Friday 8th December 2017

A Ball Found on Mars

Was Mars once subjected to an ancient alien war that left the planet stripped of its atmosphere?

Since as far back as the days of the original John Carter novel, A Princess of Mars, humanity has been fascinated by the possibility of exotic warrior races existing on our planet’s closest neighbor.

Getting a better look at the planet has put paid to most of these romantic hopes, as astronomers have revealed that if life did ever exist on Mars, it was a long, long time ago.

While professional scientists and experts are eager to see whether any traces of microscopic life might exist on Mars, some people still hold out hope for proof of something far cooler, like evidence of an ancient warfaring race that explain how Mars transformed from a relatively nice vacation spot to a dusty wasteland.

Scott C Waring of the UFO Sightings Daily has released a video which claims to show evidence of a war on the planet Mars. In his video, Waring points to an image from the Curiosity Rover that appears to show a round metal cannonball. According to Waring, this sight displays “100% evidence of a war on Mars.”

“This projectile is sitting on the surface above all the wrecked stone structures around it. Fragments of a civilization is sitting scattered in tiny pieces around this cannonball. I do believe these balls and millions of others were deliberately shot at Mars from space all at once to destroy their atmosphere, burn it away. What I mean is a large enough man-made meteor shower could strip Mars of its atmosphere and thus, destroy all or most life on the planet surface.”

The photograph is quite compelling – the image shows a single round grey ball that stands out from the red and brown rocks all around it. Waring does seem to have a point here, as the cannonball looks too perfect and spherical to be a complete accident, especially considering that it stands out so distinctly from anything else on the horizon. There’s just one problem—the “cannonball” is 100 percent not evidence of war, because it’s a commonly occurring natural phenomenon that has already been explained by scientists studying the planet, and has been common knowledge among genuine Mars enthusiasts for many years.

According to the team at NASA behind the Curiosity Rover, this is an example of a phenomenon called “concretion,” in which minerals build up in bubbles within sedimentary rock at the bottom of lakebeds and oceans. The minerals are nice and hard, while the sediment rock is relatively soft, and is worn away over time by the water in the lake. Thus, perfectly spherical metal balls are left behind when the lakes dry up, and YouTubers can speculate endlessly about a bunch of facts they’ve just made up about the effects of cannonballs on Martian atmosphere.

It’s also worth noting that Mars does have an atmosphere, albeit one that’s a lot weaker than our own, which doesn’t exactly help Waring’s case.

Even a basic Google search reveals the specifics of the process of concretion, and the fact that NASA has been very eager to talk about the process in the past. Waring seems to have deliberately opted to either ignore scientific fact, or has refused to research anything that might explain away his “cannonball” theory.

It’s almost as if, having created a YouTube channel named “UFO Sightings Daily”, Waring finds himself under a tight deadline to find new proof of extraterrestrial life, and feels that pesky research and accurate facts would get in the way of all the sweet, sweet advertising money that he could otherwise get. This has clearly worked out for him—at the time of writing, he’s made approximately a whole $7 from his ill-researched, speculative hogwash. Clearly, this endeavor has proven worthwhile.

Of course, while Waring shouts into his own personal echo chamber, the sign of concretion spotted in the video is actually very exciting – these round balls are evidence that Mars once had large lakes of water, and so the more of these that are spotted, the better we’re able to map out the ancient landscape of the planet. It could be that one of these lakes holds evidence that bacteria once lived in pools of nutrient-rich water upon the planet. We know that micro-organisms can survive on Mars, so at present, this is perhaps our best chance for finding alien life.

ALf knows for a fact that the truth is nothing like the story of the cannon ball. The truth is that in a match between Aston Villa and Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in 1966 his second half 30 yard shot went so high and so wide that the ball was never seen again. It went high and higher still into outer space landing on the surface of Mars 12 years later.

Anthony Hateley was an English footballer who played as a centre forward. He played for several clubs in The Football League, including Notts County, Aston Villa, Chelsea and Liverpool.