This intriguing and suggestive article was sent to me by Mr. K.B., an Indian, and for those who have been tracking the shenanigans in space, this is disturbing at so many levels, if true. The shenanigans in space, let us recall, are almost too numerous to mention. We have - and this is just the short list - UFOs that have been captured by space shuttle footage, being shot at, performing dizzying maneuvers, inspecting nuclear weapons sites, turning on, or off, ICBMS in the USSA and USSR, diving at civilian airlines, being shot at by military aircraft, and on and on; we have satellites being detected early in the Cold War in polar orbits, weighing vastly more than the USSA or USSR could put into orbit at the time, and that neither knew the origin of; we have neat geometric arrangements of obelisk-like objects on the Moon, a Face and several pyramids on Mars, a satellite of Saturn that looks like a battered ruin of George Lucas' Star Wars "Death Star," a fact that was not publicly known until almost two decades after the Star Wars epic came out; we have a Soviet Mars probe - Phobos II - photographing a long metalling-looking and definitely artificial "something" as it approached Mars and then, suddenly, went silent; we have the strange and peculiar behavior of NASA around the Mars Orbiter and Global Surveyor; we have the weird failure of Russia's Phobos Grunt probe, and the even weirder behavior of the Russian government all the way up to Dmitri Medvedev, and highly placed Russian generals, suggesting it was American sabotage, then almost complete silence from them on the subject; we have the weirdly "sudden" stories about asteroid mining, and the need for asteroid defense, Japanese space cannon...

...on and on we could go. Now, in this list of celestial strangeness, one odd thing that researchers have pointed out, is the unusually high percentage of failures associated with Mars Probes. And some have gone so far as to suggest that many of them were either sabotaged, or that we were told that the probe failed for whatever reason, while - perhaps - the probe was merely taken off the grid and went deeply black. All of this suggests, of course, that there is something on Mars that someone doesn't want us - you and me - to see. The question is, after Faces, pyramids, odd "junk" on the ground in some cases that looks suggestively "machined," what could be so sensitive that no one wants us to look.

Now, apparently, India is the latest victim of the Mars Space Probe Mystery:

Cryogenic countdown: How the GSLV became India’s missile impossible

Now this has all the makings of a good "Robert Ludlum" type spy thriller, complete with honey pots (of apparently not-to0-attractive" honey"), court trials, and CIA assets hovering closely in the background. What is intriguing in the whole story is the mention that US pressure on the then Yeltsin regime in Russia halted transfer of cryogenic rocket technology to India, a situation that one can only presume might have changed - perhaps considerably - under the Putin-Medvedev governments. And squatting in the middle of it all is one of India's top scientists, pointing fingers at the CIA:

"In this backdrop, Narayanan’s allegation that the United States wanted to stunt India’s space programme deserves to be looked into. According to the scientist, his arrest was part of an agenda of the United States accomplished by the CIA conniving with rogue agents of India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB). "One of them says Narayanan was Rattan Sehgal, who was the IB’s counter intelligence chief and was associated with the ISRO investigation. Sehgal was later caught red-handed by the then IB chief Arun Bhagath. He was accused of having worked for the CIA, which led to his unceremonious exit from the IB in November 1996."

Rogue elements in Indian intelligence working with the CIA? this is beginning to sound very familiar. But the article notes not only suspiciously dead engineers that had worked on India's ballistic missile submarines, but also this:

"The Mars mission is a sideshow – a mere $75 million roll of the dice. Less spectacular but vastly more important is the planned launch of the GSLV in December. The GSLV is the granddaddy of India’s rocket arsenal. Compare this: while the much hyped Mars probe, Mangalyaan, is carrying an instrument package weighing just 15 kg, the GSLV is designed to carry Indian astronauts to the moon in the early 2020s. The heavy lift rocket is also needed to launch the next generation of India’s spy satellites, which ideally should not be launched from foreign shores. "Now check this out. The Mars mission took just 15 months to launch after it was green-lighted. The GSLV project on the other hand has taken over three decades and yet according to Narayanan it has been a stubborn disaster. When you join the dots….the finger of suspicion points only in one direction. Protection racket "Unlike Iran, which has provided round the clock security to its top nuclear scientists after five of them were murdered (perhaps by Israel) India does not even offer its personnel working on strategic projects even token protection."

In other words, India suspects that "someone" - the USSA in all likelihood - does not want their Mars projects, and equally, their planned manned Moon landing, to go forward. And that, I strongly suspect, is because there are still things that "they" would rather not have "us" or the Indians or anyone else "see"...

...at least, not until "they" can get in touch with corresponding people in Russia, China, Germany, France, India, and Brazil, to coordinate the press releases, and what will, and will not, be said.

But, in such circumstances, it only takes one rooster. Someone in India just might be that rooster. In the meantime, expect New Delhi to beef up security on its scientists and engineers dramatically.

See you on the flip side.