The Daily Mail reports, Dec. 2, 2014, that Scott Waring of the UFO Sightings Daily blog discovered something right out of the Twilight Zone.
While looking at NASA images of Mars taken from the Spirit Rover’s Pancam ‘Everest’ panorama on October 1 to 3, 2005, Waring spotted what appears to be a strange rock that resembles a human head with a nose, chin, eyes and hair. He writes, “From the way its standing up I would say that it is a full statue, but is buried from the shoulders down.”
Another UFO enthusiast used a software program to “clean up” the image of the head. He writes on UFO Sightings Hotspot: “By cleaning the image in a software program, I discovered that this relic has an uncanny resemblance to the United States president, Barack Obama.”
The original image is taken from the Spirit Rover’s Pancam ‘Everest’ panorama, acquired on sols 620 to 622 (October 1 to 3, 2005) from a position in the Columbia Hills at the true summit of Husband Hill on the Martian surface.
The image was released online by NASA, and even turned into an interactive panorama.
The summit region of Mars is a broad plateau about 100 meters (300 feet) above the surrounding plains of Gusev crater, consisting mostly of outcrop rocks and windblown drifts.
The image is the latest in a series claiming to show faces on Mars, the first of which is the notorious simian-like “Face on Mars” in the Cydonia region of the red planet.
In a video, Waring expresses bafflement that NASA used arrows to point out various features on the Mars landscape, including the head: “This rover found some objects and NASA was pointing them out with different arrows. I was just thinking ‘wow Nasa’s really not helping us at all find any of these objects on Mars’ and bam, there is an arrow pointing right to the face.”
NASA says the arrows are to point out different kinds of rocks on Mars.
So is the Obama head on Mars a phenomenon called pareidolia? — the psychological propensity of humans to see a pattern in random data?
But then I’m reminded of a post I did nearly 3 years ago, “Obama went to Mars?!,” Jan. 11. 2012.
There is an agency within the U.S. Department of Defense called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known by its acronym DARPA.
Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, DARPA is charged with developing new military technology. The agency focuses on short-term (2 to 4 years) projects and is independent from other more conventional military R&D, reporting directly to senior Department of Defense management. DARPA has around 240 personnel and a budget of $3.2 billion. Since its founding in 1958, DARPA has been responsible for funding the development of many technologies that have had a major effect on the world, such as computer networking.
DARPA has six program offices, all of which report to the DARPA director. The current DARPA director (since 2009) is Regina E. Dugan.
Some of DARPA’s current active projects are:
- ACTUV – A project to build an unmanned Anti-submarine warfare vessel.
- ArcLight (missile) – Ship based weapon system that is capable of striking targets nearly anywhere on the globe. It is based on the Standard Missile 3.
- Boeing X-37
- Combat Zones That See – “track everything that moves” in a city by linking up a massive network of surveillance cameras
- Human Universal Load Carrier battery-powered human exoskeleton
- Proto 2 – a thought-controlled prosthetic arm
- Remote-controlled insects
- Transformer – flying armoured car
DARPA (under its first name, ARPA) was created 1958 in response to the 1957 Soviet launching of Sputnik. Given its beginning and its mission to develop cutting-edge military technology, the news that two DARPA scientists claim they once served as chrononauts (time-traveling, universe-exploring government agents) may not be completely outlandish.
But what is outlandish is that the two scientists say they had been accompanied on a Mars mission by a teenage Barack Obama, then named Barry Soetoro.
Spencer Ackerman reports for science and technology magazine Wired, Jan. 3, 2012:
As a young man in the early 1980s, Obama was part of a secret CIA project to explore Mars. The future president teleported there, along with the future head of Darpa.
That’s the assertion, at least, of a pair of self-proclaimed time-traveling, universe-exploring government agents. Andrew D. Basiago and William Stillings insist that they once served as “chrononauts” at Darpa’s behest, traversing the boundaries of time and space. They swear: A youthful Barack Obama was one of them. […]
As “Barry Soetero,” the 19-year-old Obama was one of 10 youths selected to secretly teleport to and from Mars, forming a band of interplanetary Teen Titans. Regina Dugan, the director of Darpa, was another member.
Between 1981 and 1983, Obama is supposed to have visited Mars twice, by way of a teleportation chamber called a “jump room.” Basiago, a fellow chrononaut, told the website Exopolitics that he saw Obama “walk back to the jump room from across the Martian terrain.” To acknowledge his comrade, Obama is said to have told Basiago, “We’re here” — apparently, “with some sense of fatalism.”
It is not known what exactly Obama did on Mars. […] “Simply put, your task is to be seen and not eaten,” an elder chrononaut, retired Army Maj. Ed Dames, is alleged to have told a young Obama.
Wired’s Ackerman concluded his article with:
Officially, the White House says Obama never went to Mars.
You can’t make this stuff up.
See also “What’s that scar on Obama’s head?”
~Eowyn