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EXTRATERRESTRIAL ARCHAEOLOGY "At most, terrestrial men fancied that there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise." —H, G. Wells, The War of the Worlds Something is out there on Mars and its moons! hobos, one of two moons of Mars, has itself always been considered a rather mys- terious object, as has its smaller twin, Deimos. Josef Shklovskii, noted member of the Soviet Academy of Science and co-writer with Dr Carl Sagan of Intelligent Life in the Universe, once calculated from the estimated density of the Martian atmosphere and the peculiar ‘acceleration’ of Phobos, that the satellite must be hollow. Could Phobos be a hollowed-out space station of huge proportions? In July 1988, the Russians launched two unmanned satellite probes—Phobos I] and Phobos 2—in the direction of Mars, with the primary intention of investigating the plan- et's mysterious moon, Phobos. Phobos 1 was unfortunately lost en route two months later, reportedly because of a radio command error. Phobos 2 was also ultimately lost in most intriguing circumstances, but not before it had beamed back certain images and information from the planet Mars itself. Phobos 2 arrived safely at Mars in January 1989 and entered into orbit around Mars as the first step at its destination toward its ultimate goal: to transfer to an orbit that would make it fly almost in tandem with the Martian moonlet called Phobos (hence the space- craft's name) and explore the moonlet with highly sophisticated equipment that included two packages of instruments to be placed on the moonlet's surface. All went well until Phobos 2 aligned itself with Phobos, the Martian moonlet. Then, on 28th March 1989, the Soviet mission control centre acknowledged sudden communication “problems” with the spacecraft; and Tass, the official Soviet news agency, reported that “Phobos 2 failed to communicate with Earth as scheduled after completing an operation yesterday around the Martian moon Phobos. Scientists at mission control have been unable to establish stable radio contact.” What had caused the Phobos 2 spacecraft to be lost? The answer came about three months later. Pressed by their international participants in the Phobos missions to provide more definitive data, the Soviet authorities released the taped television transmission Phobos 2 sent in its last moments except for the last frames, taken just seconds before the spacecraft fell silent. The television clip was shown by some TV stations in Europe and Canada as part of weekly ‘diary’ programs, as a curiosity and not as a hot news item. The television sequence thus released focused on two anomalies. The first was a net- work of straight lines in the area of the Martian equator; some of the lines were short, some longer, some thin, some wide enough to look like rectangular shapes ‘embossed’ in the Martian surface. Arranged in rows parallel to each other, the pattern covered an area of some six hundred square kilometers (more than two hundred and thirty square miles). The ‘anomaly’ appeared to be far from a natural phenomenon. The television clip was accompanied by a live comment by Dr John Becklake of the London Science Museum. He described the phenomenon as very puzzling, because the pattern seen on the surface of Mars was photographed not with the spacecraft's optical camera but with its infrared camera—a camera that takes pictures of objects using the heat they radiate, and not by the play of light and shadow on them. In other words, the pattern Extracted and edited from the book Extraterrestrial Archaeology by David Hatcher Childress ©1994 Adventures Unlimited NEXUS ¢ 35 JUNE - JULY 1994 PHOBOS: MALFUNCTION OR EARLY "STAR WARS" INCIDENT?