A NASA employee claims to have seen people walking on Mars in 1979 next to the Viking Lander (Picture: NASA)

A woman who claims to be a former NASA employee claims to have seen evidence of the most monumental cover-up in space history in 1979 – as she saw two human figures in space suits walk calmly towards the Viking lander (the grandfather of today’s Mars Curiosity Rover) across the Martian surface.

‘Jackie’ called in to Coast to Coast AM in America this year, and asked the presenter to ‘solve a 27-year-old mystery for me.’

She claimed to have been working for NASA, handling downlink telemetry from the lander – the first vehicle to send back images of Mars’s surface – when she saw two people walking on the surface.



‘That old Viking rover was running around,’ she said, saying that she and six colleagues were watching on multiple screens. ‘Then I saw two men in space suits – not the bulky suits we normally used, but they looked protective. They came over the horizon walking to the Viking Explorer.’


Naturally, UFO and conspiracy websites have lapped this up – with some claiming that the humans may have been there to polish the lander’s solar panels.

This seems a little odd, considering that if there were humans there, presumably they could just fill the lander with petrol instead- or take photographs themselves.

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‘There were probably about half a dozen of us downstairs,’ ‘Jackie’ said. ‘We were just maintaining the equipment. Then they cut off our video feed.’

‘We ran upstairs – but they locked the door, and taped paper over the door so we couldn’t see. My question is – were they our guys?’

Other conspiracy theorists claim there were ‘secret’ landings on Mars in the Sixties – and the Apollo landings were actually a cover-up for wider exploration of the solar system.

Former CIA pilot John Lear claims that NASA landed on Mars in 1966, and that humans adapted to breathe the thin Martian atmosphere.

It should also be noted, however, that Lear believes that human souls travel to the moon when they die to be processed inside a mile-high glass tower, and that the toxic, crushingly dense Venus is actually ‘green and beautiful.’

Nigel Watson, author of the Haynes UFO Investigations Manual, says, ‘These accounts of secret space missions seem to be growing in number and remind me of the infamous Project Serpo.’

‘In November 2005, a contact called ‘anonymous’, who said they worked for the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) started sending information about an extraordinary alien exchange programme, called Project Serpo. Basing his claims on a 3,000-page document written in the late 1970s, he boldly claimed that six aliens were recovered from the Roswell crash.’

‘Claims that aliens living and/or dead were recovered from the Roswell crash are nothing new, but in this case it was stated that an alien survivor from the crash, called EBE 1, helped to organise twelve specially trained people to visit his home planet Serpo in the Zeta Reticuli solar system. This mission occurred in 1965 and they remained there until 1978. During their stay two of them died, two remained on the planet and the rest, after returning to Earth, have died because of the high levels of radiation they were exposed to on Serpo.’

‘Bill Ryan who posted these claims online concluded that ‘the Serpo story is a mixture of disinformation (i.e. truth mixed with added fictional elements) and naturally occurring compounded errors…surrounding a core of extraordinary truth.’