Mars Monster

Since the Curiosity Rover spacecraft landed in Gale Crater on the planet Mars it has been sending back images that appear to show all kinds of objects that simply should not be there. These include bones, planks of wood, pyramids and statues. There are even objects that make some people doubt that the Rover is even on Mars at all and might be driving round a remote region of Earth, an island in the Canadian arctic is one place nominated, see: http://www.richplanet.net/starship_main.php?ref=193&part=1. I find the idea of life on Mars perfectly plausible and I'm not just talking microbes. There's evidence to suggest that Mars was once home to far more advanced life-forms in the distant past. Structures have been photographed on Mars that appear to be artificial, most famously the Face on Mars; this is just one object of interest in an entire complex called Cydonia, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/skeptics-in-pub-18808.html. There are many others that have emerged since. This is not as nonsensical as the Skeptics will tell you. It's been known since the first probes went to Mars that the planet was not always as like as it is today; long ago water flowed on its surface. There were rivers, lakes and even oceans. This means that back then Mars must have had a denser atmosphere and it must have been an awful lot warmer; very similar to what Earth like today. Could life have evolved on Mars that was as complex as that on Earth? Maybe an intelligent animal species emerged that was capable of building such structures as Cydonia. At some point a terrible cataclysm befell the planet, about four billion years ago scientists reckon, maybe the emergence of Olympus Mons and the enormous Tharsis volcanoes. This killed off almost all the life and turned Mars into what it is today: dry, airless and freezing cold. But the constructions remained and we can still see them today. For whatever reason, the authorities are very keen to keep this a secret from the general public.

Skeptics dismiss the sighting of recognizable objects on Mars as what they call pareidolia, the tendency we have to interpret random patterns as organized shapes; for example we might see a map of Scotland in a passing cloud or a face in the wood knots of a piece of timber. There are problems with this explanation, primarily because it has no limitations. If we conclude that somebody is mistaken over something they've seen because they're suffering from pareidolia, then it can in theory be applied to everything they see. It therefore is something of a get-out-of-jail-free card for the Skeptics, see here for more detail: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/pan-pareidolia.html. However the latest picture of interest from Curiosity must surely make some Skeptics take a step back and pause. On the side of a cliff with sand dunes beneath it there is a shallow grotto with smooth walls, and attached to one of those walls is something that definitely looks out of place. It resembles a spider or crustacean of some kind, perhaps a crab; it most definitely appears to be a complex living organism. It clearly has eight appendages that could be defined as legs. Its body looks like it has a shell. At the top are other protrusions that might be sense organs of some kind, see: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3186416/What-images-dark-lady-crab-like-alien-facehugger-spotted-Mars-latest-bizarre-claims.html. Could it be a mineral deposit or erosion feature? If so how did it form? The rock it's a part of is made of neat horizontal layers. Do any geologists (or areologists) have an answer to that? It looks distinctly like some kind of animal crawling up the rock face. Some people say it's very similar to the "facehugger" from the film series Alien. If it's "just a coincidence!" that it looks like that and I'm now suffering from pareidolia, then I repeat what I said about in the background link. Where's the cut-off point? Where do we all agree is the statistical ceiling above which you Skeptics cannot play the pareidolia joker?

See here for more background: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/nasa-sued-over-mars-anomaly.html.

And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/man-on-mars-in-this-decade.html.