This blog actually started off to be about something completely different than what it ended up being about. When Mr. S.D. sent the following article about NASA director Jim Bridenstine's remarks about going back to the Moon and "staying there" and wanting "lots more people in space," I thought this was a worthy topic for today's high octane speculation. Here's the article that Mr. S.D. passed along:

But then I clicked a link within the article that led me to this story, and to the picture that begins it, a picture of something on the surface of Mars which, initially, NASA designated - no doubt with palpitating hearts and beads of sweat - as "foreign object": https://bgr.com/2018/08/17/mars-foreign-object-curiosity-inspection/

Here's the picture from that article, which I have performed color, contrast, levels enhancements upon, with two arrows pointing to some very weird things. The arrow to the center and left of the picture is the "foreign object" apparently that NASA has now "explained" as being nothing but an unusually shaped rock, and the arrow to the upper right is "something else" that caught my eye. Here's the photo from the article, as I performed the above transforms:

What instantly pops out is that the object in question, via these transforms, appears to have a high, and almost metallic, albedo. More importantly, when I cropped that section of the photo, this property not only persists, but it appears to be relatively thin for a "rock", and is casting a definite shadow which tends to confirm its "thinness":

I don't know about you, but Never A Straight Answer's explanation that this is just a rock (subtext: "a trick of light and shadow") does not seem to this pair of eyes to be much of a rock. If it is a rock, why are its albedo properties so very different from all the other "rocks" surrounding it, and why is it so very much thinner than the other obvious rocks around it?

My conclusion: it's not a rock, and NASA is saying something ridiculous again, and knows it is saying something ridiculous (nod nod, wink wink).

But the other thing that caught my eye was "possible object number two" as I've designated it:

Now, granted, this strange thing looks both like ordinary fissures and cracks in a table-like rock on the surface, which it could very well be. But beneath the central "hole" (if it is a hole), one sees a rectangular yellowish "thing", and above the "hole" one sees two "fissures" at the end of which are two high albedo rocks. Or, one is looking at a "something", with a rectangular yellowish "something" underneath a central black "some other thing", with two black "leg-or-antennae-like things" at the end of which two "globe like things" of high albedo appear to be attached.

So we have a "something" on Mars which definitely looks to my eyes as something metallic, and a "possible other thing" with its own high weirdness. Given the context, my vote on the "second something" is that it's not a rock either.

But in this case, your eyes may see something(s) very different from mine, and thus this may all be a case of "you tell me."

See you on the flip side...

1535713219274

1535713558865