Speaker 1: What if I told you there's this uh potato shaped
moon zipping around Mars, right, Phobos? Yeah, Phobos? And what
if some people thought it might actually be hollow, hollow
like engineers, maybe sparking theories about aliens. And then there's
this whole mystery with a Soviet probe that just went silent.
Speaker 2: Okay, that definitely sounds intriguing.
Speaker 1: You bet So today we're doing a deep dive into Phobos,
all the weirdness, the theories that failed mission, and.
Speaker 2: The strange things people claimed to see on it and
on Mars itself exactly.
Speaker 1: We're going to unpack this whole strange case, try and
figure out what makes this little moon so well fascinating.
Speaker 2: It definitely is fascinating. I mean, Phobos really plenches above
its weight, mystery wise.
Speaker 1: Totally, especially when you compare it to our moon.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, okac the difference is huge. Our Moon's about
what two thousand miles wide, pretty substantial, and.
Speaker 1: It keeps a respectable distance, you know.
Speaker 2: Right about two hundred thousand miles out. But Phobos it's tiny,
only like fourteen miles across.
Speaker 1: It's fourteen that's smaller than a lot.
Speaker 2: Of cities seriously, and it orbits Mars incredibly close, just
five thousand miles away.
Speaker 1: Whoa, that's practically skimming the surface, closer than Denver to
New York.
Speaker 2: He said, pretty much. So that really close, really fast orbit.
That's the first big clue that something's different about Phobos.
It challenges the usual ideas about how Moon's form.
Speaker 1: It's like this hyperactive little gnat buzzing around Mars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, good analogy.
Speaker 1: And it doesn't look serene like our moon either. It's
all lumpy, scarred, no air.
Speaker 2: The giant potato description really fits.
Speaker 1: So for ages. Everyone just figured it was a captured asteroid,
right along with Damos. It's a little sibling.
Speaker 2: That was the standard theory. Yeah, it's rocky, looks like
an asteroid.
Speaker 1: Seemed simple enough, but that weird orbit kept nagging at
people exactly.
Speaker 2: It made some scientists, especially over at JXA, the Japanese
Space Agency, think again. Okay, they proposed something different. Maybe
Phobos wasn't captured. Maybe maybe it formed from debris after
a huge impact on Mars itself.
Speaker 1: Wow, like our moon supposedly did with her.
Speaker 2: Precisely that theory, a massive collision early on could have
blasted Martian rock into orbit, eventually clumping together to form
Phobos and Demos.
Speaker 1: That's a much more traumatic origin story, it is, and it.
Speaker 2: Gets even more interesting because you know, we're finding hints
that Mars might have had water, maybe even life way.
Speaker 1: Back when, right the building blocks, maybe even Dormitt microbes.
Speaker 2: So the idea is those huge impacts that might have
formed Phobos, they could have also blasted Martian surface material rocks, dust,
maybe even fossils or DNA traces out into space.
Speaker 1: And some of that stuff landed on Phobos.
Speaker 2: That's the hypothesis, making Phobos a potential time capsule, a.
Speaker 1: Time capsule of ancient Mars holding secrets of life potentially.
Speaker 2: Yeah. One JXA scientist basically said if life was ever
common on Mars, finding evidence on Phobos is actually pretty
likely because of this transfer.
Speaker 1: So this little potato moon could be like the Rosetta
Stone for Martian life.
Speaker 2: That's the hope and why it's such a hot target
for exploration. It could be one of the best places
in the Solar System to look for signs of past
life besides Mars itself.
Speaker 1: Crazy, but the weirdness doesn't stop there, does it. Something
about its orbit Back in the sixties.
Speaker 2: Uh right, Soviet astronomers noticed something really odd. Phobos orbits
Mars faster than Mars rotates faster.
Speaker 1: How does that work?
Speaker 2: It means it's moving very quickly for something its size,
suggesting it's less massive, less dense than you'd expect.
Speaker 1: For a solid rock, lighter than it looks.
Speaker 2: Which led to a pretty radical idea back there, don't.
Speaker 1: Tell me the hol of thing again.
Speaker 2: Yep. That observation fueled the hypothesis championed by guys like
Russian astrophysicist Josef Schklovsky and even Carl Sagan considered it.
Speaker 1: Sagan too, Wow.
Speaker 2: They suggested, well, maybe the only way to explain that
speedy orbit was if Phobos wasn't solid rock all the
way through, maybe it was hollow, hollow.
Speaker 1: Like a giant empty space.
Speaker 2: Rock, or even more out there. Schlovsky speculated it might
have a thin, maybe even metallic outer shell.
Speaker 1: Okay, now that definitely sounds artificial on engineered moon.
Speaker 2: That was the implication. Yeah, highly controversial, of course, but
it came from trying to explain the orbital data they had.
Speaker 1: Was anyone else buying this?
Speaker 2: Doctor Fred Singer, who advised President Eisenhower on science actually
supported the hollow idea. Really, He looked at observations suggesting
Phobos was slowly spiraling inward towards Mars. He argued that
if that was true, being hollow and therefore less dense
was the best fit for why it was decaying like that.
Speaker 1: So its orbit is weirdly fast and it might be
slowly falling.
Speaker 2: Seemed that way based on the data. Then even NASA
much later described its insides in kind of odd terms.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, what did they say?
Speaker 2: Something like a rubble pile barely holding together, but with
a mildly cohesive outer fabric.
Speaker 1: Huh, outer fabric. That does sound a bit like Schklovsky's
shell idea.
Speaker 2: Doesn't it. It does echo it a bit. Yeah, less
alien engineered, more like loosely packed gravel with maybe a crust,
still not solid rock.
Speaker 1: So naturally people wanted a closer look, the Soviets especially absolutely.
Speaker 2: This was peak Space race era and Phobos was this
big Martian mystery. So in July nineteen eighty eight they
launched two probes, Phobos I and Phobos.
Speaker 1: Two ambitious what were they supposed to do?
Speaker 2: Study Mars? Study Phobos get detailed pictures, analyze the composition,
the works. And it wasn't just the Soviets. It was
a big international project.
Speaker 1: How many countries.
Speaker 2: Fourteen nations involved, including the US. Everyone wanted answers about Phobos.
Speaker 1: But it didn't go smoothly from the start, did it?
Phobos won?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Phobos one was lost pretty early on. The official
story is a command error, basically a typo sent from
ground control.
Speaker 1: OUCH one run command at boom mission over space is unforgiving.
Speaker 2: But Phobos two seemed okay.
Speaker 1: Initially got to Mars, started sending data.
Speaker 2: YEP operated for several months, gathered good stuff on Mars.
But then March eighth, nineteen eighty nine, it was getting
ready for its closest pass by Phobos, and things went wrong.
Suddenly the signals got weak and the probe started spinning,
tumbling out of control for no reason exactly. Things in
space don't just start spinning unless something acts on them.
Controllers were baffled. They tried everything to get it back. Yeah, nothing,
it's at one last picture and then silence.
Speaker 1: Dick, Wow, what was the official clause?
Speaker 2: Computer malfunction? That was the official line.
Speaker 1: But you mentioned a last picture.
Speaker 2: Ah, yes, that last transmission. That's where things get really
really weird, and the whole UFO angle comes in.
Speaker 1: Okay, lay it on me. What did it show?
Speaker 2: The final image seems to show Phobos, but there's this
long elliptical shadow on its surface, and maybe hovering above it,
this huge oval shaped object, an object.
Speaker 1: Like a ship, and a shadow that doesn't match Phobos itself.
Speaker 2: The shadow's shape was hard to explain based on Phobos's
known features, and the object well, that was even harder
to explain.
Speaker 1: So instant speculation, right.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, camera glitch and internal reflection or something else,
something physical near Phobos.
Speaker 1: Oh and the Soviets didn't release the.
Speaker 2: Photos right away, No, they kept most of the photos
two photos classified initially, which, given the international partner or
some bet definitely Eventually, under pressure they released most of them,
but the last few frames, including that image, stayed secret
for a while.
Speaker 1: Longer until someone leaked them, well.
Speaker 2: Not exactly leaked. In nineteen ninety one, a Soviet test pilot,
Marina Popovich revealed one of the classified shots.
Speaker 1: And what did that one show?
Speaker 2: Apparently a very long elliptical or cigar shaped object near Phobos.
Estimates put it at maybe fifteen miles long.
Speaker 1: Fifteen miles that's enormous, bigger than photos itself.
Speaker 2: Huge, And supposedly these were infrared images.
Speaker 1: Infrared so detecting heat right, which.
Speaker 2: Is important because a simple shadow wouldn't show up on infrared.
It suggests the object, whatever it was, was physically there
and maybe emitting heat.
Speaker 1: Okay, that is intriguing. Did Papavinch say what she thought
it was?
Speaker 2: She was known to be interested in UFOs, so that
fueled speculation that maybe this thing, this object, was why
Phobos too malfunctioned. Maybe it interfered somehow.
Speaker 1: Wow, So a possible UFO encounter near Mars. But the
weirdness wasn't just Phobos too right, other anomaly.
Speaker 2: Correct Phobos who also supposedly snapped a picture of Mars itself,
showing what looked like well.
Speaker 1: Ruined ruins, like a city.
Speaker 2: Some descriptions mentioned rectangular shapes gridlines reminiscent of ancient city ruins.
Speaker 1: Which ties into that older Mars mystery.
Speaker 2: The face exactly the face on Mars and Sidonia seen
by Viking one in seventy six that kicked off decades
of speculation about Martians, civilizations, alien.
Speaker 1: Markers, mostly explained as peridolia. Now right, seeing faces in rocks, that's.
Speaker 2: The mainstream view. Yeah, our brains love finding patterns, but
for some the clarity, especially in the early images, was
just too much to ignore. And Sidonia has other weird
stuff too, like what things people call pyramids, obelisks, geometric
shapes that look well unnatural to some observers.
Speaker 1: Pyramids on Mars like actual pyramids.
Speaker 2: There's one called the Elysium pyramid, a huge four sided
thing nearly a mile high, very regular shape apparently.
Speaker 1: A mile high. Wow.
Speaker 2: And tunnels too, Yeah, these features that get described as
tubes or glass tunnels seeming to connect across the surface,
leading to ideas of underground CITIESCI. Okay, so strange stuff
on Mars. What about back on Phobos itself? Besides being
maybe hollow and having that giant crater.
Speaker 1: Right Stickney crater. But they're also those grooves.
Speaker 2: The grooves, Yeah, tell me about those.
Speaker 1: There are deep parallel lines running across the surface, pretty
uniform with uniform.
Speaker 2: Depth, not just random cracks.
Speaker 1: Doesn't look like it. They're often brighter than the surrounding
area too, which is odd, and missions have shown new
ones seem to appear over time, so the surface is changing.
That's weird for a tiny man and Stickney crater. People
think that's an entrance.
Speaker 2: For those who like the hallow moon idea. Yeah, a
six mile maybe it leads inside pure speculation, but it
fires the imagination.
Speaker 1: And near that crater, the monolith.
Speaker 2: The Phobos monolith stands out like a sore thumb, about
three hundred feet tall, maybe two hundred and.
Speaker 1: Eighty feet wide, and it looks artificial.
Speaker 2: Very bright, very rectangular, not what you typically expect from
random geology, sharp angles, defined edges. It's intriguing.
Speaker 1: Didn't buzz Aldrin come in on it?
Speaker 2: He did, called it a very unusual structure on that
little potato shaped object and basically asked, you know, how
did you get there?
Speaker 1: When an Apollo astronaut says something's unusual in space.
Speaker 2: You pay attention, right, So theories fly. Martian artifact marker
shared tech.
Speaker 1: Between worlds, and people connect it to structures on Earth
like the pyramids and obelisks in Egypt.
Speaker 2: That connection gets made. Yeah, especially with the Sidonius stuff
on Mars looking vaguely Egyptian. To some it leads down
some interesting.
Speaker 1: Rabbit holes, like the idea the Great Pyramid was a
power plant.
Speaker 2: That's a fringe theory, but it persists. People point to
certain feet Nikola Tesla's experiments with wireless power and.
Speaker 1: Link it to the electric universe idea.
Speaker 2: Right, the theory that electricity, not gravity, is the main
force in the cosmos. Proponents suggest pyramids obelisks worldwide and
maybe on Mars and Phobos were built to tap into
some kind of cosmic.
Speaker 1: Energy field, zero point energy.
Speaker 2: That's the term often used, like these structures were giant
antennas pulling energy from space.
Speaker 1: So Martian pyramids, the Phobos monolith. Maybe they were power
stations back when Mars had an atmosphere and water.
Speaker 2: That's the speculation. Within that framework, maybe losing its atmosphere
somehow short circuited and energy connection between Mars and Earth.
It gets pretty wild.
Speaker 1: Very grand cosmic stuff. Are people actually researching zero point energy?
Speaker 2: Some are, though it's way outside the mainstream, and you
hear stories, probably conspiracy theories, mostly about patents being suppressed,
that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Okay, it's a lot to take in, but let's pull
back a bit. What about the debunking the more conventional explanation, right.
Speaker 2: Because they're usually are more grounded explanations for Phobos two.
Speaker 1: For instance, Yeah, what's the counter argument?
Speaker 2: Well Reports suggests the probe was already having problems before
it got to Mars, including that spinning issue, so the
final failure might not have been sudden or external. And
the data it sent back was messy because it was tumbling.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, so the UFO images might just be corrupted data.
Speaker 2: That's the likely explanation for the cigar shaped object. It
seems to be an artifact in the infrared camera system,
only it's not in the regular camera images taken at
the same time.
Speaker 1: So just a glitch, not an alien ship. What about
Marina Popovich, the pilot who showed the photo?
Speaker 2: Okay, she was an incredible test pilot, but not actually
a cosmonaut who'd been to space, and she was a
known UFO enthusiast. Apparently she actually had permission to share
those photos later on, So maybe less whistleblower, more authorized release.
Speaker 1: Gotcha and buzz Aldrin's comment on the mamolef.
Speaker 2: Often cut short. The full quote includes him saying, maybe
the universe put it there, or God put it there,
leaving room for natural origins.
Speaker 1: Right, not necessarily aliens. What about that weird shadow in
the last Phobos two image.
Speaker 2: Newer, cleaner images show that the shadow shape actually matches
the lumpy, irregular shape of Phobos itself pretty well.
Speaker 1: So it was just Phobos's own shadow, maybe distorted in
the old image.
Speaker 2: Seems likely image processing back then wasn't what it is
now and enhancements could have created misleading shapes.
Speaker 1: Okay, so no UFO shadow. What about Phobos being hollow?
Speaker 2: Current science leans away from completely hollow based on gravity measurements.
Is probably more like a loose pile of rocks and
ice clump together.
Speaker 1: A rubble pile, like NASA said, with lots of empty
spaces inside.
Speaker 2: Exactly significant voids caverns maybe, but not a single hollow shell.
Speaker 1: And the grooves, if it's not hollow, what makes them.
Speaker 2: The leading idea now is tidal stress. Mars is grouty
is literally pulling Phobos apart. Seriously, Yeah, it creates stress
inside and service material slumps down into those internal voids
or along fault lines, creating the grooves.
Speaker 1: So the grooves are basically stretch marks from Mars's gravity.
Speaker 2: That's a good way to put it, and eventually Phobos
will likely break up entirely and form a ring around Mars.
Speaker 1: Wow, and the sheet metal skin.
Speaker 2: Probably just millions of years of dust being kicked up
by impacts and settling evenly over the surface, creating a
kind of fine grained layer.
Speaker 1: Okay, natural processes. What about monoliths being common?
Speaker 2: Yeah, geologists see similar blocky formations elsewhere on our moon
on asteroids. Their exact formation isn't always clear, but they're
likely just unusual rock formations, not alien signposts.
Speaker 1: And the city on Mars the tunnels.
Speaker 2: Almost certainly peridolia, again seeing familiar shapes in random geology,
Those tunnels are likely just natural rock ridges or collapsed
lava tubes.
Speaker 1: So it sounds like most of the really wild stuff
has well less wild explanations now.
Speaker 2: For the most part. Yeah, science tends to find natural
causes eventually, But that doesn't mean Phobos isn't still really interesting.
Speaker 1: Oh, definitely, especially the idea may hold bits of ancient Mars,
maybe evidence of past life.
Speaker 2: That possibility is still very real and scientifically exciting. It
makes Sobo subprime target, even if it's not hollow or artificial.
Speaker 1: And landing there is hard right. Every mission failed so.
Speaker 2: Far, every dedicated landing attempt. Yes, it's a tricky target,
which just adds to the challenge in the intrigue.
Speaker 1: But Japan's trying soon.
Speaker 2: Yep. The Martian Moons Exploration MMX mission schedule to launch soon,
hoping to land on Phobos, grab samples, and bring them
back to Earth around late next year.
Speaker 1: That could finally give us some real answers.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, yeah, you could tell us what Phobos is made of,
how it formed, and maybe, just maybe, if it holds
any secrets from Mars' past.
Speaker 1: But even with the likely debunking of the Phobos to UFO,
there's still a little question mark about exactly what happened,
isn't there? Why did it fail? Right?
Speaker 2: Them? There is? While computer malfunction is plausible, especially given
prior issues, the timing and the strained final images, even
if misinterpreted, leave a little room for well wondering, that
lingering what if Right.
Speaker 1: So we've journeyed through all this Phobos weirdness, hollow theories,
lost probes, monoliths, Martian ruins.
Speaker 2: And while science has chipped away at many of the
biggest mysteries with natural explanations or data glitches.
Speaker 1: Phobos itself is still this really strange, compelling little.
Speaker 2: World, no doubt about it. It keeps drawing us back.
Speaker 1: So here's something to think about. If Mars might have
had life and Phobos could be holding pieces of that,
what would finding even microscopic proof actually mean for us,
for science, for everything.
Speaker 2: It would be monumental, absolutely world changing, proof of life
beyond Earth.
Speaker 1: And even if Phobos isn't hollow but just full of
voids and caves, what's going on inside? What weird geology
or who knows what else could be happening hidden away
in that lumpy potato.
Speaker 2: Unanswered questions, That's what drives exploration. We encourage you to
keep digging into Mars Phobos. The search for life one
of the biggest stories out there.
Speaker 1: For sure. The Universes packed with mysteries, and Phobos are weird.
Little cosmic potato is definitely one of its most intriguing characters.