Weird Beasts: Life on Mars? by Chris Perridas
M. Louis Dixon | Jun 02, 2010 | Comments 3
Have we finally found life on Mars?
We at the “Weird Beasts” desk cruise the Internet to bring you eye-popping things. We have been (figuratively speaking) under the sea, on frozen plateaus, and through steaming jungles, or bone-dry blazing-hot deserts. Now we go … to … Mars.
Budget strapped NASA frequently releases raw data so that the public can examine as they wish. Below is a video of MOVING THINGS known as UMO’s, unidentified moving objects. In most cases these are very, very small things and the narrator mentions this. So, they may be tiny things moving because of vibrations, though why aren’t other things moving? In the world of the small, and under very cold, dry conditions, very small things tend NOT to move because of static charges. Think how Styrofoam sticks to you in a dry house, it’s like glue to shake off those flotsam bits of white.
However, we are either looking at the first living things on another world, or one of the eeriest optical illusions ever captured on digital film.
One of the most extraordinary is about seven minutes into the video. It really is spectacularly weird.
You be the judge.
(A sol simply means a Martian Day)
Filed Under: Weird beasts
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Neat stuff!
What makes them look so extraordinary is the illusion of movement — but note that the time frame is often over several hours. Take a picture of grains of sand in your yard, leave the camera set up in exactly the same place, take more frames after an hour or so, and the sand will move around, too. Mars has ground movements, wind, changes in temperature, etc. It’s not a static environment so it’s hardly surprising dust grains and little rocks don’t move around.
That being said, the 7-minute mark things are startlingly like some kind of little beetles.