I’m going to be honest here: I really only blogged about this story about an alleged traffic light in a NASA Mars photo because I wanted to keep my Photoshopping skills up to snuff. Oh, and to point out the folly of these UFO “enthusiasts” who pour over NASA images looking for any little thing that looks even remotely like something “intelligently designed.” But after months of lizards and rats and sheep-men, I think I’m done dealing with Mars rocks for the foreseeable future. Unless the next story inspires me to play with Photoshop some more. The actual photo is at the end of this article, for those interested.
I’m sorry, I just don’t see it…
A photo taken by National Aeronautic and Space Administration’s Curiosity Mars Rover was captured on 1:08 a.m. EDT on September 19. A “traffic signal” was spotted by a UFO enthusiast.
A British UFO enthusiast, Joe Smith, spotted the “extraterrestrial” signal, on the image captured by the Curiosity Rover with the help of the six-foot-high left-hand mast cam, reported the Huffington Post. This gives an opportunity to the conspiracy theorists to talk about another strange object in Mars.
According to the Western Daily Press, Joe Smith, 45 years of age, said that he had been following the images released by NASA since the beginning, and that he flicked through the pictures on the NASA Web site daily. NASA has been sending out pictures captured by the Curiosity Rover since it landed on the Red Planet in August 2012.
He came across the traffic signal-shaped object and thought that it looked a bit strange. He estimated that the size of the object would be around 12 inches.
Joe believes that the object that he spotted was “clearly intelligently designed.” He explained that he had posted the image on the internet and while few people thought that it did look like traffic lights, a few others said that it looked like a totem pole. He wrote on his latest video titled “Mars Traffic Light? Amazing Alien Object: on his YouTube Channel, ArtAlienTV-Mars Zoo that the object was mostly a rock.
When the images came out, another person noticed a weird “ball.” The person, blogger Paul Scott Anderson, described himself as a freelance space writer on his Twitter page. He is the publisher of The Meridiani Journal blog, a chronicle of planetary exploration.
According to the scientists at NASA, the “ball” was just a spherical rock that could have been formed by concretion. Discovery News described concretion as a process when minerals become hard and get compacted.
In the past, there have been many odd-looking objects that have been noticed in the images captured in Mars like an iguana and body parts like a finger, a skull and a thigh bone. But it was later found to be just rocks.
It’s a rock. Just a rock. A rock which, if a healthy amount of imagination is used, looks kind of like a traffic light. Kinda. Maybe. If you squint. And if you’re really tired. And you had a bad day at work that day. Or maybe I’m the silly one, and eons ago, ancient aliens actually left a rock carved to look like something that wouldn’t be invented for millions and millions of years, so that we’d know they were there at some point.
