Mars Draws More UFO Claims With New Curiosity Photos

By Brian Williams | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

Just after it landed on Mars, photos taken by Curiosity of a mysterious puff of smoke that appeared and then disappeared from the horizon caused a stir among the UFO community. NASA came out quickly enough and said that while it was a phenomenal grab by their cameras, the cloud was in all likelihood just the impact of the jettisoned sky crane system that delivered the rover to the surface of Mars. While an impacting sky crane was readily accepted as the obvious answer by just about everyone, that did not stop the efforts of some to scrutinize every photo coming back for signs of E.T. Now a video and a single frame of footage show what some claim to be Martian UFOs in action.

YouTube user StephenHannardADGUK recently posted this video of an image that he had to actively work with to bring out what looks like four strange floating objects above the surface of Mars…

The good news is, this wasn’t a hoax; the bad news is, it’s not aliens either. As video analyst Marc Dantonio told the Huffington Post, this is a pretty clear-cut case of dead pixels. Dantonio says that the dead pixels are remarkably easy to spot on Mars because the red planet has a bland atmosphere. If that same camera took a picture of a cloudy sky on Earth, you’d likely never be able to spot them. This isn’t much of a shocker as there’s nothing particularly alarming about a couple of dots on the horizon anyway.

Now this other video is a little bit more perplexing. This video supposedly comes from Curiosity cameras taking pictures at a rate of about one frame per second. The video shows one white dot moving vertically near the center of the horizon and then another moving from left to right across the rover’s field of view. You may need to enlarge this to really see what’s going on.

While this may initially raise some eyebrows, the poster of this video hasn’t actually come out and pointed to the source of this “leaked” footage, so in all likelihood this is a fake. Even if this video were verified to be an undoctored version of one of Curiosity’s picture sets, I would hazard a guess that itty bitty dots moving across dust-covered camera lenses are probably not the most compelling evidence for alien life…even on YouTube.

Already there are three different UFO sightings and now even more pictures of anomalous rocks — yes, rocks — are popping up on the Internet. This isn’t going to make national news, and any sane person that reports on it will do it with a smirk in their voice because by now we’re all used to the tricks that the Internet can play on us. It kind of makes you wonder, though, if we actually did find life on another planet, would anybody really believe it?

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