Some researchers have claimed that it was this object that
destroyed the Phobos 2 spacecraft, believing that the cylinder is in fact some
form of spacecraft that silenced Phobos with an ‘energy pulse beam’.
There is no
evidence whatsoever to support this theory, indeed it was two days after
this photograph was taken that Phobos disappeared, and not, as some
commentators would have us believe, the disappearance happened within seconds of
transmitting the picture.
Indeed this is the very last picture (above)
taken by Phobos some 188km from the moon’s surface after the missing
photograph was taken. Whatever the picture shows, it is likely that the shadow on the
Martian surface is from the same source. The failure of Phobos 2 has been linked to
the sudden and rapid reduced funding towards the Soviet space programme.
'A-ha’ claim conspiracy theorists, ‘Phobos 2 was
blasted out of space by some alien ship as a warning, and the Soviets have
beaten a hasty retreat.’ Well, okay, it is true that the newly elected Council
of Deputies in the Soviet Union did drastically reduce funding, but for more
Earth-bound reasons. As Laurence Soderblom of the US Geological
Survey’s Center for Astrogeology in Flagstaff, Arizona noted "the recent
political concerns in the Soviet Union … may make the relentless exploration of
space impossible for Soviet leaders (13)."
Whatever the object is close to Phobos, it bears a remarkable
resemblance to a number of other images taken both in space and closer to home.
Recall the photograph taken of a similar object close to
the Moon and this object photographed by astronauts on the Apollo 16 mission
(NASA photo 16-19238 – right) The object also resembles that captured in a
photograph taken over Palermo in Sicily on 14th December 1978 (left). The following sequence of photographs showing similar
cigar-shaped objects were taken by George Adamski on 5th March 1951.
Adamski claims these pictures show six scout ships emerging from a ‘mother’
ship.
The objects also look suspiciously like images taken from
around the planet Saturn. This planet of Saturn is visible to the naked eye as a
yellowish, star-like point of light. The second largest planet in the Solar
System, it has a diameter of 74,980 miles, and rotates around its equator in
just ten hours and thirteen minutes (and fifty-nine seconds). It has the mass of
over ninety-five Earth’s and, excluding Jupiter outweighs all the other planets
in the Solar System put together. The planet orbits the Sun once every 29.46
years at a mean distance of 666.7 miles (14).
And in this orbit have been
detected what appear to be some extremely large and powerful extraterrestrial
space vehicles. This finding was reached by Norman Bergrun, a former Chief
Specialist with the United States Navy, after studying NASA photographs taken by
Voyager’s (taking off, below) two flybys of Saturn in the 1980s. (Voyager 1 was
closest to the planet on 12th November 1980 and Voyager 2 on
26th August 1981. Voyager was also the probe that featured in Star
Trek: The Motion Picture as ‘VGER’.) The ‘vehicles’ were identified
amongst Saturn’s rings. It was Galileo who first sighted these rings in 1610,
however his telescope was not powerful enough to actually identify them as
rings; he concluded, therefore, that the two bright spots on either side of the
planet, meant that Saturn was a triple planet.
The rings were first identified as rings by Dutch astronomer,
physicist and mathematician Christiaan Huygens (1629-95) who noted that Saturn
was "surrounded by a thin ring not adhering to the planet at any point and
inclined to the ecliptic."
Huygens concluded that the ring was solid and it was a further
sixteen years before Italian astronomer Jean Dominique Cassini working in Paris
discovered that what appeared to be a single ring was actually split into two –
now called the A and B rings. The gap between these rings is named the ‘Cassini’
division. (A third, darker ring – the C, or Crêpe, ring was detected in 1850.) Further discoveries have been made from the probes that have
bypassed the planet. It is now known that there is a faint D ring, then the C
ring, the B, then the Cassini division (filled with faint ringlets), then the A
ring with its own gap, the ‘Encke’ division. (Other minor rings have also
been noted.) A basic understanding of the names and terms applied to the rings,
assists in understanding Bergrun’s theory.
Bergrun noted in one of
the photographs taken by Voyager that there was an unidentified light and an
apparent object in Saturn’s orbit.
He wrote, "Inspection of the [photograph]
indicates that a slender body is orbiting clockwise and, in doing so, deposits a
wide trail. This trail, which can be recognised as the A ring without the Enke
(sic) division, is generated by efflux emanating from the
entire length of the body.
While most of the efflux is generated along the top, some also appears
to begin underneath and along the body sides in the form of streamers.
These streamers pass over the side toward the right, proceed above the
body and contribute to the A-ring trail.
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