I really don't get all this fascination with rocket technology. If NASA is to be believed we've hardly made any advancement in propulsion systems since BEFORE WWII!

Sure, the materials are more refined and we're building them on a much larger scale. But rockets remain little more than expensive fireworks. Incredibly crude.

I've never believed NASA's story about them having no sub-orbital delivery mechanism in the wake of the shuttle's retirement. It's utterly ludicrous to think the United States with it's trillion-dollar-plus defence budget would allow itself to be in such a position. If NASA has no means of getting into space this tells me it's been handed off to another government agency - most likely the Navy. Let's not forget that NASA's astronaut program wasn't the only one in existence. For decades they ran a shadow operation out of Vandenberg AFB (doing what?)

I haven't looked into this but I'd be very surprised if the US hasn't been servicing one or more secret space stations with experimental craft over the past decade (they've done it before, decades ago, with a manned spy station crewed by two). Granted, it was a bit of a flop. But the fact that it stayed unknown for thirty years is instructive.

My guess is they have been flitting about space for some time with exotic ship designs. Perhaps even Ed Fouche's TR-3B. A LOT of people have reported seeing a vehicle which seems to closely approximate the TR-3B (the most interesting of all being two very surprised Belgian F-16 fighter pilots).

Here is a link to Andrew Johnson's truly fascinating lecture, rlSecrets of the Solar Systemrl

Admittedly there's a lot of speculation here - but on the specific subject of NASA's tampering with Mars rover photographs Johnson is unquestionably correct.

From the work I've carried out in image editing, digital colour calibration and grading as well as forensic photograph analysis I feel confident in agreeing with Johnson that NASA's ostensible excuse for tampering with Mars' colour is completely bogus and has no basis in fact. Yes, it is possible that a CCD can go screwy (especially in such a harsh environment) and record images with the wrong colour cast. But the method by which NASA claims to have re-calibrated the instrument is bizarre and simply couldn't achieve the kind of colour shifts we are seeing. I spent a good hour trying to match their results in Photoshop (using the same source image) and no matter how hard I tried I couldn't achieve their outcome without performing specific localised adjustments which threw the rest of the image's colour out completely. I mean, sure - it's possible if you use masks. But by doing so you are no longer calibrating the instrument.

Which leaves the big question: why? Some of the visual phenomena we see in this lecture are truly baffling. Admittedly there may be perfectly innocuous explanations for some - but NASA isn't helping itself by either stonewalling the queries of researchers or offering explanations which are completely at odds with NASA's reputation for scientific rigor.

I should imagine that people at NASA are so fatigued with rebuffing the endless stream of conspiracists that many serious questions probably often get shredded with the flat earthers and ISS-hoax nutters.

The big question isn't "why". The big questions are posed by the almost unmanageable wealth of raw data being endlessly produced by space efforts from not only NASA, and by no mean not only from Mars, arriving in such volume that it would take batallions of scientists centuries to properly process every byte.

But yes, they may have some secret reason for "tampering" with Mars Rover images to alter shades of colour for some nefarious purpose. I personally would suggest that is patent nonsense - particularly as there are squillions of images from not one, but several, surface craft and if you were going to "tamper" with one image then surely, you'd need to tamper with - literally - millions. But hey. Maybe there is some secret reason why NASA wants to hide from the world that the shades of colour on Mars are pink not red, or whatever. Maybe it would be too much for humanity to take. If you are with them to the extent that you believe they actually do launch craft, and did land working rovers on Mars, which genuinely do stream data back to Earth, then it's all good banter.

Whether you think this is nonsense or not - it really doesn't alter the fact that NASA is tampering with photographs and its excuse for doing so is neither credible nor scientific. If you don't see a problem with that then maybe it's time for you to start being truthful to yourself.

I have about as much faith in NASA's commitment to truth as I do in a snake's commitment to veganism. It's a military operation from start to finish. I mean, if I suddenly waxed lyrical about the British Army's obsession with honesty you'd think me cracked in the head. So do me a favour and stop asking me to believe in the tooth fairy.

As for the images from Mars - my view is that some of them are real whilst others are either edited or outright fakes. It's not as though they haven't faked images in the past. Given that NASA runs several duplicate rovers in so-called "Analogue Sites" whose topology closely matches the Martian surface it would be very easy to perform the necessary colour grading in order to fool the public.

Why this is so? I think the answer is blindingly obvious: they are trying to hide evidence of life forms on Mars. I think they've known life exists in some rudimentary form since the first Viking lander positively detected life in the Martian soil (a fact which was covered up on a trumped up scientific pretext which was bogus from the outset - not least because the instrument used to disqualify the test was known to be faulty by the entire Viking lander team).

Given that all the early photographs (as well as several recent ones) showed a distinctly blue sky I'm inclined to believe the initial colour calibration was correct and that Mars' atmosphere is indeed that colour. Certainly they had to violate their own colour calibration procedures to achieve the now recognisable red tint. How do we know this? By looking at the colours of the four calibration points in photographs with the red filter applied. These markers should have been the basis for any colour shift changes. The fact that NASA chose to completely ignore them and impose their own arbitrary colour cast suggests that the people who devised the optical sensor package were incompetent - or some other agenda is afoot here.

Why change? I think the answer is partly to do with the telltale signature of organic processes being easier to detect in a blue sky. I also think that by red-shifting the atmosphere they also make it easier for those editing Mars images to clone out inconvenient artifacts without leaving the telltale traces that experienced Photoshop users can spot a mile off. I have attempted to clone the same portion of duplicate images and it is definitely harder to detect changes at a pixel level in the photograph which has been colour shifted into the red.

People really should take a long hard look at the reams of high-resolution photographs NASA attributes to the Mars rovers because they are littered with all kinds of strange anomalies which at the very least demand more explanation than NASA seems willing to give.

There have been several books which explore this, most notably Charles W. Shultz III's rlA Fossil Hunter's Guide To Marsrl containing - YOU GUESSED IT - 400 pages of Martian fossils which NASA seems to have missed completely.

I've seen a number of these images and whilst it's tough to draw reliable conclusions on many there exists and hefty number which have not only been identified as fossils by palaeontologists - but even former NASA employees!

Shultz claims this is firm evidence of past Martian life. But there's an equally plausible explanation - these are earth-based fossils shot in one of the many (conveniently) remote locations NASA uses to test its rovers (such the island of Spitzbergen, Devon Island etc) dressed up as Martian landscapes.

And we're not just talking about fossils. Keen observers who comb through these images at high magnification have picked up all manner of weird and wonderful artefacts (from dead rodents to lumps of wood). There's a revealing clip somewhere on Youtube which I'll try to locate in which several palaeontologists are passed one image after the other and the endless series of rolled eyes and stifled guffaws tells its own story.

Is there any external evidence we can offer which might support this story? Well, we could start with the testimony of the so-called "9/11 Hacker", Gary McKinnon, who claimed that the Johnson Space Centre was running a department whose job it was to airbrush out evidence of extraterrestrial life on Mars. McKinnon just barely escaped a 75-year sentence in the United States for hacking into NASA servers so it's safe to assume they thought he had seen something he shouldn't have.

But I encourage everyone to look for themselves. Download a handful of high-resolution images and spend some time scrutinising them at 100-150% crop. I've just tried it now with a randomly selected panorama shot and it only took five minutes to find two artifacts which looked completely out of place. Again, I'm not saying there isn't a good explanation - or that NASA is faking all its shots. It's the sheer VOLUME of these oddities coupled with some of the ridiculous answers NASA gives as an explanation (when it bothers to at all - which isn't often) which leaves one feeling suspicious.

Let us not forget that it wasn't tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorists which claimed the words NASA are an acronym for "Never A Straight Answer" - it was NASA's own employees!

I am a very experienced Photoshop user and the above is in my considered view conspiracist nonsense.

Images from space are all processed one way or another (although a vast array of unprocessed images is available too) and the images that make the media are specially processed to make sense and illustrate stuff for the layman. For example, false colours in a nebula, or on Pluto, to emphasize features.

Sadly, there is nothing that can be done by them which will not immediately be converted into a conspiracy theory by someone and they will have no shortage of adherents whose default position is that every single thing is part of some overwhelming conspiracy, from a middle-ground one like yours (that the rover is on Mars, but NASA is "covering up" something to do with life on Mars); to the "Don't Be Sheeple Nobody Nor Nothing Ever Left Earth You Can't Survive The Van Allen Belts Its All In A Hollywood Studio" extremists, to the adherents that we are all in real-life Truman Show.

I much prefer Occam in the typical scenario.

Often people link as you did) to videos by self-appointed "experts" - I tend from weary experience to give those a miss as the large quantity I have seen have invariably turned out to be by people who are deluded and are much easier to spot than your Photoshop examples. But I did dip into the one you posted, and while i have only watched 10% of it's 1 hour-plus, this was more than enough to entirely discredit this guy in my eyes as he has clearly lost sight of simple hard cold facts in pursuit of his own agenda. I stopped watching when he referred to the so-called Monolith on Mars (an interesting feature) and then panned images of many other features that he implied were a proliferation of other monoliths - when it would be obvious to a schoolchild that in fact they were lengthened shadoesw from standard rocks near the terminator at sunset/sunrise. An embarrassing thing to watch a man putting himself forward as an expert analyst of some sort propounding.

Occam might ask, if when the first Rovers landed on Mars, and when NASA clearly found out about "telltale organic processes", are they really so stupid if they wanted to for some (unexplained) reason hide the existence of these processes from mankind, that they would instead launch a series of further craft to the planet, and make freely available over many years millions of images from these craft?

That is my short answer. I am extremely grateful to NASA for their indefatigable efforts to advance our knowledge of the universe, and am in awe of their technical achievements most recently the superb Pluto mission. If however they have the technology to do all that - you think they would spoil the ship for a ha'porth of incompetent buffoons who couldn't fake images properly? And incompetent supervisors/superiors who could't properly check fake work before it is released to the world? Really? Given the importance of such an imagined task, would it be left to Australian backpackers on a gap year? And to cap it all, simultaneously release the raw data too? I don't think so.

People want to know what Mars looks like. That itself is a loaded question. The view from your own front window looks like a million different things and colours depending on the time of year, or the time of day. NASA has always readily agreed that colour reproduction isn't an exact science, and indeed isn't really possible. As a Photoshop expert, you will understand that colour balance is a highly subjective thing.
Secondly, people perceive colours differently, sometimes greatly so. (Remember the is it blue dress anyone? - had that been on Mars, the conspiracy world would have literally exploded!).

This difficulty (impossibility, if you like) is the precise reason why NASA often releases several versions, the raw file, unprocessed colour images and what they suggest would be true-colour versions. But there would be two true-colour versions, the first is what would the view look like in Earth-like lighting conditions, the second, what would it look like through the interference of Mars' atmosphere. Mars is called the red planet because it is. The atmosphere contains red dust. This gives a "false colour" to any image, to a greater or lesser extent, depending how much dust is in the air at your location. So, yes, an image could look very reddish if you were stood next to the rover; and yes, the same view could be much brighter and "earth like" if you filter out the red cast.

However, "manipulating" is very much part of astronomy. For example, no human eye would ever see the Cat's Eye Nebula as the bright, green/red object from many well-known images. Indeed, most of what the Hubble telescope (if you believe in its existence) produces is the result of very long exposures. Indeed the same could be said for the vast majority of astronomical images from any source including my own DSLR. Manipulation is therefore the norm, and one man's manipulation will produce a different looking image than the next. But neither are "fake" - they represent reality, over a longer timeframe. Or reality if you were several light years nearer, and had the eye sensitivity of a barn owl. The point is just to help visualise what is there, and visualize it in different ways (see for example the myriad shots of the Sun taken with hydrgogen alpha and any number of other filters).

I think overall your error is forgetting that the human eye can only se a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and only at high illumination levels. You are taking the 2+2 of standard attempts to image standard views, and making 666.

Now, I think that has dealt with the "Astronomy" aspect of this discussion. I don't really think we need to go down NASA conspiracy roads here as it would again derail it. I would be happy to continue rational discussion in a NASA conspiracy or whatever thread if you want to start one but this is just to draw people's attention to what they can go out and see in the night sky, which does include Mars (if you believe that it exists as a planet and is not a NASA holograph).

Nope, that's a loaded statement meant to browbeat independent thinking into quiescence. You should know by now that I attach a much higher degree of significance to my own opinions than yours (for a whole host of reasons) so I really don't know why you bothered typing it.



This is a gross misrepresentation and you know it. I don't know ANYONE, ANYWHERE who believes every single event taking place on this planet and others forms part of a "grand conspiracy". Likewise, I don't know ANYONE, ANYWHERE who believes conspiracy doesn't exist - full-stop. We ALL inhabit a region in-between both extremes. I mean, weren't YOU the guy who claimed the SL Challenge Cup draw is "rigged"? Do as I say but not as I do, eh?



You do realise that a monolith is, BY DEFINITION, a "geological feature consisting of a single massive stone or rock". So you're discounting someone for pointing out "monoliths" on Mars when he is accurately describing the VERY THING YOU CLAIM HE ISN'T? This is what happens when people get their knowledge from movies ...



Well, what do you propose? Stop all further missions? Bit suspicious, that - not to mention hard to justify. And as you know perfectly well, the system of government graft in the US is fundamentally wrapped up with the maxim "Use it or lose it".



Good grief, man - you sound like some kind of fawning acolyte of one of those weird and wonderful religious cults. NASA is run by human beings just like the rest of us. They have the same hangups, are prone to making the same mistakes and are periodically bothered by the same naggings of conscience. You think a guy paid to sit in front of a PC all day editing images is any more honest and diligent just because he works for NASA? Who do you think leaked some of the photographs which Shultz used in his publication?



On the contrary - colour reproduction is a VERY precise science. You are conflating colour PERCEPTION which is not the same thing. No one is talking here about colour perception. When I say it's IMPOSSIBLE for NASA to change their own colour calibration markers from blue to vivid red using only a colour cast transfer and still record an accurate colour rendition (under earth conditions) it's because it really is impossible. Colour does not work this way. You can have one. You can have the other. But you can't have both. By all means investigate yourself - but I'm afraid you'll be wasting your time.



See above.



I've no idea why you are introducing any of the above into the debate. It's irrelevant. We're talking about NASA's excuse for completely ignoring their own colour calibration procedure, imposing a seemingly arbitrary value and then offering an excuse which introduces a variable which we can't test and yet they knew of it before the mission was even launched. Did the scientists who designed the optical package and the calibration tests just FORGET about this dust?



Again, all of this is irrelevant. We know that some degree of editing takes place and with good reason. But there's a big difference between attempting to render non-visible radiation in false colour and FAKING images. I'm sure you can grasp the distinction.



No, you are rambling on about any number of issues which aren't issues.



Erm ... in case you didn't know science is and has never been about arguments from authority. If it were the church would still be running the whole show. The linked video provides EVIDENCE to support a THEORY seeking to explain OBSERVED PHENOMENA. Now, we can agree or disagree about the validity of the evidence and the theory - but don't think for one moment that it doesn't meet the criteria of science. Most of the people linked to in the presentation are scientists themselves. Two even work for NASA.

I also don't mind saying that there's a ton of solid observational, circumstantial and other evidence which suggests that the reason a rocket-based Mars mission has repeatedly been pushed back and had its funding cut is because [iwe are already on Mars.[/i

I think the US military has been working with a revolutionary electro-gravitic drive system based around a magnetic field disrupter which utilises a mercury based plasma pressurised to over 250,000 atmospheres, and rotated up to 50,000 rpm. This allows the operator to tap into the universe's infinite reserves of zero-point energy resulting in a "warpage" of gravity of up to 90% (it also implies Einsten's theory of relativity is no longer a barrier to close-to-FTL travel and perhaps beyond).

I believe vehicles with this drive system have been operational since the early nineteen eighties. At that time it was capable of accelerating to 18g in seconds (without killing the pilots) and would escape the earth's atmosphere within forty seconds.

Given the rate at which technology is advancing the mind boggles at what the performance figures of new variants of the TR-3B might achieve.

Like I said, there is a TON of highly credible evidence to support this argument - not least being the comments of former Lockheed Skunkworks director, Mark Rich, who all but confirmed the above in correspondence on at least two occasions.

I should also point out that recently the US defence agency, DARPA, was tasked with [i"delivering [Trek] WARP DRIVE within one hundred years"[/i. Makes one think ...

*Sigh*

rlAmerican rapper BoB is convinced that the Earth is flat...rl

Seriously, I don't understand some of you people. It's like you are fundamentally incapable of arriving at any conclusion without explicit authority to do so.

When industry insiders, whistleblowers, professional observes (i.e. fighter pilots and scientists performing seismic surveys on the US Western seaboard), directors of major defence contractors are ALL saying [i"I have seen craft or evidence of craft whose performance envelope is staggering"[/i and those testimonies are found not to be contradictory there's more than a chance that they are telling the truth. A craft shaped like a "big black triangle" with lights at each vertex. A craft which can change direction around a coin at multiples of mach speed. A craft which makes almost no sound at all. A craft which can cloak itself within ambient colours. Time and time again we've seen highly credible observers make such statements. But you'd rather believe NASA, an overtly military operation largely created by former Nazi war criminals who should have been hung at Nuremberg which has repeatedly lied and falsified evidence since its inception than people who really have no vested interest in reporting their observations and have even had their careers harmed by doing so.

I find this possibility far more credible than the LUDICROUS notion that a nation spending TRILLIONS on defence is prepared to cede supremacy of space to expanding nation states such as China and beg Roscomos or Ariane for a lift into orbit following the retirement of the shuttle. Likewise, the idea that there has been almost no significant progress (other than the rarely deployed ion drive) in the field of space propulsion systems since prior to WWII.

I'll list just a handful of the comments made by Ben Rich before his death"We did the F104, C130, U2, SR71, F117 and many other programs that I can't talk about. We are still working very hard, I just can't tell you what we are doing" [/i(September 1992)

[i"The Air Force has just given us a contract to take ET back home" [/i(September 22, 1992)"

[i"We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects and it would take an Act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity"[/i (UCLA 3/23/93)

[i"There is an error in the equations, and we have figured it out, and now know how to travel to the stars, and it won't take a lifetime to do it"[/i (UCLA Alumni Speech 3/23/93)"

[i"Jim, we have things in the Nevada desert that are fifty years beyond what you can comprehend. If you've seen it on Star Wars or Star Trek, we have been there, done that, or decided it wasn't worth the effort"[/i -- confirmed conversation with Jim Goodhall (a close friend of Rich) weeks prior to his passing in 1995.

Now, you tell me what you think the above means?

X2

Nope, it was a neutral and accurate statement meant to indictae that I consider myself able to comment on "Photoshopping" questions with as much validity as you did when you made the following loaded statement presumably meant to browbeat independent thinking into quiescence

I neither know nor care what you think of my opinions. Take em or leave em. I typed it in answer to your claim, that much is surely obvious.

Exaggeration for emphasis is a normal literary device and your comment therefore has no valid basis.

Er - no, I debunked the "dodgy ball theory. (Using Photoshop). The precise opposite to what you oddly claim.

You can be irritatingly deisingenuous. You know full well that in context the suggestion by your mate and his school of thought is that the "Monolith on Mars" must be artificail not natural, so evidence of aliens or whatever, and he then implies that there's loads of 'em. There aren't. There is known to be just that one. And he is comparing long shadows from plainly natural rock objects, to the "Monolith", trying to make people think it is not the only artificial monolith "built" on Mars. As you well know.

Ah, so you DO think there is known life on Mars, and they've found it, but they have to keep spending untold billions continuing to send missions to "look for it" just so they don't "give the game away" by stopping missions because taht woudl "look suspicious". Okaaaaaay. Hmmm. Now my trolling detector is reaching amber levels.

No, most human beings working for NASA or elsewhere do not participate in the crazier conspiracy theories about alien life, aliens on Earth, fake Moon landings, no satellites exist, flat earth, and the rest. There MAY be the odd conspiracy loon within NASA and I suppose being such a big organisation statistically there is some likelihood but no, I believe that the overwhelming majority of them are likely to be like the overwhelming majority of other people - just doing their job, and not part of some ludicrous endless and infinitely expensive conspiracy involving hundreds of thousands of employees all over the globe 99.9% of which would I think roll their eyes and sigh at the sort of conspiracist shoite I am talking about.

No I am not at all. Colour can only be accurately reproduced if you are able to use a light source of precisely standard "white" and of a precisely calibrated brightness and at a precisely measured distance, and starting in total darkness. Anything else and you will get a variation from doing the exact same thing in different places. Whether you call it an error of perception or an error of reproduction will depend. It could be a bit of both.

Wrong. All we CAN talk about is colour perception. Unless a human eye is seeing the image / object / and forming a judgment on it, which is perception, there is nothing to talk about, is there?

Is there an actual point in there that you want to get out, that realtes to something specific?

What, specifically, are you referring to? Do you have a link to NASA's said "excuse"?

Indeed I can, sadly many conspiracists on the planet absolutely can't. Which sad state of affairs has been going on ever since the first Moon landing "hoax" claims with their pseudo-scientific absolute bunkum about not being able to see the stars, diverging shadows, why is the dark side of teh lander illuminated and other such puerile objections, which are so asinine that to say they were "debunked" is to afford them 99% more credibility than they ever had - yet despite this, their legacy is that many people to this day ludicrously believe man never landed on the Moon.

As I said the trouble with the linked video is that the presenter reveals his conspiracist credentials as well as presenting grossly unscientific and misleading material. So I can't take anything he says seriously. I'm surprised you can.

If you asked me whether I believe that the Americans (or the Russians, Chinese or any other power capable of throwing sufficient resources at it) have in the past been and are currently spending a lot of money on top secret research into stuff like propulsion systems, advanced air/space craft etc., I would say well of bloody course they are, it would be ludicrous to think they weren't!

I would qualify my opinion with the strict caveat that we are not now nor ever have been in possession of technology from /contacted or visited by / aliens from other worlds and I consider anyone who claims to have been abducted, or seen aliens to be in need of help.