One of the more intriguing – and highly controversial – claims I’ve heard concerning Area 51 is that top secret research has been undertaken at the base in the field of none other than teleportation. Of course, nothing solid has ever come my way. And, given the fact that the base is impenetrable, it’s unlikely anything ever will. That’s not to say that research isn’t going on in this incredible field, however. Let’s look a bit deeper at the matter of teleportation: the very same technology that has become famous in the likes of Star Trek and the 1958 movie (and its 1986 remake) The Fly. Let’s see what teleportation actually is.  IBM stated the following concerning this decidedly fringe part of science: “Teleportation is the name given by science fiction writers to the feat of making an object or person disintegrate in one place while a perfect replica appears somewhere else. How this is accomplished is usually not explained in detail, but the general idea seems to be that the original object is scanned in such a way as to extract all the information from it, then this information is transmitted to the receiving location and used to construct the replica, not necessarily from the actual material of the original, but perhaps from atoms of the same kinds, arranged in exactly the same pattern as the original.”

IBM continues: “A teleportation machine would be like a fax machine, except that it would work on 3-dimensional objects as well as documents, it would produce an exact copy rather than an approximate facsimile, and it would destroy the original in the process of scanning it. A few science fiction writers consider teleporters that preserve the original, and the plot gets complicated when the original and teleported versions of the same person meet; but the more common kind of teleporter destroys the original, functioning as a super transportation device, not as a perfect replicator of souls and bodies.” In 2017, the Guardian said: “Chinese scientists have teleported an object from Earth to a satellite orbiting 300 miles away in space, in a demonstration that has echoes of science fiction. The feat sets a new record for quantum teleportation, an eerie phenomenon in which the complete properties of one particle are instantaneously transferred to another – in effect teleporting it to a distant location.”

The BBC ran an article on the astounding story titled “Teleportation: Photon particles today, humans tomorrow?” It included the following, under the sub-heading of “What has the Chinese team achieved?”: “They created 4,000 pairs of quantum-entangled photons per second at their laboratory in Tibet and fired one of the photons from each pair in a beam of light towards a satellite called Micius, named after an ancient Chinese philosopher. Micius has a sensitive photon receiver that can detect the quantum states of single photons fired from the ground. Their report – published online – says it is the first such link for ‘faithful and ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation.’ ‘It is a very nice experiment – I would not have expected everything to have worked so fast and so smoothly,’ says Professor Anton Zeilinger from the University of Vienna, who taught Chinese lead scientist Pan Jianwei.”

Star Trek Teleportation

As for the matter of teleportation in the real world, we have to turn our attentions to a man named Eric W. Davis. In 2004, the U.S. Air Force quietly (as in extremely quietly) contracted Davis’ Las Vegas, Nevada-based Warp Drive Metrics company to prepare a report for them on the feasibility of teleportation being feasible. It became known as the Teleportation Physics Study. We know that as the Air Force has now placed the report in the public domain. The specific arm of the Air Force that had a particular interest in teleportation was the Air Force Research Laboratory, Air Force Materiel Command, which is based out of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. The Air Force states of the AFRL: “Air Force Research Laboratory, with headquarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, was created in October 1997. The laboratory was formed through the consolidation of four former Air Force laboratories and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The laboratory employs approximately 10,000 military and civilian personnel. It is responsible for managing and annual $4.4 billion (Fiscal Year 2014) science and technology program that includes both Air Force and customer funded research and development. AFRL investment includes basic research, applied research and advanced technology development in air, space and cyber mission areas.

“With headquarters at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, and an additional research facility at Edwards AFB, Calif., the Aerospace Systems Directorate leads the effort to develop and transition superior technology solutions that enable dominant military aerospace vehicles. Areas of focus include vehicle aerodynamics, flight controls, aerospace propulsion, power, rocket propulsion, aerospace structures, and turbine engines. Programs advance a wide variety of aerospace technologies including unmanned vehicles, space access, advanced fuels, hypersonic vehicles, future strike, and energy management.”

What the above tells us is that even if teleportation – as it is popularly perceived – has not been achieved, then, still, a lot of facilities and programs have looked into it. Maybe, one day, we’ll all be surprised and find out that it has been perfected.

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{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

A recent discovery of a bone ornament in Einhornhöhle cave in the northern part of Germany has shed new light on how creative Neanderthals were. An ancient toe bone (also called a phalanx) belonging to a giant deer had geometric patterns engraved into it that date back at least 51,000 years.

It is believed that this is the oldest ever work of art associated with Neanderthals. Other ancient items have been found connected to Neanderthals such as eagle talons that were made into pendants and old cave paintings, but their ages are still being disputed.

This discovery is very significant in regards to learning more information about the creativity of Neanderthals since there has been a lot of debate on this topic. The study read in part, “The phalanx from Einhornhöhle with its stacked offset chevrons represents one of the most complex cultural expressions in Neanderthals known so far.” Since the chevron design on the bone also contained three uniform parallel lines, it is believed that it was intentionally created as a possible ornament.

The ornament was created from a deer bone.

In order to get a better understanding of how the ornament was created, the researchers attempted to make their own version of it. The first thing they did was attempt to recreate the ornament with stone blades from Baltic flint and carved five Limousin cow bones that were all treated differently (fresh, room dried, air dried, boiled once, and boiled twice).

Dirk Leder, who is a research associate at the State Service for Cultural Heritage Lower Saxony, Hannover, Germany, explained that the fresh bone was extremely difficult to work on as the tools were always slipping off of it. They realized that the boiled bones provided a much softer “mellow” surface to carve with the finished product looking quite similar to the original. Furthermore, it took them approximately 1.5 hours to complete the engravings by scraping and cutting the bone.

Silvia M. Bello, who is a researcher at the Centre for Human Evolution Research, Department of Earth Sciences, at the Natural History Museum in London but was not involved with the study, described the intention behind the creation, “The choice of material, its preparation before carving and the skillful technique used for the engraving are all indicative of sophisticated expertise and great ability in bone working,” adding, “The presence of incisions artistically arranged in a chevron pattern on the bone of a giant deer, supports the symbolic meaning of this find and raises new questions about how complex Neanderthal behavior might have been.”

Even though Homo sapiens arrived in Europe at the same time that Neanderthals were there and they did interact with one another, it is believed that the carved deer bone was of “independent Neanderthal authorship” and had no link to Homo sapiens. (A picture of the bone ornament can be seen here.)

The study was published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution where it can be read in full.

Today, I’m going to share with you a number of UFO cases that are not just amazing or incredible. Rather, they are downright crazy. You’ll quickly see what I mean. Here’s our first case of absolute weirdness. It comes from Men in Black expert, Gareth J. Medway. He says of an MIB case that occurred on November 1, 1973: “At the start of a UFO wave in New Hampshire, Florence Dow heard a thumping sound on her porch. Looking out, she saw a man in a black coat and a wide-brimmed black hat, with what appeared to be a face covered with masking tape.” Precisely why anyone might want to cover their face with masking tape after a UFO report is anyone’s guess. And I don’t have a guess!” One more from Gareth: this one comes from January 26, 1986. As Gareth reports it: “About 7.30 pm Paul Rebek of Epping, New South Wales, received a visit from a man who said: ‘Hello sir, I am a representative of the Uranus Peanut Company. Would you like to sample my wares?’ He bought some peanuts off him, and was told: ‘Thank you. The Council will remember you favorably. Good night.’ He turned, but seemed to vanish after a few steps. Rebek thought it must have been ‘a spectral Man In Black.'”

Mary Hyre was a woman who played an integral role in the series of 1960s-era events that led John Keel to write The Mothman Prophecies. In January 1967, Hyre was visited by a creepy, bowl-haired man of around 5-feet in height and who had oddly hypnotic eyes. Throughout the encounter, the black-clad character kept staring at Hyre’s ballpoint pen. To the point where Hyre told him he could keep it. The man did so, laughed loud in a strange fashion, and vanished as mysteriously as he first arrived. Whatever floats your boat, I guess! Moving on: in 1961, a Wisconsin chicken-farmer named Joe Simonton claimed to have met aliens who landed on his property in a classic flying saucer-style craft. They were said to be very human-looking entities, who had an “Italian” appearance, and generously gave the stunned Simonton three pancakes that one of the crew-members happily cooked on his alien grill! And with their good deed for the day duly accomplished, the aliens were gone – presumably to fill the bellies of even more astounded souls.

Simonton, holding the ‘alien pancake’ he kept

What about a dog inside a UFO? Yep. Back in November 1980, a then-serving English policeman named Alan Godfrey had a profound UFO encounter in Todmorden, Yorkshire – a pleasant locale that has its origins in the 17th century. Godfrey’s encounter came just five months after he was involved in the investigation of a curious death in town. The victim was a man named Zigmund Adamski. As most people will know, the not exactly common name of Adamski is a very famous one in Ufology. It was just one of those strange synchronicities that proliferate when the UFO phenomenon looms large. As for Godfrey’s UFO encounter, it occurred undercover of darkness, in the pre-dawn morning of November 29, 1980, while he was out on patrol in his police-car. As he drove along one particular stretch of road, Godfrey was amazed by the sight of what he first thought was a bus positioned oddly in the road. As Godfrey got closer, however, he could see it was something else entirely. It was actually nothing less than a somewhat egg-shaped UFO.

There then followed an experience that contained certain, key elements of the UFO phenomenon, such as missing-time, and recollections of being taken on-board a craft. However, the entity Godfrey was confronted by on the craft was not the typical black-eyed, dwarfish “Grey.” Rather, it was a human-looking figure dressed in a long gown and sporting a beard. That wasn’t all, though: While undergoing hypnotic regression, Godfrey said that also aboard the UFO was a large black dog. This was not the first encounter Godfrey had with an anomalous hound. Years earlier, he had seen a ghostly Labrador. There was also an odd occasion – in the 1960s, and near Todmorden – when what seemed to be a woman with a large black dog stepped out in front of Godfrey’s vehicle, causing him to slam the brakes on. Both the woman and the dog vanished.

Every now and then a story will surface that is so bizarre, yet also intriguing, that it is almost impossible to categorize. Such a story comes from Jan, a woman who encountered a small UFO – as in extremely small – in the southwest of the U.K.. Jan was walking through nearby woods with her dog early one morning when she heard a loud buzzing noise that quickly filled her ears – and clearly those of her dog, too. Puzzled, she looked around, but it was all to no avail – at least, for around two minutes. Then, everything became amazingly clear. As if out of nowhere, a small flying saucer appeared before her, hovering at a height of around four feet off the ground, in a small clearing in the trees. It was circular in shape, silver in color, and had a red band around its middle. And, it was barely four-feet across! She watched, astonished, as the diminutive craft settled to the ground – in decidedly wobbly fashion – and a small door opened. Jan still recalls holding her breath, wondering what might happen next. She soon found out. Out of the door flew three, three-to-four-inches long small humanoid figures: clearly female and glowing brightly, they fluttered around Jan for a minute or two, dressed in silvery mini-skirts! At one point the tiny trio landed on Jan’s right arm, smiled, then flew back into the craft, which shot away into the skies, never to be seen again. Such rogue cases are so often dismissed by Ufology; yet they are weirdly engaging and not at all rare.

It’s official: Ufology is weird!

My previous article was on the subject of Philip Corso’s controversial claims in relation to the July 1947 “Roswell UFO Crash” in Lincoln County, New Mexico. The article was mostly on the possibility that the “bodies” found at the crash site were what we might call, in simple terms, “biological robots.” And, that they were constructed, rather than born. This makes me wonder if – should the theory have any merit to it, of course – that the mysterious makers of those biological robots might also be behind the likes of the Men in Black, the Women in Black, the Black Eyed Children, and so on – all of who look creepily odd. There’s a reason why I specifically say all of this. There’s no doubt there are a lot of accounts of people who have encountered strange-looking people and that we might call “semi-humans.” And there’s no doubt that most of the witnesses to these things have said that it’s the faces that gave them away – which is hardly surprising. After all, it’s largely our faces that define us. With that said, let’s take a look at the cases of a few, really creepy-looking people who might not even be human.

Denise Stoner, co-author with Kathleen Marden on The Alien Abduction Files, told me a bizarre but fascinating story. It involved her husband and occurred in Florida only  a couple of years ago. Denise said: “My husband’s run-in with a possible WIB [Woman in Black] was a few days ago when he decided he would take a bike ride around a lake he travels around on a regular basis and knows it well. If he is feeling pretty energetic, he begins near a pool and park complex, rides the trail nearby and then turns into an area that has a Vet memorial then on around the lake that used to be part of the Navy Base – now new housing. When he entered the path, there was a woman jogging with one of those jogging strollers but the top was down so he could not see a baby inside. This woman had sunglasses on that wrapped around her head and looked way too large for her head. She was thin and about 6 ft. tall. She smiled at my husband as he passed on his bike. She was very thin and pale skinned. He still did not feel uncomfortable because not much scares him. He just thought she was a weird person. As he approached her, she dropped her sunglasses to show him huge black eyes that we at least 4X human size and they wrapped around the side of her head. She grinned again and this time he noticed she did not have a real nose; plus her mouth was long and thin with no teeth – only a dark gap.” Denise’s husband quit the area – quickly.

The Black Eyed Children are very much the same: at first glance they look like us, but the closer you get, the weirder things get. Their skin is, to say the least, nothing like ours. It’s plastic-like. One called it “kinda like wax.” Their faces are often like those of a mannequin. Plain, bland, lacking in emotion, and as if sculpted. Or, right out of a factory. One witness said: “His face was so thin and his skin was strange and almost a see-through milky color, no hair that I could see.” Others have said that the BEC seem to have come out on conveyor-belts. In other words, the witnesses got the feeling these things were machines, rather than real children, and being dispatched to perform particular tasks. What those tasks might be, it’s hard to know, since the BEC are elusive on almost every occasion. One other thing regarding the BEC: it’s almost always their not-quite-normal faces that give them away.

In 2015, Dr. David M. Jacobs’ book, Walking Among Us: The Alien Plan to Control Humanity, was published. As the title alone suggests, this is an extremely controversial book. Although it is heavily focused on so-called “alien abductees,” it is not actually about abduction events, at all. Rather, its focus is on how abductees are allegedly being used to assist alien-human hybrids whose role it is to infiltrate human society. And, yes, that word “infiltrate” is intended to suggest that nothing good can come from all of this. Or, from any of it. We’re talking about the way in which potentially hostile aliens – with no real regard for us, the Human Race – are working towards a certain, fateful day. A day when the Earth will be so heavily infested with these part-ET/part-human things that the invasion, take-over, and/or extermination, will be completed before we’ll have even a single chance to do anything about it. Yes, I said it was controversial. Even Jacobs notes this when he says: “My research has uncovered a substantial presence of hybrids living on Earth…”

Are all of these strange-looking characters something along the lines of a biological robot? It sounds totally nutty. Just maybe, though, it’s not.

For as long as photographs depicting the surface of Mars have been made available by NASA and other space agencies conducting studies of the Red Planet, online sleuths have scoured the images in search of possible anomalies.

Over the years, claims of everything from alien spacecraft and even possible alien skulls, to Bigfoot have turned up in imagery depicting the Martian surface. However, what this really constitutes is an exercise in pareidolia and only shows us, for the most part, how active the human imagination can be.

Perhaps not everything unusual that has been observed on the Martian surface seems quite so outlandish though. One instance involves a peculiar formation that was first spotted more than three decades ago when the Mariner 9 spacecraft managed to photograph the peculiar feature within a crater located near the Martian equator.

On the 58-mile-wide Pollack Crater floor, there appeared to be an unusual-looking region with a lighter coloration than the surrounding Martian terrain. Estimated to be 8.5 by 11 miles in size (think of a standard sheet of printing paper, albeit greatly enlarged), the weird feature was not only a peculiar whitish color but appeared to possess unusual grooves running along its surface.

The anomaly known as “White Rock” within Pollack Crater

(NASA/Public Domain).

Dubbed “White Rock,” the object was subsequently also photographed by the Viking Orbiter and presented a unique series of questions. What was the object, and what caused it to stand out so sharply against the rest of the Martian terrain?

Although the notion that it might represent an ice formation immediately springs to mind, White Rock’s location close to the Martian equator would easily rule this out. So what is this unusual feature?

If not ice, some scientists who continued to puzzle over White Rock began to suspect that it might represent a deposit of water-rich sediments, similar to salts that collect along the surface of dry lake beds in deserts on Earth. This would seem plausible, especially because later in 2004, such deposits were indeed found by NASA’s Opportunity rover while exploring the Meridiani Planum.

Backtracking to 2001, however, with the deployment of NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter and its Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) instrument, new clues emerged about the mysterious White Rock at the bottom of Pollack Crater. With the new spectrographic information, scientists were able to determine that White Rock showed no signs of water and, in fact, wasn’t white at all: its coloration closely matched other lighter regions on the Martian surface.

Part of what led to the confusion had been an optical illusion presented by the sharp contrast between the lighter material, which rises from the surface of the feature in the form of ridges shaped over time by wind, placed alongside darker basaltic sand (the latter can particularly be observed toward the feature’s northern side, where a field of dark basaltic dunes exists).

Detail of the unusual light colored area within Pollack Crater

(NASA/JPL/Public Domain).

While most scientists would agree that wind action played a significant role in the formation of the peculiar White Rock formation, estimates about its direction vary. Some of the grooves apparent on the feature seem to indicate an easterly or southeastern wind that could have shaped them over time, while others interpret that a wind approaching from the west would have done the job.

This before-and-after pair of images of the same patch of ground in front of NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity 13 days apart documents the arrival of a strange, bright rock at the scene. The rock, called "Pinnacle Island," is seen in the right image on Jan. 8, 2014. The image at left was taken on Dec. 26, 2013. 

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell Univ./Arizona State Univ. )

Steve Squyres, lead scientist for NASA's Mars rover Opportunity, points at a strange rock found by the rover on Jan. 8, 2014, where earlier there had been nothing, during a Jan. 16 presentation. The rock has been named "Pinnacle Island." 

(Image credit: NASA/JPL)

A comparison of two raw Pancam photographs from sols 3528 and 3540 of Opportunity's mission (a sol is a Martian day). Notice the "jelly doughnut"-sized rock in the center of the photograph to the right. Minor adjustments for brightness and contrast. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Opportunity has been exploring Mars since Jan. 24, 2004, when it landed on the Red Planet a few weeks after its robotic twin Spirit. Both` rovers far outlasted their original 90-day mission, with Opportunity still driving today. Spirit's mission officially ended in 2011, several months after the rover stopped communicating with Earth.

Although White Rock initially seemed to stand out from other Martian features with its unusual light coloration, similar features have since been located at places like Ganges Chasma, where another bright grooved region rising from the surface can be seen to almost match the mysterious appearance of White Rock perfectly.

So as it turns out, White Rock isn’t so white, and in fact, it isn’t really a rock either… but it helps illustrate how astronomers are closing in on explaining even some of the more plausible anomalies on the Martian surface.

For as long as photographs depicting the surface of Mars have been made available by NASA and other space agencies conducting studies of the Red Planet, online sleuths have scoured the images in search of possible anomalies.

Over the years, claims of everything from alien spacecraft and even possible alien skulls, to Bigfoot have turned up in imagery depicting the Martian surface. However, what this really constitutes is an exercise in pareidolia and only shows us, for the most part, how active the human imagination can be.

Perhaps not everything unusual that has been observed on the Martian surface seems quite so outlandish though. One instance involves a peculiar formation that was first spotted more than three decades ago when the Mariner 9 spacecraft managed to photograph the peculiar feature within a crater located near the Martian equator.

On the 58-mile-wide Pollack Crater floor, there appeared to be an unusual-looking region with a lighter coloration than the surrounding Martian terrain. Estimated to be 8.5 by 11 miles in size (think of a standard sheet of printing paper, albeit greatly enlarged), the weird feature was not only a peculiar whitish color but appeared to possess unusual grooves running along its surface.

The anomaly known as “White Rock” within Pollack Crater

(NASA/Public Domain).

Dubbed “White Rock,” the object was subsequently also photographed by the Viking Orbiter and presented a unique series of questions. What was the object, and what caused it to stand out so sharply against the rest of the Martian terrain?

Although the notion that it might represent an ice formation immediately springs to mind, White Rock’s location close to the Martian equator would easily rule this out. So what is this unusual feature?

If not ice, some scientists who continued to puzzle over White Rock began to suspect that it might represent a deposit of water-rich sediments, similar to salts that collect along the surface of dry lake beds in deserts on Earth. This would seem plausible, especially because later in 2004, such deposits were indeed found by NASA’s Opportunity rover while exploring the Meridiani Planum.

Backtracking to 2001, however, with the deployment of NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter and its Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) instrument, new clues emerged about the mysterious White Rock at the bottom of Pollack Crater. With the new spectrographic information, scientists were able to determine that White Rock showed no signs of water and, in fact, wasn’t white at all: its coloration closely matched other lighter regions on the Martian surface.

Part of what led to the confusion had been an optical illusion presented by the sharp contrast between the lighter material, which rises from the surface of the feature in the form of ridges shaped over time by wind, placed alongside darker basaltic sand (the latter can particularly be observed toward the feature’s northern side, where a field of dark basaltic dunes exists).

Detail of the unusual light colored area within Pollack Crater

(NASA/JPL/Public Domain).

While most scientists would agree that wind action played a significant role in the formation of the peculiar White Rock formation, estimates about its direction vary. Some of the grooves apparent on the feature seem to indicate an easterly or southeastern wind that could have shaped them over time, while others interpret that a wind approaching from the west would have done the job.

This before-and-after pair of images of the same patch of ground in front of NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity 13 days apart documents the arrival of a strange, bright rock at the scene. The rock, called "Pinnacle Island," is seen in the right image on Jan. 8, 2014. The image at left was taken on Dec. 26, 2013. 

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell Univ./Arizona State Univ. )

Steve Squyres, lead scientist for NASA's Mars rover Opportunity, points at a strange rock found by the rover on Jan. 8, 2014, where earlier there had been nothing, during a Jan. 16 presentation. The rock has been named "Pinnacle Island." 

(Image credit: NASA/JPL)

A comparison of two raw Pancam photographs from sols 3528 and 3540 of Opportunity's mission (a sol is a Martian day). Notice the "jelly doughnut"-sized rock in the center of the photograph to the right. Minor adjustments for brightness and contrast. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Opportunity has been exploring Mars since Jan. 24, 2004, when it landed on the Red Planet a few weeks after its robotic twin Spirit. Both` rovers far outlasted their original 90-day mission, with Opportunity still driving today. Spirit's mission officially ended in 2011, several months after the rover stopped communicating with Earth.

Although White Rock initially seemed to stand out from other Martian features with its unusual light coloration, similar features have since been located at places like Ganges Chasma, where another bright grooved region rising from the surface can be seen to almost match the mysterious appearance of White Rock perfectly.

So as it turns out, White Rock isn’t so white, and in fact, it isn’t really a rock either… but it helps illustrate how astronomers are closing in on explaining even some of the more plausible anomalies on the Martian surface.

For as long as photographs depicting the surface of Mars have been made available by NASA and other space agencies conducting studies of the Red Planet, online sleuths have scoured the images in search of possible anomalies.

Over the years, claims of everything from alien spacecraft and even possible alien skulls, to Bigfoot have turned up in imagery depicting the Martian surface. However, what this really constitutes is an exercise in pareidolia and only shows us, for the most part, how active the human imagination can be.

Perhaps not everything unusual that has been observed on the Martian surface seems quite so outlandish though. One instance involves a peculiar formation that was first spotted more than three decades ago when the Mariner 9 spacecraft managed to photograph the peculiar feature within a crater located near the Martian equator.

On the 58-mile-wide Pollack Crater floor, there appeared to be an unusual-looking region with a lighter coloration than the surrounding Martian terrain. Estimated to be 8.5 by 11 miles in size (think of a standard sheet of printing paper, albeit greatly enlarged), the weird feature was not only a peculiar whitish color but appeared to possess unusual grooves running along its surface.

The anomaly known as “White Rock” within Pollack Crater

(NASA/Public Domain).

Dubbed “White Rock,” the object was subsequently also photographed by the Viking Orbiter and presented a unique series of questions. What was the object, and what caused it to stand out so sharply against the rest of the Martian terrain?

Although the notion that it might represent an ice formation immediately springs to mind, White Rock’s location close to the Martian equator would easily rule this out. So what is this unusual feature?

If not ice, some scientists who continued to puzzle over White Rock began to suspect that it might represent a deposit of water-rich sediments, similar to salts that collect along the surface of dry lake beds in deserts on Earth. This would seem plausible, especially because later in 2004, such deposits were indeed found by NASA’s Opportunity rover while exploring the Meridiani Planum.

Backtracking to 2001, however, with the deployment of NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter and its Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) instrument, new clues emerged about the mysterious White Rock at the bottom of Pollack Crater. With the new spectrographic information, scientists were able to determine that White Rock showed no signs of water and, in fact, wasn’t white at all: its coloration closely matched other lighter regions on the Martian surface.

Part of what led to the confusion had been an optical illusion presented by the sharp contrast between the lighter material, which rises from the surface of the feature in the form of ridges shaped over time by wind, placed alongside darker basaltic sand (the latter can particularly be observed toward the feature’s northern side, where a field of dark basaltic dunes exists).

Detail of the unusual light colored area within Pollack Crater

(NASA/JPL/Public Domain).

While most scientists would agree that wind action played a significant role in the formation of the peculiar White Rock formation, estimates about its direction vary. Some of the grooves apparent on the feature seem to indicate an easterly or southeastern wind that could have shaped them over time, while others interpret that a wind approaching from the west would have done the job.

This before-and-after pair of images of the same patch of ground in front of NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity 13 days apart documents the arrival of a strange, bright rock at the scene. The rock, called "Pinnacle Island," is seen in the right image on Jan. 8, 2014. The image at left was taken on Dec. 26, 2013. 

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell Univ./Arizona State Univ. )

Steve Squyres, lead scientist for NASA's Mars rover Opportunity, points at a strange rock found by the rover on Jan. 8, 2014, where earlier there had been nothing, during a Jan. 16 presentation. The rock has been named "Pinnacle Island." 

(Image credit: NASA/JPL)

A comparison of two raw Pancam photographs from sols 3528 and 3540 of Opportunity's mission (a sol is a Martian day). Notice the "jelly doughnut"-sized rock in the center of the photograph to the right. Minor adjustments for brightness and contrast. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Opportunity has been exploring Mars since Jan. 24, 2004, when it landed on the Red Planet a few weeks after its robotic twin Spirit. Both` rovers far outlasted their original 90-day mission, with Opportunity still driving today. Spirit's mission officially ended in 2011, several months after the rover stopped communicating with Earth.

Although White Rock initially seemed to stand out from other Martian features with its unusual light coloration, similar features have since been located at places like Ganges Chasma, where another bright grooved region rising from the surface can be seen to almost match the mysterious appearance of White Rock perfectly.

So as it turns out, White Rock isn’t so white, and in fact, it isn’t really a rock either… but it helps illustrate how astronomers are closing in on explaining even some of the more plausible anomalies on the Martian surface.

The search for methane on other planets is a key element in the search for life on other planets because one cause of the carbon gas is the decaying of organic matter. Unfortunately for life searchers, the most common cause of methane is abiotic or inorganic — either because of magmatic (volcanic) processes or via water-rock reactions that occur at low temperatures and pressures. That’s why the discovery of giant water plumes containing methane erupting from the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus by Cassini spacecraft generated mixed reactions from scientists depending on whether they saw their glass of possible life half empty or half full. The level of that glass just increased with the release of a new study which determined that no known process could generate as much methane as that erupting in plumes on Enceladus. Is it life … or something else?

Cassini image of Enceladus backlit by the sun showing the fountain-like sources of the fine spray of material over the south polar region.

(NASA)

“Here we use a Bayesian statistical approach to quantify the probability that methanogenesis (biotic methane production) might explain the escape rates of molecular hydrogen and methane in Enceladus’s plume, as measured by Cassini instruments”.

Scientists at the University of Arizona and Paris Sciences & Lettres University knew the best way to determine if the methane was being generated by Earthlike microbes eating dihydrogen and producing methane in such huge quantities would be to be to go where they are – on the seafloor of one of the water bodies on Enceladus. Since that’s not currently possible, they did the next best thing — develop mathematical models to calculate the probability of the different known processes of methane generation, both biological and abiotic, captured in the Cassini data. The researchers used the Bayesian statistics approach which expresses probability as a degree of belief in an event.

“We find that the observed escape rates (1) cannot be explained solely by the abiotic alteration of the rocky core by serpentinization; (2) are compatible with the hypothesis of habitable conditions for methanogens; and (3) score the highest likelihood under the hypothesis of methanogenesis, assuming that the probability of life emerging is high enough”.

That’s as close as the authors of the study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, will get to saying, “We’re not saying it’s alien life, but it’s alien life”. In the University of Arizona press release, Régis Ferrière, an associate professor in the University of Arizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and one of the study’s two lead authors, explains that the results show that even the highest possible estimate of abiotic methane production based on known hydrothermal chemistry is far from sufficient to explain the methane concentration measured in the plumes. Add it together with the probability of biological methanogenesis and the model shows the combination could produce enough methane to match Cassini’s observations. In other words, the probability of life on Enceladus at some point in time just made the glass more than half full.

An artist’s concept of Saturn’s rings and major icy moons.

(NASA)

Then again, it’s just a model. Missions to Enceladus which would settle the argument have been proposed since 2006, with half already canceled and half under study – but none funded and planned. Will this study push the Enceladus mission needle to the ‘planned, funded and scheduled’ side anytime soon? We can only hope.

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