A researcher in the U.K. is facing off with NASA, accusing the U.S. space agency of trying to cover up evidence of alien life on Mars. NASA’s Curiosity rover captured images of what Dr. Barry DiGregorio claims are alien tracks on Mars, but the agency believes the shapes captured by the rover were actually formed by water that was lying over crystals a long time ago.
DiGregorio told the Daily Star that the shapes in the images are actually trace fossils which prove that there were once “soft bodied creatures” inhabiting Mars. In an interview with the tabloid media outlet, the University of Buckingham researcher also accused NASA of trying to cover up evidence of alien life on the Red Planet. He claims that the U.S. space agency is hiding the truth because it wants to be the first to send humans to the Red Planet, which it is planning to do sometime in the 2030s.
He said that they haven’t seen anything else like the shapes captured on NASA’s Curiosity rover last month. He believes the shapes are actually trace fossils showing “sticks” attached to other objects. DiGregorio noted that NASA decided to move its rover on to the next point quickly after finding the shapes, indicating that they weren’t important enough to spend much time examining. He expressed surprise at that decision, calling it “very odd, despite the fact a gale crater was host to probably a series of lakes for billions and billions of years.
NASA published its take on the shapes uncovered by its rover last month. A press release from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology describes the shapes as looking similar to shapes observed by geologists studying crystals that formed in lakes on Earth that are drying up. However, the release also states that NASA scientists are “considering multiple possibilities for the origin of these features on ‘Vera Rubin Ridge’ on Mars.”
The space agency hopes the Curiosity rover will be able to help them figure out when the crystal-like bumps were formed in comparison to the formation of the sediment layers that are around them. NASA also wants to figure out whether the mineral that originally formed the shapes is still inside them or if it was dissolved and replaced. Scientists believe that the shapes could be evidence of a lake that has dried up.
However, DiGregorio disagrees with NASA’s finding. He said it doesn’t make sense that the shapes are crystals because they don’t “branch or twist.” He’s now working with other experts to take a closer look at the images captured by the Mars rover, and they plan to release a report arguing that NASA is wrong and that the trace fossils actually show evidence of alien life. DiGregorio has long believed that Mars was home to alien life in a lake about a billion years ago.
This certainly isn’t the first time he has been talking about alien life. He told Space.com earlier this year that some of the other images captured by the Curiosity rover looked like Ordovician trace fossils. The shapes in those images were tube-like, and some suggested that they may have been formed by creatures burrowing in the dirt on the Red Planet.
