Saturn the Planet

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 the 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 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 close to Phobos is, 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 - above). 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.

Saturn itself 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 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 Crepe, 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. Presence of exhaust flames from each end of the body and the bulgy appearance of the streamers as they pass over the body suggest a circular cross-section fro the body. A light source, somewhat greater in diameter than the body, is positioned below the right end." (15) The NASA spacecraft Cassini also recorded this strange alien signal. Whatever the objects and lights were, something that dropped through the letterbox of a US film producer in 1984, appeared to show that not only were there aliens in the solar system, but they had already reached Earth.