The Daily Mail has reported that an American “armchair astronaut” claims to have discovered a mysterious structure on the surface of the red planet by studying images on Google Mars.
David Martinez — whose YouTube video of the alleged base, which he has dubbed “Bio-station Alpha,” has racked up over 200,000 hits so far — claims to have randomly uncovered the picture while scanning the surface of the planet one day.
Describing the ‘structure’ as a living quarters with red and blue stripes on it, to the untrained eye it looks nothing more than a white splodge on an otherwise unblemished red landscape.
Martinez even lists the co-ordinates 49’19.73″N 29 33’06.53″W so others can go see the anomaly for themselves. In a pre-recorded ‘fly by’ video of the object, Mr Martines describes what he thinks the station might be. In his own words:
‘This is a video of something I discovered on Google Mars quite by accident. I call it Bio-station Alpha, because I’m just assuming that something lives in it or has lived in it. It’s very unusual in that it’s quite large, it’s over 700 feet long and 150 feet wide, it looks like it’s a cylinder or made up of cylinders.”
Martinez also speculated on what else the structure might be:
“It could be a power station or it could be a biological containment or it could be a glorified garage – hope it’s not a weapon. Whoever put it up there had a purpose I’m sure. I couldn’t imagine what the purpose was. I couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to live on Mars. It could be a way station for weary space travelers. It could also belong to NASA, I don’t know that they would admit that.”
Although Martinez concedes that the base may have been an initially terrestrial project, he feels that it would have been difficult to pull of without fanfare:
“I don’t know if they could pull off such a project without all the people seeing all the material going up there. I sort of doubt NASA has anything to do with this. I don’t know if NASA even knows about this.”
The finding is similar to that of the infamous face on Mars, which was uncovered by the Viking 1 probe in 1976, and swiftly dismissed by scientists at NASA as a mere trick of the light caused by a quirk of geography that threw shadows over a small hill on the Cydonia region of Mars, making the inanimate rock look like a carved face.
NASA and Google have both yet to respond to this new “discovery.”
