A particularly litigious American, Rhawn Joseph, is suing NASA for failing to investigate an object, discovered by the Opportunity rover on Mars, that he claims is evidence of alien life. NASA, who has looked at the object with Opportunity’s microscope, says the object is — drum roll please — a rock. Joseph’s lawsuit claims that the object is a living thing that “germinated from spores,” and thus NASA should be compelled to take hundreds of photos from multiple angles, and then send the original photos to Joseph for investigation. Who will blink first? (Hint: Probably not NASA.)
Now, to be fair, the object — named Pinnacle Island by NASA — is fairly extraordinary. On Sol 3528 (Opportunity’s 3528th Martian day), the object was nowhere to be seen. 12 days later, on Sol 3540, Pinnacle Island appeared. According to NASA, the object “looks like a jelly donut, white around the outside, red in the middle,” with the red hue being described as a “weird deep red color, not a Martian kind of red.” NASA has looked at the object with Opportunity’s microscope and decided that it is “clearly a rock.”
As for how the rock got there, NASA gives us two options: 1) The rock was dislodged by the rover’s maneuvering, or 2) The rock was thrown out by a nearby meteorite impact. The first option is much, much more likely says NASA. “We think that in the process of that wheel moving across the ground, we kind of flicked it, kind of tiddly winked it out of the ground and it moved to the location where we see it,” said NASA’s Steve Squyres. NASA thinks the rock’s odd coloring is due to the fact that it was flipped over; it may have been facing downwards for billions of years, unexposed to the Martian atmosphere.
Rhawn Joseph, however, thinks that the object was already there on Sol 3528 — it was just too small to be seen. Over the intervening 12 days, Joseph contests that the object, which is actually a biological organism, grew to become its current size and shape. The lawsuit contends that, “The refusal to take close up photos from various angles, the refusal to take microscopic images of the specimen, the refusal to release high resolution photos, is inexplicable, recklessly negligent, and bizarre.” As a result, Joseph is now asking NASA to “take 100 high resolution close-up infocus photos… from all sides, and from above down into the “bowl” of the specimen … [and] take a minimum of 24 microscopic in-focus images of the exterior, lip, walls, and interior of the specimen.” He then wants NASA and the rover team to hand over all of the images, so that he can find out for himself that it’s just a rock.
Rhawn, as you have probably surmised by now, is a bit of a fringe scientist. He has previously published books and research papers on UFOs, panspermia (that life arrived on Earth via asteroids/meteorites), and a range of other topics (lots of which involve sex and sex hormones, for some reason). He is closely connected to the Journal or Cosmology — a publication that isn’t generally held in very high esteem. (Read: Life on Earth originally came from Mars, new study suggests.)
For what it’s worth, NASA is still investigating the rock, and trying to find the patch of ground that it (probably) originated from. It is possible, I suppose, that it’s biological in origin — but, unless you’re a conspiratorial crank, it’s hard to believe that NASA would keep such a find to itself. Finding a sign of life on Mars would be one of the greatest discoveries of the last 100 years. The full lawsuit is embedded below. I wonder how NASA will respond…