera capture this image above Phobos,
the inner moon. But here's the kicker. It wasn't NASA,
not initially who spotted it. It was an amateur astronomer
if rand Poalmero.
Speaker 2: That happens quite often, actually, citizen scientists meticulously combing through
public data archives. It's fantastic he.
Speaker 1: Noticed this really curious shape just scrolling through images on
NASA's website. Amazing dedication.
Speaker 2: And what stands out about this one, this particular anomaly
is just how obvious it is relatively speaking, It wasn't subtle.
We're talking a huge protrusion.
Speaker 1: Near the equator, and that shadow, right, the shadow it
casts makes it undeniable. This thing is tall, exceptionally tall
for Phobos exactly.
Speaker 2: It really defies expectations for such a small body.
Speaker 1: And exceptionally tall means three hundred feet sources mentioned author
Jason Martell describing it as like cylindrical with a slanted top.
Speaker 2: Which is a very specific shape, not just a random lump.
Speaker 1: And here's the Geli logical paradox. Yeah, Phobos is tiny,
maybe fourteen miles across, basically a pile of rubble held
together by gravity. Planetary experts are pretty clear there's no
geologic reason for something that big and well shape like that.
It's sticking out so prominently right.
Speaker 2: Phobos is thought to be a captured asteroid or maybe
debris from an early Mars impact that kind of reclumped.
It's heavily cratered, no internal geology to speak of, almost
no gravity.
Speaker 1: Not exactly the place for towering rockspires decisely.
Speaker 2: That environment just doesn't support things like massive volcanic cones
or erosion resistant spires of that height. So when the
usual geological explanations fall short.
Speaker 1: The mind goes elsewhere. Intelligent design.
Speaker 2: It's the natural pivot, isn't it.
Speaker 1: And that's exactly where the speculation went, straight to the
idea of a monolith, something deliberately placed, And because it's
so big, some people didn't just think monument. I thought
maybe it's functional, a futuristic dwelling.
Speaker 2: Which is fascinating because this is where we start seeing
these parallels drawn, maybe coincidental, but interesting parallels to earthly designs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the sources mentioned this design called Marsia here on Earth.
It's this concept for a three D printed dual shell
sort of egg shaped vertical home designed specifically for living
on Mars, a proof.
Speaker 2: Of concept for sustainable Martian living, and it.
Speaker 1: Looks uncannily similar. The Marshal design is tall and lean,
right to handle. The pressure difference minimize radiation exposure. It's functional.
Speaker 2: So the theory goes, if some advanced civilization was building
on a low gravity, harsh place like Phobos, they might
naturally arrive at a similar shape for efficiency, vertical climate resistant.
Speaker 1: It speaks to it like universal engineering principles. Maybe yeah,
survival dictates shape.
Speaker 2: It does offer a compelling narrative hook connecting our own
future plans with this mystery from the past, even if
it's just parallel thinking and structural design.
Speaker 1: Okay, but maybe it's not a house. What about communication?
It's shape led some to think and.
Speaker 2: Yeah, someone saw a resemblance to those old plastic antennas
on like Nokia phones from back in the day.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I remember those.
Speaker 2: So the hypothesis became, maybe this three hundred foot thing
is an antenna or some kind of Calm's device attached
to what though, Well, that's the leap. If it's an antenna,
maybe it's not just on a random rock. Maybe it's
attached to Phobos itself.
Speaker 1: Whoa, Okay, so that links directly to that other really
persistent theory, the hollow moon idea.
Speaker 2: Exactly the decades old theory championed by the Soviet scientist
Josef Schklovsky back in the sixties. He looked at the
data they had then and concluded Phobos was likely hollow inside,
maybe even with a thin metal shell.
Speaker 1: How did he even get to that conclusion.
Speaker 2: It was all based on physics, on orbital mechanics from
the data available at the time. Original tracking suggested Phobos
was doing something weird. Atmospheric drag from Mars seemed to
be making its orbit decay, sinking it by almost two
inches a year.
Speaker 1: Two inches. That doesn't sound like much before a moon.
Speaker 2: It's significant, especially given Mars's incredibly thin atmosphere. Skolovsky reason
that for a natural moon of that size to be
affected so much, it couldn't be solid rock. It had
to have a remarkably low density, so low.
Speaker 1: It implied empty space inside.
Speaker 2: So low it behaved almost like an artificial satellite, like
a hollow sphere decaying in orbit. That was his conclusion.
Speaker 1: Man, you can see why that idea took off. The
hollow moon. Yeah, an artificial satellite, maybe with a giant
antent on it irresistible. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. It fueled so much speculation. Even buzz Aldron mentioned it,
saying he thought the monolith would generate public curiosity once
people knew about it. Hashtag tac tac tax C expert
analysis and geological verdict.
Speaker 1: Okay, but powerful theories need powerful evidence or powerful debunking. Yeah,
let's bring in the modern science. What about the communication
device idea? First?
Speaker 2: Right, astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy raised a really fundamental point here,
based on physics, not aliens.
Speaker 1: It's the shape, the slanted top, the irregularity.
Speaker 2: Precisely. Modern comms, especially omni directional stuff, relies heavily on symmetry.
Think satellite dishes, antenna arrays. They're engineered for minimal distortion.
That's a regular shape. It would make reliable communication pretty
difficult based on how we understand radio waves.
Speaker 1: Okay, so probably not a finely tuned antenna. What about
the hollow moon? Shlosky's idea was based on old.
Speaker 2: Data, right, decades old data, and McCarthy provides that crucial context.
Shloski was working with the best information he had then.
Planetary science has moved on massively since the sixties.
Speaker 1: We know more about small bodies now, a lot.
Speaker 2: More, especially about their internal structure and porosity. Today, the
consensus is pretty strong Phobos and its twin demos. They're
solid but incredibly porous, like rubble piles.
Speaker 1: Basically, okay, wait, solid but porous. How does that explain
the orbital drag Schaglovsky saw? Wouldn't porous rocks still be heavy?
Speaker 2: Ah? That's the key insight. The low density isn't because
it's hollow like an eggshell. It's because a huge chunk
of its internal volume is empty space, tiny voids, fissures
between the rubble pieces.
Speaker 1: So it's like a bag full of rocks versus one
solid boulder, less dense overall.
Speaker 2: Exactly, this porous rubbly structure is less dense than solid
rock or metal, and that lower overall density does account
for the orbital decay they observed without needing a manufactured
hollow shell. The modern models fit the data, So.
Speaker 1: The Hollomon theory, as romantic as it is, it's pretty
much off the table, now largely.
Speaker 2: Negated by contemporary data and modeling. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Okay, so if it's not a building, not an antenna,
and the moon is in hollow, we're left with a
big rock. But experts confirm it's made of local rock material,
So why is it standing three hundred feet tall. Why
hasn't it eroded? Doesn't it sheer existence suggest something unusual happened.
Speaker 2: That's the critical point. It is unusual that lack of erosion,
its isolated height. That's why the final most likely verdict
is actually pretty dramatic in itself. The Phobos monolith is
most likely impact.
Speaker 1: Ejecta impact ejecta like a piece got blast out from
a crater somewhere else.
Speaker 2: Exactly picture a big impact on Phobos. Stuff gets thrown everywhere.
On Earth, big chunks usually come crashing back down hard,
but on Phobos, with its tiny gravity.
Speaker 1: Things could fly further slower, right.
Speaker 2: Large pieces can get launched on weird ballistic paths at
relatively low speeds. It's possible this massive three hundred foot
chunk got ejected, flew across the Moon and then landed awkwardly,
maybe sticking upright, partially buried, so it's like.
Speaker 1: A cosmic accident scene. A piece of debris just happened
to land pointing.
Speaker 2: Up essentially, Yes, a violently relocated piece that settled in
an unstable prominent position. Or another possibility, maybe it wasn't
even from Phobos. It could be a fragment of a
meteorite that was heading towards the Sun and just happened
to intersect Phobos' path, embedding itself there.
Speaker 1: Wow. So instead of a monument to intelligence, it's a
monument to kinetic energy, a cosmic collisions leftover shard.
Speaker 2: That seems to be the most plausible scientific explanation, fitting
all the evidence, geological freak of physics and chance.
Speaker 1: I just to add a final note on Phobos. It's
doomed anyway, isn't it.
Speaker 2: Yeah? It's spiraling, in word, getting closer to Mars by
about six feet every century. In maybe fifty million years
or so, it'll hit the Roch limit where Mars is.
Speaker 1: Gravity just tears it apart.
Speaker 2: Hikes it apart, could form a temporary ring system, then
eventually rain down on to Mars. So, whatever the monolith is,
it's days are numbered, cosmically speaking.
Speaker 1: So the grand structure turns out to be a trick
of cosmic chants. Fascinating. Okay, So if massive geology can
fool us, what about smaller stuff? What happens when simple
weathering tricks our eyes into seeing something, well, something alive
or at least recently alive.
Speaker 2: Right, we're shifting scales now from three hundred foot potential
structures to things that look distinctly biological and much smaller.
Speaker 1: We're moving from planetary physics to pixel analysis and maybe
a bit of conspiracy.
Speaker 2: It definitely involves a blend of geology, biology or apparent biology,
and some very specific location based theory.
Speaker 1: So fast forward to February twenty twenty one. NASA's Perseverance
Were over Land successfully amazing mission adds to the mountain
of images we already have from curiosity, Spirit.
Speaker 2: Opportunity, decades of high resolution imagery of the Martian surface.
Speaker 1: It's undeniably desolate, right, yeah, rocks, dust, craters, But some
observers pouring over these thousands of pictures started noticing rocks
that didn't quite look like rocks. They look like evidence
of life.
Speaker 2: And the anomalies here are incredibly evocative because they resemble
things we know very well from Earth. That pattern recognition
kicks in hard.
Speaker 1: What kind of things are we talking about? Well?
Speaker 2: The sources mention a few key examples. An object that
looks strikingly like a walrus femur.
Speaker 1: Bone walrus bone on Mars.
Speaker 2: Another one that seemed to resemble the remains of a whale, vertebra.
Speaker 1: Okay, marine mammals, it's getting weird.
Speaker 2: But perhaps the most compelling, or maybe the most problematic
one scientifically, was an object that, when you zoomed in,
looked uncannily like a live rodent, specifically a lemming.
Speaker 1: A lemming like the little furry Arctic creature, complete with eyes, nose,
stubby legs.
Speaker 2: That's what some observers claim to see. Yeah, resting right
there next to the rover tracks and some images.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay for people who look for these things, the
anomaly hunters, this must have been huge.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Figures like writer and producer Billy Carson point out
that finding things that appear to be out of place
is common in Mars images. Mars is a prime target
for exactly this kind of search for unconventional evidence.
Speaker 1: The argument being these shapes are too specific to biological
looking to be just random rocks.
Speaker 2: That's the core argument, Yes, suggesting a biological origin rather
than a geological one.
Speaker 1: Now, this apparent abundance of earthlike fauna, bones, mammals led
to this really wild counter theory. It tries to answer
the obvious question, how did a lemming get to Mars?
Speaker 2: And the answer proposed is it didn't. The theory suggests
the pictures aren't from Mars at all.
Speaker 1: Where are they from.
Speaker 2: Then, Devon Island up in Northern Canada.
Speaker 1: Devon Island, I've heard of that place in relationship the
Mars simulation exactly.
Speaker 2: And the specific Mars truther claim is quite clever because
it links the photographic evidence directly to a known terrestrial location.
Since nineteen ninety six, Devon Island has been used for
space exploration research, right because.
Speaker 1: It's so Mars like, cold, rocky, desolate, perfect for testing.
Speaker 2: Rovers, perfect simulation ground. So the conspiracy claim goes like this,
NASA never actually had the tech to land rovers successfully
on Mars. It was too hard, too expensive, whatever.
Speaker 1: So what the rovers are just sitting in a garage.
Speaker 2: Somewhere essentially, Yeah, stored in a hangar according to this theory,
and all the images we see fakes, decades of fakes,
staged and photographed right there on Devon Island.
Speaker 1: WHOA, that's elaborate. Yeah, But how do the animals fit in?
Speaker 2: That's the supposed smoking gun. The key fauna spotted in
the Mars images, the lemming, the walrus, femur, the whale, vertebrae,
guess what. They're all native to the Devon Island ecosystem.
Oh way, seriously, yes, lemmings live there, Walruses frequent the coasts,
their bones wash ashore whale remains too. So the argument
is these aren't signs of Martian life. There's signs of
Canadian life accidentally caught in the background of NASA's faked photos,
proving the hoax.
Speaker 1: Okay, that connects the dots in a very specific way.
It sounds like a movie plot.
Speaker 2: It's a remarkable claim. You have to assume massive decades
long collusion involving potentially thousands of people across multiple space agencies,
with not a single whistleblower leaking the secret that they're
just driving rovers around Canada.
Speaker 1: It's definitely an entertaining theory. But okay, let's get back
to verifiable reality. We need solid evidence these rovers are
on Mars. How do we counter the Devon Island idea?
Speaker 2: Thankfully, modern space exploration provides pretty solid proof, mainly through
international verification. You don't have to just take NASA's word
for it.
Speaker 1: Right, other countries are involved now exactly.
Speaker 2: This is where space rivalry actually helps accountability. Andrew McCarthy
highlights this China has its own orbiter TO one on one
circling Mars right now, and TI on one one has
actually photographed NASA's rovers Curiosity and Perseverance sitting right there
on the Martian surface.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's that's pretty hard to fik one country photographing
another country's robot on another planet.
Speaker 2: It's powerful. Cross verification confirms the location beyond reasonable doubt.
Speaker 1: I'd say, what else any other proof?
Speaker 2: Well, there's the signal tracking. This is pretty cool because
it's somewhat publicly accessible. Any sophisticated amateur radio astronomer can
actually detect the radio signals coming from these probes in
Martian orbit. They listen for that carrier.
Speaker 1: Wave, so you can literally point a telescope and hear
the signal.
Speaker 2: From Mars if you have the right equipment and nowhere
to look. Yes, the Deep Space Network handles the complex
data decoding, but the basic signal confirming presence and location,
that's detectable. It completely undermines the idea they're hiding in
a hangar. Hashtag tag tag tag d the true identity
of the fauna.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, the rovers are definitely on Mars. The photos
are genuinely from the Red Planet, which brings us back
to the core puzzle, why do these rocks look so
much like bones and lemmings.
Speaker 2: This is where geology and psychology really team up to
trick us. Let's take the whale vertebrae. First, NASA geologist
doctor Bob Anderson analyzed this.
Speaker 1: What did he say?
Speaker 2: He explained that the Martian wind, even though it's super
weak compared to births, because the atmosphere is so thin,
it blows constantly, carrying a brace of dust. And it
does this for millions, maybe billions of years.
Speaker 1: This says like super slow motion sand blasting.
Speaker 2: Precisely endless patient abrasion. It sculpts softer rocks into amazing shapes,
just like wind and sand create arches and hoodoos and deserts. Here,
Anderson said, the grooves making it look like a vertebra
they match the predominant wind direction, carving the rock from
left to right over eons.
Speaker 1: So just a naturally wind carved rock that happens to
resemble a bone.
Speaker 2: A beautiful, coincidental piece of natural sculpture.
Speaker 1: What about the walrus bone that looked pretty convincing in
the pictures.
Speaker 2: View analyst Mick West looked at that one. He pointed
out first that anatomically the shape doesn't actually match a
real femur bone that closely if you know what to
look for. But his main point was statistical. Think about it.
The rovers have sent back hundreds of thousands of photos
of rocks, just rocks, rocks, rocks, yes, the rocks. So
with that sheer volume of random shapes, you are statistically
guaranteed to find some rocks that, just by chance alignment,
weird lighting, partial burial, will resemble something familiar, like a bone.
Our brain just latches onto those few interesting ones and
ignores the millions of boring ones.
Speaker 1: The needle in the haystack, But the needle is just
another piece of hay that looks like a needle.
Speaker 2: That's a good way to put it, Okay, But.
Speaker 1: The Lemming that one seemed the most lifelike, the eyes,
the nose. How do you explain that away?
Speaker 2: Micwest's analysis of the Lemming image is really fascinating because
it gets down to the pixel level. He showed that
if you adjust us the image contrast, the Lemming rock
looks exactly the same material wise as all the rocks
around it.
Speaker 1: So it's not made of fur. Shocker, right.
Speaker 2: The entire rodent resemblance he found is driven by just
a couple of pixels that happened to be significantly darker
than their surrounding.
Speaker 1: A couple of pixels. That's it.
Speaker 2: These dark pixels create the illusion of shadow, defining what
looks like an eye socket or a nose. Wess actually
demonstrated this digitally. Remove or just slightly change the brightness
of those few specific dark pixels, and instantly it becomes
a lot less like a rodent. It just resolves back
into a bumpy, unevenly lit rock with some sharp contrast points.
Speaker 1: Wow. So the life was literally just a trick of
the light on a few dots of.
Speaker 2: Data, exactly driven by shadows and high contrast.
Speaker 1: And there's a name for this, right, Our tendency to
see familiar things in random patterns.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's the prime suspect in almost all these cases peridolia,
that hardwired human tendency to interpret vague stimuli as something
familiar and meaning, especially faces, figures, animals. Our brains are
too good at finding patterns.
Speaker 1: So the verdict on the Martian zoo definitely images from Mars.
But the animals are just rocks carved by wind, combined
with statistical chants and our own patterns seeking brains working overtime.
No Canadian field trip requires.
Speaker 2: Phcisely natural carvings, optical illusions, and a heavy dose of peridolia.
Speaker 1: All right, we've seen geology and psychology create illusions on Mars.
Let's bring it closer to home. Now to the moon.
This next one involves less patient geology and more high
speed confusion about scale and perspective.
Speaker 2: This is a great example because it shifts from static
anomalies on distant worlds to something fleeting, dynamic happening right
above us. It really challenges our immediate sense of distance
in motion.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the setting is Moscow, Russia, May twenty nineteen.
A photographer is out trying to get a shot of
the full moon over the city.
Speaker 2: Classic nighttime photography subject.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but apparently they were having trouble with the focus
and willdd with it. They captured something startling. First, three
black circular objects, then a whole cluster crossing in front
of the moon in a loose formation.
Speaker 2: WHOA Okay, black circles against the bright moon that would
definitely stand.
Speaker 1: Out totally and The immediate thoughts see them against the
Moon is how big are they? If you assume they're
actually orbiting the Moon, say sixty miles up a reasonable
guess for a low lunar orbit.
Speaker 2: You can calculate their size based on how much of
the Moon they appear to cover exactly.
Speaker 1: And astros to talkraper. Andrew McCarthy did the math. He
calculated that he'd have to be enormous, between two and
three miles wide.
Speaker 2: Each three miles wide?
Speaker 1: Are you that's the calculation if they're at lunar distance? Yeah,
I mean the International Space Station, Our biggest orbital structure
is like what a football field long? Maybe a thirtieth
of a mile.
Speaker 2: So these things would be forty times the size of
the ISS.
Speaker 1: Roughly roughly Yeah, colossal doesn't even begin to cover it.
So the only theories that fit that scale assuming lunar
orbit are well, a massive fleet of UFOs or maybe
giant asteroids moving in a strangely coordinated way.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, mind boggling. A fleet of miles wide craft
near the Moon. That implies technology far beyond anything we
can consume of hashtag tag tag tag be analyzing location
and movement.
Speaker 1: So is it giant alien ships or is our perspective
just totally wrong? First step, verify the footage? Was it real?
Speaker 2: Crucial first step. Lots of fakes out there, right.
Speaker 1: Astronomer Marke D'Antonio, who also knows video effects, apparently confirmed
the video looked authentic. Yeah, based on camera behavior, the
way the moon moved in the frame, not obvious CGI trickery.
Speaker 2: Okay, so the footage is likely real. What are the
mundane explanations? Satellites?
Speaker 1: That was the first thought. NASA's Bob Anderson and D'Antonio
considered satellites orbiting Earth or maybe even the Moon.
Speaker 2: But lunar satellites wouldn't they be known an object miles wide?
Speaker 1: Exactly? Hundreds of astronomers watched the Moon constantly. Something that
huge appearing in orbit would trigger global alerts instantly.
Speaker 2: It hasn't happened, okay, So not lunar orbit. What about
Earth orbit, like maybe a starlink cluster. SpaceX has launched thousands.
Speaker 1: Of those things. That was considered too. Anderson thought maybe
a startlink train or perhaps even high altitude military drones
testing formation flying clausebleish.
Speaker 2: But there's a catch, right, There's.
Speaker 1: Always a catch. Yeah, and it's the movement. This is
what killed the satellite theory, whether Earth or Moon orbit.
Speaker 2: How are they moving? Satellites follow fixed predictable orbits, right
smooth arcs across the sky. These things they were speeding up,
slowing down, bunching together, spreading apart.
Speaker 1: Erratic, almost organic movement exactly.
Speaker 2: Cantonio and Andersen noted this dynamic, almost chaotic movement. It
completely rules out anything locked into a fixed gravitational orbit.
Satellites just don't do that. Asteroids don't do it.
Speaker 1: Okay, so not satellites, not giant asteroids. What else could
they be If they're not orbiting the Moon, and they're
not miles wide, maybe they're not far away at all.
Maybe they're close.
Speaker 2: That's the key, key insight. The answer isn't about enormous scale,
it's about extreme proximity. So what were they The movement pattern,
the acceleration, deceleration, the flocking behavior is perfectly consistent with birds,
migratory birds, birds.
Speaker 1: Seriously, but they looked like perfect black circles.
Speaker 2: Ah, but think about the conditions. The video was shot
in May over Moscow, peak migration season for many bird
species there. Okay, the photographer was focused on the moon,
essentially focused at infinity. The birds were flying much much closer,
maybe just a few hundred feet away, completely out of focus.
Speaker 1: Out of focus birds look like black.
Speaker 2: Circles when silhouetted against a very bright background like the
full moon. Yes, yeah, they're rapidly flapping wings, blurred by
motion and being out of focus average out Optically, the
camera sensor effectively registers them as dark, roughly circular shapes
moving erratically across the bright disc.
Speaker 1: Wow. So the miles wide scale was just a complete illusion.
Speaker 2: Of perspective, completely because as they looked like they were
crossing the moon, our brain assumes they're near the moon
and therefore must be huge, But they were actually tiny
and extremely close.
Speaker 1: That's incredible, an entire alien fleet theory debunked by a
flock of birds flying by at the right moment.
Speaker 2: It's a powerful lesson in how easily our perception of
scale and distance gets fooled without reliable reference points. Anything small,
dark and close can appear huge and distant against a
vast bright background.
Speaker 1: Like a fly buzzing past your eye can block out
a building exactly.
Speaker 2: That principle just scaled up spectacularly against the Moon. The
Moscow lunar fleet wasn't intergalactic, it was intercontinental migration, all right.
Speaker 1: For our final deep dive, we're heading back to Mars.
This is where Peridolia, that pattern seeking urge really combines
with our own human history and cultural baggage to create
perhaps the most elaborate vision yet.
Speaker 2: Yes, the supposed ancient Martian city. This one taps directly
into our fascination with lost civilizations here on Earth, Egypt,
the Maya complex architecture emerging from the dust.
Speaker 1: So the claims really took off around spring twenty twenty
based on images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter MRO super
high resolution stuff.
Speaker 2: Mrro's high rise camera gives this incredible detail, and.
Speaker 1: Some people claimed MRO had photographed not just random features,
but an entire group of buildings and pyramids, including one
formation that looked uncannily like an eagle's head.
Speaker 2: George Hass from the Sidonia Institute is a key proponent here.
He interprets these as large geoglyphic formations showing clear signs
of intelligent design. He argues it looks like the ruins
of a planned city.
Speaker 1: An Eagle's head statue on Mars and pyramids, and the
pyramid claim got specific. Hawes noted a striking geometric similarity
between one alleged Martian pyramid and a famous Earth structure,
the ancient Mayan pyramid of the Moon in Toti Walk
in Mexico.
Speaker 2: How similar are you talking?
Speaker 1: Apparently the Martian formation seems to be foresighted, maybe with
a kind of jetted off platform near the top. Very
similar geometry the tot Walk and pyramid.
Speaker 2: So the implication is shared design, maybe even shared builders somehow,
connecting ancient Mars and ancient Earth.
Speaker 1: That's the connection that makes the theories so compelling for some.
It hints at a shared architectural template, linking potential Martians
to our own ancestors through geometry. Hashtag tag chad tag
tag b theories on Martian annihilation. Okay, but if there
was a city, a civilization capable of building pyramids, where
did they go? Mars is dead?
Speaker 2: Now, that's the inevitable tragic question, And the context is
we know Mars had water. Forensic investigator Chase Klutsky points
to the strong scientific evidence of river beds, shorelines, minerals
formed in water. Mars could have supported life, maybe even
civilization in the past.
Speaker 1: So if life was possible, what happened? This leads to
some pretty dark theories, doesn't it.
Speaker 2: It leads to one particularly sobering one, nuclear annihilation. It
kind of reflects our own deepest fears about technology and
self destruction.
Speaker 1: How would that work? A Martian world war?
Speaker 2: The theory subject us an advanced Martian society might have
destroyed itself in a global nuclear war, and proponents point
to suppose it. Evidence in the atmosphere traces of an
element called xenon one twenty.
Speaker 1: Nine xenon one twenty nine. Why is that significant?
Speaker 2: They argue? Xenon one twenty nine is considered a specific
signature of artificial nuclear explosions. We know how devastating nukes
aar A one megaton bomb levels everything for miles, a
planetary war, total annihilation.
Speaker 1: So the idea is all that's left are these eroded
ruins and the chemical ghost of their final war in
the air.
Speaker 2: It's a powerful, almost mythical narrative, a cautionary tale projected
onto Mars. Advanced technology leads to self destruction hashtag tax
tech tag taxe Geological and chemical debunking.
Speaker 1: It's definitely a dramatic story. But let's bring in the
science again. We need to scrutinize these claims like we
did the monolith. Mars mission planner Jonathan Hill looked at
these formations. What about the eagles head?
Speaker 2: Hill's analysis brings it right back to Martian geology. He says,
the formation, with its cliffs and slopes, is entirely consistent
with natural processes involving ice, specifically the residue left after
ice sublimes.
Speaker 1: Away, sublimation ice turning straight to gas. Exactly.
Speaker 2: It happens all over Mars over long periods. This process
sculpts maces and cliffs. The eagle's head fits perfectly with
feature scene on similar ice rich maces elsewhere on the planet.
It's a natural shape carved by evaporating ice and wind.
Speaker 1: Is there proof it's just rock and ice?
Speaker 2: Yes, Orbital ground penetrating radar. It can map the subsurface layers.
The data confirms the entire mesa, including the head, is
made of rock and water ice. No hidden artificial structures,
no metals, nothing like that.
Speaker 1: Okay, geology explains the eagle. What about the pyramid shape?
The Mayan connection?
Speaker 2: This comes down to precise geometry. Real pyramids like the
Mayan ones or Egyptian ones have meticulously engineered angles, straight lines,
perfect corners signs of deliberate.
Speaker 1: Construction, and the Martian pyramid.
Speaker 2: Hill stresses the geometry just isn't there when you measure
it accurately. The edges are curved consistent with natural erosion,
not straight lines. The top platform isn't centered, the angles
aren't uniform. It looks pyramid like at a glance, especially
with the low sun angles on Mars creating sharp shadows.
Speaker 1: But the precision of artificial construction is missing.
Speaker 2: Completely lacking. It's an eroded mesa, not an engineered pyramid,
all right.
Speaker 1: Finally, the smoking gun for nuclear war xenon one twenty nine.
Is it really proof of Martian nukes?
Speaker 2: This seems to be a case of misinterpreting natural background levels.
Xenon is a naturally occurring gas. Xenon one twenty nine
is a naturally occurring isotope of xenon. We find it
in Earth's atmosphere in rocks. Finding traces on Mars is
actually not surprising at all from a geological.
Speaker 1: Perspective, But why the link to nuclear explosions? Then?
Speaker 2: Because nuclear fission does produce xenon isotopes, often enriching xenon
one twenty nine relative to other isotopes, and specific predictable
ratios that ratio can be a signature.
Speaker 1: But the Mars levels don't show that specific ratio exactly.
Speaker 2: The trace amounts to detected on Mars or consistent with
natural background levels found elsewhere in the Solar System. They
don't show the highly specific enriched isotopic ratios you'd expect
from widespread nuclear detonations. But transting the natural background zene
on one twenty nine specifically to artificial bombs requires a
leap that data doesn't support. Hashtag TrashTag trash tag d
final psychological insight.
Speaker 1: So once again the science points towards geology, atmosphere, chemistry,
and our own brains playing tricks on us.
Speaker 2: Jonathan Hill really nailed the psychological aspect. He described peridolia
as the human brain going a little too far, implanting
familiar patterns where none actually exist. Our brains are so
good at finding faces, figures, signs of intelligence.
Speaker 1: That they create them. Ount of random shadows and curves
on Martian rocks, especially.
Speaker 2: On Mars, where the thin atmosphere creates those incredibly sharp,
high contrast shadows that define edges, maybe a little too
perfectly for our pattern seeking eyes.
Speaker 1: It really seems like you have to consciously fight that impulse.
You have to active try improve to yourself. You're not
just seeing things before claiming ancient city or alien lemming.
Speaker 2: It requires a level of critical self awareness, absolutely training
yourself to look at the data objectively, understanding that seeing
a face and a cliff isn't evidence of martians, it's
evidence of a normal human brain doing what it evolved
to do just on data wasn't really designed for.
Speaker 1: Wow. So this whole deep dive, massive monoliths, martian zoos,
lunar fleets, ancient cities.
Speaker 2: Cosmic tour of misinterpretation pretty much.
Speaker 1: But the common thread through all of them, the Focos monolith,
the animals, the fleet, the pyramids. It's this incredibly powerful,
persistent human urge to see intelligence or life or structure
in ambiguous data.
Speaker 2: That drive to find something else, something meaningful, is just
so strong. We saw the experts consistently lean towards impact,
ejecta wind, erosion, migrating birds, natural mass.
Speaker 1: The more grounded, if less exciting explanations.
Speaker 2: Usually, yes, geology probably ability perspective tricks.
Speaker 1: But I think it's important to say, pursuing these anomalies,
even when they get debunked, it's not wasted effort. Is it?
That curiosity is vital.
Speaker 2: Absolutely essential, that initial what is? That is what drives
science forward. These strange images force scientists to get better data,
refine their models, develop better instruments, and the whole process
of debating and verifying or refuting these claims globally makes
the entire scientific community stronger.
Speaker 1: The what if always comes before the how.
Speaker 2: Always, and every time we thoroughly debunk an anomaly, we
learn something concrete about the physics or geology or atmosphere
of that world. We get smarter about the universe, and
maybe a little smarter about how our own perception works too.
Speaker 1: And there's that great irony we touched on. We talked
about the Marcia concepts for Martian homes looking like the monolith. Meanwhile,
we have NASA's Artemis program aiming for moon bases, SpaceX
and Blue Origin planning Martian habitats. We are literally starting
to build the kinds of alien structures we're currently mistaking.
Speaker 2: Rocks for It's the ultimate twist, isn't it. We're searching
for artifacts of past intelligence while actively creating the artifacts
of future intelligence. The things we build on the Moon
and Mars will be the anomalies for future explorers or
maybe even future civilizations to puzzle over someday.
Speaker 1: So maybe we can leave our listeners with this final
thought to chew on. If our brains are so hardwired
for peridolia, so desperate to find patterns and meaning, how
much does our own hope, the hope of finding life,
finding intelligence out there, or even our deep seated fears
like the fear of nuclear war scene in the Xenon theory.
How much do those desires and fears influence what we
look for and how we interpret the data we find.
Speaker 2: It's a crucial question about observer bias in the grandest sense.
Keep looking up, keep exploring
Speaker 1: But don't forget to look closely and critically at what
you think you see