ABOUT THAT “JUST-A-ROCK-WITH-A-HOLE-IN-IT”(?) ON MARS

I thought I'd begin this week's blogs with something a little less bleary and a little more fun, and besides, it's been a while since we've had an honest to goodness space anomaly to talk about, and right on time it seems, just when we were despairing of something worthy of genuine distraction, the government steps in with UFO stories told by  "ex"-agents from the Clowns In America, or with convenient videos and pictures.  NASA - otherwise known as Never A Straight Answer and also as Not A Space Agency - has entered the lists this week with a story that was spotted and shared by  a great many of you, with our thanks.

There is, as most of you know, a lot of strange stuff and anomalous looking pictures of "stuff" on the surface of Mars, some of it looking like ruined cities or buildings, some of it looking for the world like fossilized bones, and some of it even looking like parts of machines of some sort.  And finally, of course, there is the famous picture of the "Face" at Cydonia which started the whole search for Martin anomalies. If there's one, why not others? And here we are.

One wonders if there is anyone out there keeping a master index of all these strange pictures and videos over the years. If not, then someone needs to start one.

If that "someone" does step forward, then they might want to add this one to the list of potentially anomalous objects: Mars has a rock with a hole in it (our thanks to N. for this version of the story):

NASA's Perseverance Rover Captures Donut-Shaped Rock On Mars

Like all potential anomalies on our celestial neighbor, this is a strange one.  As usual we get the typical "it's entirely a natural object, nothing anomalous to see here, just a rock with a hole in it, move along". One tweet, cited in the article, wrote it all off to a possible meteor:

#PPOD: @NASAPersevere took a picture using the SuperCam Remote Micro-Imager on 23 June 2023 of a donut-shaped rock off in the distance, which could be a large meteorite alongside smaller pieces. Credit: @NASA @NASAJPL @Caltech @LosAlamosNatLab @CNES @IRAP_France @mars_stu

Interestingly enough, that tweet came from someone claiming to be the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute.  So one would think there would be at least some acknowledgement that this rock, or "meteor", was just a little bit anomalous.

But no.

It's a meteor.

It's a rock with a hole in it.

It may indeed be all those things.

But there are some peculiarities to this just-a-rock-with-a-hole-in-it.  As usual, NASA is not giving us any pictures of the same object from a different perspective. Maybe they didn't take any, and given their decades' long track record of curiosity about such things and, failing that, having to cook up "naturalistic" explanations for clearly anomalous objects or events - like dust storms which blow dust on solar panels shutting down probes, and dust storms blowing dust off of probes, turning them back on.  The last time we had winds like that where I live, it didn't clean my windows, and left me with tree limbs all over my yard, as most of you know - well anyway, if NASA did take other pictures of the "just-a-rock-with-a-hole-in-it", they're not telling, and they're not sharing. And that says a lot...sort of, because the absence of evidence  is not evidence of absence (thank you very much), but simply the absence of evidence.

So we're thrown back on our time-honored tradition of high octane speculation. There are a few basic things in the picture that strike me as perhaps indicating something genuinely anomalous and artificial about the "just-a-rock-with-a-hole-in-it": (1) the thickness of the object appears to be more or less uniform, as if it was a bolt or a coin, or an object run through a mill press. (2) The hole itself appears almost perfectly circular, (3) the circular hole appears to have a beveled edge, (4) the object appears to be of two distinct colors, with the left half more or less brown (perhaps the result a dust storm on that half of the "just-a-rock-with-a-hole-in-it"), while the right half of the "just-a-rock-with-a-hole-in-it" looks more like rock and even appears in some places to have a bit of a reflective surface, as if it were made of metal, as one would expect from an object that may have been machined at some point, (4) there appears to be three more or less evenly-space triangular "teeth" at the lower left edge of the object, and finally (5) if one looks closely, there is the suggestion of a kind of "seam" running around the object at roughly half of the thickness of the "just-a-rock-with-a-hole-in-it", a feature again suggestive of something artificial and machined.

These "teeth" however, bring us to the final point, which is a counter-indicator to the implications of the above point: the object is not symmetrical, for on the right of the object, there's a huge and singular "tooth".

So in the end I'm left with something anomalous. It may indeed be ""just-a-rock-with-a-hole-in-it", but for the reasons I've listed above, if that is the case, it has some very peculiar features suggesting otherwise.

See you on the flip side...