Astronomer Philip Plait is tired of radio personality Richard Hoagland's claims. He's had enough of Hoagland's assertions that NASA is covering up evidence of extraterrestrial life, that the infamous Face on Mars was built by sentient aliens and, of late, that otherworldly machine parts are embedded in the red planet's dirt.And then there's the mile-long translucent Martian worm.On Hoagland's web site, there are several images from various space probes said to possibly show evidence for ET. Recent Mars rover photos include not just rocks, Hoagland and other contributors maintain, but common objects that might tell of alien civilization -- a bowl, a stove, a piston.Hoagland has since 1983, he says, led "an outside scientific team in a critically acclaimed independent analysis of possible intelligently-designed artifacts" on other worlds, using spacecraft data from NASA and other missions.Plait, author of "Bad Astronomy" (Wiley & Sons, 2002), which debunks space myths and common factual misconceptions, had for years not countered Hoagland directly, because he did not want to give a man he calls a "pseudoscientist" the "air time that he so desperately seeks."But last week Plait took his intellectual gloves off.Plait has two words for the latest claims of alien objects on Mars. The first is "garbage." The second and more scientific word is "pareidolia." This is the same phenomenon that makes us see animals or other familiar objects in clouds."It's pretty common," Plait said of pareidolia. "Just a few months ago, a water spot on my shower curtain took on the uncanny form of the face of Vladimir Lenin." Plait took a picture of the liquid Lenin and uses it illustrate his contention that, though objects on the surface of Mars can sometimes take on interesting shapes, they are just a bunch of rocks.
View: Full Article | Source: space.com