Are there little-green men on Mercury? One UFO expert is convinced NASA photos show a city on the red-hot planet’s surface. Courtesy: Scott Waring

FIRST it was a face on Mars. Then it was Nazis on the moon. Now is it little green men on Mercury? One UFO expert is convinced NASA photos show a city on the red-hot planet’s surface.

UFO Sightings Daily author Scott Waring is set to sell more books after revealing what he claims are recently built structures “without breaks or fissures and clean with no dirt of dust blanketing them over time, which tells me … they are occupied.”

It’s not the first time such an extraordinary claim has been made. It was not long after the famous “Face of Mars” photo became popular that a whole “city” of structures — including pyramids and airstrips — was found nearby. Later, high-resolution imagery came up trumps — revealing a landscape of rock and dust like everywhere else on Mars.

RELATED: Has Google Earth exposed a secret base on the Moon?

Earlier this year “evidence” of a massive secret moonbase — like the Nazi base in spoof movie Iron Sky — was supposed to have been uncovered through an in-depth analysis of Google’s Moon map. This was shown to be simple “compression artefacting” caused by the software used to mesh a wide variety of photographs into one seamless interactive image.

So what’s the story with the new Mercury claims? Read on then add your comments below the story.

If a structure was built on Mercury, it would have to be incredibly hardy. Temperatures can swing by up to 600C as night turns into day — such is the raw power of the nearby Sun to what is its closest planet. There is no atmosphere to mitigate or distribute this heat, resulting in days of up to 430C and nights as low as -170C.

News_Module: Mercurty interactive map

Needless to say, the opportunity for a picnic at a nearby scenic crater would be limited.

Once again the evidence of extraterrestrial structures involves massive blow-ups of small and blurry satellite photographs that have been processed into an interactive map of the planet’s surface.

Waring, however, is undaunted by the challenges posed by such technicalities.

Instead, it’s the very nature of the Mariner 10 space probe’s cameras that make him so excited and inspired: They’re infra-red images that can “see” into shadows.

Here’s what he thinks he found:

News_Image_File: Monumental discovery ... if real, this ‘Face on Mercury’ structure as identified by ufosightingsdaily.com would be a truly epic feat of engineering.

A face on Mercury

Waring says he had found evidence of a “face” on Mercury, similar to that found on Mars decades ago by the Viking space probes. “It was massive in scale and appeared as if I was looking at the face of a statue here on Earth, but this was tens of floors high. I saved the photo and then a few days later a virus wiped out my whole computer. So it was gone.” He embarked on a five-year quest to find the “face” again. It was this quest that produced the new images of what he says are structures on Mercury.

News_Image_File: Shapes in the clouds of pixels ... some of Waring’s pictures presented as evidence of structures on Mercury.

Hidden honeycomb structures

“(Mariner 10’s) infra-red filter is so powerful that if you pour ink onto a typed page, you can see right through the ink and read the words as if the ink never existed,” Waring writes on his ufosightingsdaily.com blog. “That is what happened to the shadow areas on Mercury in this photo. The shadows hid a honeycomb-like structure that always varies in shape … Other structures are located near hills and mountains to blend in at a distance. This is why normal photos of Mercury will not have these structures in them.”

He goes on to highlight a variety of blurs on a variety of images as evidence of a vast complex of structures built into — and on — Mercury’s surface.

News_Image_File: What do you see? Alien structure or distorted digital image ... another of Waring’s Mercury ‘structure’ images.

Interpretation difficulties

Waring admits that recognising an alien structure is not easy. “People often misconstrue what an alien structure looks like when they see it ... Most alien structures look like black mountains (moon) or giant white mushrooms (moon), so finding a structure we can relate to is difficult.”

But we do have plenty of experience of the pitfalls human perceptions have when presented with grainy, blurry images.

The terms are pixelation and pareidolia. Pixelation will be looked at below. Pareidolia is the human mind’s interpolation of scant information into shapes it can recognise — such as an elephant in the clouds, a leopard in the shadows or a face on Mars.

All need to be accounted for before any claim of evidence can be asserted from a grainy photograph.

News_Image_File: Evolution of an icon ... from “Face on Mars” to mesa landform. All it took was a few extra pixels.

Learning from the past

We’ve been here before. When NASA engineers released the original “Face of Mars” photo back in 1976, they felt highlighting the artistic interplay of light and shadow in the image would help attract attention to the project.

As NASA’s website ruefully admits, “it certainly did”.

The 3km-wide pharaoh’s mask-like image became a pop sensation in the ’70s and ’80s. Such was the public fascination that it actually compelled NASA to make photographing the site a priority for the Mars Global Surveyor when it arrived in orbit in 1997. Once it turned its high-resolution cameras on the “face”, it was exposed to be just an oddly shaped mound. To make sure, Global Surveyor it took an even more comprehensive set of images — including laser scans — in 2001 when shadow conditions were similar to the original 1976 image.

The nearby “city” of “Cydonia” — with its pyramids exposed in glorious detail through extensive edge-sharpening and contrast-adjustment software to the original low-resolution 1970s images — ended up looking like almost every other rocky outcrop on the Red Planet. Global Surveyor’s pictures were much more detailed. Each pixel spanned a 1.5m area of Mars’ surface — enough to detail small aircraft or even a hut. No such structure showed up. A single pixel in the 1976 Viking camera spanned an area of more than 43m.

News_Image_File: Enhanced impressions ... these greatly enhanced versions from the 1976 Viking mission to Mars have been said to show a monumental “face” alongside a pyramidal city named “Cydonia”.

Pushing the edge of technology

What Waring fails to take into account is the digital nature of the images he is looking at. Not only are the original photographs taken at great distance under extreme conditions, the interactive map of Mercury’s surface he is examining is a composite of different pictures of different qualities taken at different times that have been electronically “stitched” together.

This adds to the already high degree of digital “artifacting” produced by the square pixels of digital cameras operating at the edge of their scale sensitivity.

Such distortion was behind claims of a secret moonbase being found via Google Earth’s interactive moon map earlier this year.

So the pixelated square streak may, in fact, be a streak instead of a structure. The light pixels in the shadows of craters may, in fact, be the result of over-contrasting and over-zooming. Not to mention over-reliance on a single infra-red band of Mariner 10’s multi-filter camera.

News_Image_File: Broken dreams ... the secret Nazi moonbase was shown to be a digital “stitch” mark, a side-effect of automated processes to mesh a maze of different photos into a seamless map of the Moon’s surface.

Where to next

Waring, as host of the UFO Sightings Daily website, seems certainly set to get a boost in clicks and some nice pocket money from product placement on his YouTube videos.

But he’s adamant that this confirms his belief in “life out there”.

“And to the aliens on Mercury, I send greetings. Since your structures have some commonality to our own, then there must be other things we have in common. We the people are asking to meet you. Ball’s in your court,” says Waring.

With such extraordinary claims, as the late, great Carl Sagan would say, comes the need for extraordinary evidence.

This is not it. The ball’s in Waring’s court to prove otherwise.

News_Image_File: Infographic: Matt Pike