So my topic this week is less of, well it kind of, it's news I guess, and it's news that we can all use.
So this is a little bit old at this point, it was from December 2nd, 2022, and perhaps you may or may not have heard about it,
but for Journey to the Fringe it's just something we must cover.
Here we go, and I'm not going to read the title of it this time because it's just gonna give it away, and I don't want to give it away too soon.
Eventually I will have to, but...
Yes.
So Vladimir Putin has injured himself in his home in Moscow, and he fell down five steps, landed on his caustics, is that how you say that?
And rolled onto his side and slid down two more steps, and the sharp impact caused him to involuntarily defecate due to cancer of the gastrointestinal tract.
So apparently three security guards allegedly helped Putin get up, cleaned the poop from his body, and called an in-house doctor to assess the extent of his injuries.
He toured a laboratory in Moscow the next day with no signs of bruising or skin marks.
Rumours about their Russian leader's health have dodged him for years.
I would hope they at least changed his pants.
Maybe they didn't. Or maybe they did.
Money's tight in Russia right now, I would understand.
The news article didn't specifically say whether or not they did.
There are more serious things afoot.
Particularly in the form of viral memes about Parkinson's and blood cancer in regards to Putin.
In July, after the Kremlin denied any illnesses, William J. Burns, director of the CIA, seemed to confirm that.
There are a lot of rumours about President Putin's health, and as far as we can tell, he's entirely too healthy.
I mean, he's alive, so yes, too healthy.
He is way too healthy for anybody's comfort.
So that's a short but sweet one, and I'm going to end it off with the title of the article, which is Vladimir Putin Tis Pants.
Not bad.
That is the news that we're all here for at Journey to the Fringe.
The guy's 70 years old at this point, so yeah, I guess you can't expect perfect health, of course.
That somehow, at this point, makes him younger in age than the average world leader, I think.
It's true, and you can expect everyone to always have a perfect 100%...
Perfectly clenched sphincter, yes.
Yes, exactly.
So with that, I think we can now start the episode.
Okay.
Now that that's out of the way.
Now that we got our sound bites out of the way.
Yes.
From the unexplained to the mundane, come join us on a Journey to the Fringe.
Hello and welcome to Journey to the Fringe, where you learn all about history's freaks.
We are your clearly normal and not freakish podcast hosts, Taylor and Chelsea.
And today, we talk about one of those historical freaks.
That's right, Mars' moon Phobos.
Now, some of you may be thinking, yeah, what a freak.
First and foremost, it is the potato-shaped moon, so it is a freak.
Just putting that out there right now.
And some of you may be thinking, wait, Mars moons?
Why haven't I heard about this?
Well, that's why we're doing this episode.
Does it really have a moon or is it something more sinister?
Yeah, that's why we haven't heard of it, because of all the controversy.
Exactly.
It's a freak.
It is a potato freak of a moon.
Now, how we're going to structure this episode, I'm going to talk about the very solid facts that NASA alleges about Mars and its moons.
And then we're going to talk about some of the history of attempting to explore it and what some people say about those attempts and what it means about Phobos.
That's a good setup.
And with that, I know completely what to expect.
Let's get talking about this freaky boy.
So you may have never heard about this place before or even what is Phobos.
You would know words that are kind of like it.
Yeah, a weird way to say it, but I'm going to explain it as we go.
Mars's moons are among the smallest in the solar system.
Mars has two moons, Phobos and Demos.
Phobos is a bit larger than Demos and orbits roughly 6,000 kilometers above the Martian surface.
Now, to put it in context, the Earth's moon orbits 400,000 kilometers away.
This one orbits 6,000 kilometers away from Mars.
So it's roughly 70 times closer than our moon is to Mars.
Like, is it as close to Mars as Antarctica is?
No, it's still further.
I mean, Antarctica is much further away from Mars than moon Phobos.
Yeah, but OK, I should have put that differently.
Is Antarctica closer to us?
I'm always wondering.
No, Phobos is very far away from us.
OK, I mean in relation to Mars.
How far away is it?
This one actually might be close.
6,000 kilometers.
Yeah, you know what?
We're about 16,000 kilometers away.
From Antarctica?
I think that's...
Or from Phobos.
From the South Pole, which is in Antarctica.
OK, so Phobos is still further.
Oh, yes. Phobos is closer.
If you were to relate, 6,000 kilometers away from the surface of Mars
and 16,000 kilometers away from where we are is Antarctica.
OK.
We're three times further away from Antarctica
than Phobos is close to the surface of Mars.
OK, this is how I need to relate measurements of how far I am from...
It's actually a better system than the metric and imperial systems.
It is, it really is.
And now I need to get back to my actual script.
And in fact, it is the closest orbiting moon
that we've ever found in the solar system.
It orbits Mars three times every day.
So every eight hours, it completes an orbit.
And while the more distant Deimos takes 30 hours for each of its orbits,
Phobos is gradually also spiraling in towards Mars,
getting roughly one human size closer every hundred years,
about six feet closer every hundred years.
And within about 50 million years, astronomers predict
that Phobos is going to crash into Mars,
or within 30 to 50 million years,
it's going to be broken up by the gravitational pull
that it's going to experience once that close.
And it will actually turn into Mars's ring.
So Mars is going to have a ring in about 30 to 50 million years.
To someone standing on the Mars-facing side of Phobos,
Mars would take up a large part of the sky,
and people may one day do just that.
Scientists have discussed the possibility of using one of the Martian moons
as a base from which astronauts could observe the red planet
and launch robots to its surface.
While it's shielded by miles of rock from cosmic rays
and solar radiation for nearly two-thirds of every orbit.
Like Earth's moon, Phobos and Deimos always present the same face to their planet.
They're tidally locked, and both are lumpy, heavily cratered,
and covered in dust and loose rock.
They are among the darker objects in the solar system,
and the moons appear to be made of carbon-rich rock
mixed with ice and maybe captured asteroids.
There's actually some contention about what they actually are.
Some people believe that they are captured asteroids from the asteroid belt,
which would explain why they have such weird orbits,
and they're absolutely tiny comparatively.
Just to give you an idea, like how big is Phobos?
It is 27 kilometers by 22 kilometers by 18 kilometers.
Like that's just the entire...
That's not too big, yeah.
No, like you could walk around it in a day.
And on the south pole, I believe, there's a nine kilometer wide crater that's just massive.
Astronomers believe that it's caused by an asteroid hit,
which would actually be quite common because of how close the asteroid belt is to Mars.
Phobos also has like no gravity.
It has 1 one-thousandth the gravity of Earth.
So a 150-pound person would weigh two ounces on Phobos.
Good for them.
Good for them. If you want to lose weight, great way to do it.
Also, makes it really hard to land any objects on it,
because basically they're so light with the gravity, they're going to bounce like nothing.
But is the gravity compared to that of the moon, like...
I believe the moon is one-ninth.
What would the difference be?
So you can't land things on it because of that.
Well, you can, it's just a lot harder.
Okay. It doesn't really impact my life,
so I never thought about how much gravity I'd need in certain places.
It's about one-sixth that of Earth on our moon.
I wonder what a comfortable gravity would be for me that's not this one.
Probably one that's incredibly similar to this one.
Probably.
Because that's all I've ever known.
Yes, and our bodies have adapted in this evolving through this gravity.
Okay. Yes, that makes sense now that I've said it out loud.
But I had to say it out loud to get there.
It also has like huge swings in temperatures.
When it is on the sun-facing side, Phobos can reach an average temperature
of about minus four degrees Celsius.
So like not that cold at all.
However, when it's on the cold side, it will reach minus 112 degrees Celsius
or minus 170s Fahrenheit.
So it's pretty different.
And that's because it has no atmosphere.
Phobos and Deimos, they picked these names.
It was found in 1877.
They're tiny, so it took a long time to find them.
They picked them because in Greek mythology,
Phobos and Deimos are Ares, Mars' children, the god of war.
And Phobos is the god of fear and panic.
And his twin brother is Deimos, the god of pain, I believe.
Wow, those kids suck.
Yeah, no, those kids have really shitty lives.
They really suck.
But I like how they name them.
Yeah, and that actually kind of went a bit against what I know about them,
mostly because I know them from the Disney cartoon Hercules
as Hades sidekicks, pain and panic.
Ah, I did.
Wow.
But they're actually, they're the god of war's twin sons.
Ah, that just unlocked something for me.
I didn't even realize.
Wow, that makes a lot of sense.
I think we all just learned something there.
Yeah, if you take nothing else from this episode,
know that Disney's full of shit.
Also, there is way more to them.
Oh, I'm taking a lot already.
Okay. And this is probably, if you've heard about Phobos before
and you're not an astronomer, this is probably what you know it for.
It's for the monolith on Phobos that Chelsea, I'm sure you've heard of before
because people like to talk about the monolith on Phobos.
In the early 2000s, I believe, is either the late 1990s or early 2000s,
they discovered a monolith, which is basically monolith means mono one.
And then the lith is short for boulder.
So it's one large rock.
And this rock they found is 85 meters across and 90 meters tall.
And it gave a very rectangular shadow off.
A monolith is a geological feature consisting of a single massive piece of rock.
Monoliths do occur naturally on Earth,
but it has been suggested that the Phobos monolith may be a piece of impact ejecta.
The monolith is a bright object near the Stickney crater,
which is the nine kilometer wide crater on the South Pole.
It has been described as building size and it casts a prominent shadow.
It was discovered first by Efrain Palermo,
who did extensive surveys of the Martian probe imagery,
which was put up there by NASA and later confirmed by Len Fleming,
an imaging subcontractor at NASA's Johnson Space Center.
It's actually really hard to find a photo of it.
You're mostly just going to see the shadow it puts off.
But as soon as you hear the word monolith,
conspiracy theorists everywhere get up in arms
and especially 2001, a space Odyssey triggers people.
They love monoliths. Yeah, exactly.
And you can find videos of many famous people or not famous people,
of many conspiracy theorists talking about the monolith
and even crazy old Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon, likes to bring it up.
I'm going to insert right here a C-Span video of him talking about it.
And I sure think we should identify what it is for America
to make such gross expenditures again for human habitation on the moon.
We can help. We can join with together.
We can explore the moon and develop the moon.
We should go boldly where man has not gone before.
Fly by the comets, visit asteroids, visit the moon of Mars.
There's a monolith.
They're a very unusual structure on this little potato shaped object
that goes around Mars once in seven hours.
When people find out about that, they're going to say, who put that there?
Who put that there?
Well, the universe put it there.
If you choose, God put it there.
Loves to talk about it all the time, though.
So that's just kind of an idea of Phobos, what it is, the oddities of it.
Now, there have been many attempts to send probes there,
pretty much all of them exclusively from the USSR or Russia.
And we're going to just kind of go through some of these attempts
and kind of how it gets its mythos about it.
In 1988, the USSR kind of takes two attempts to send probes there.
It's Phobos 1 and Phobos 2 are the name of the trips.
Makes it nice and easy to talk about.
I was just going to say, so creative.
So they're going to Phobos, Phobos 1's the first one, Phobos 2 is the second one.
It's easy when you don't speak English, just to name things simply.
Phobos 1 leaves on July 7th, 1988, and Phobos 2 leaves on July 12th.
The first one, Phobos 1, gets launched off,
intended to be a mission to explore Mars and moon Phobos and Deimos.
However, the mission ends on September 2nd of 1988 in failure as it loses power suddenly.
This one is the less contentious of the two.
Basically, there was a coding error.
They used solar panels to power it, but the solar panels had an error
where they would not line up with the sun, so they wouldn't collect power.
So it just died.
So that one happened.
I like the story behind that.
It was before you coding was like accepted by the space program.
You had to put it through a computer, but the computer was broken that day.
So the guy who was coding is like, fuck it.
I'm not waiting another day. It's good enough.
And it was like one dash mark was out of place.
And therefore the solar arrays wouldn't go into place.
Oh, that's hilarious. I love that.
Now Phobos 2 is where the real stories come out of.
So Phobos 2 was the second of the two missions launched again on July 12th, 1988.
And it actually got to Mars and it entered orbit on January 29th, 1989.
It operated nominally throughout its course and Mars orbital insertion,
gathering data on the sun, interplanetary medium, Mars and Phobos.
Phobos 2 investigated Mars' surface and atmosphere
and returned 37 images from its time up there with a resolution of up to 40 meters, which was huge.
Shortly before its final phase, during which the spacecraft was to approach within 50 meters of Phobos
and release two landers, which were going to get data back from Phobos.
But at this time, when it was getting close, they lose contact with it.
The mission ends when the spacecraft signal failed to be successfully reacquired on March 27th, 1989.
A few days before that, it sends back all the photos and they just lose contact with it before it can do its final big thing.
With the photos that come back, rumors start to kind of come out about what happened to Phobos 2.
And the rumors are that it was attacked by a UFO as it got close to Phobos.
And evidence of it is that the last photo that was received from Phobos has a white cylindrical object in it
that people believe looks a lot similar to a Tic-Tac UFO that we see all the time on Earth.
Oh, there it is.
Yeah. And then there's also a photo.
One of the last photos it took or so is said is of the Mars surface.
And there's a shadow being cast down there as well.
The shadow is cylindrical in shape and elongated, and therefore it is said to be a UFO's shadow.
There it is as well. Quite easy to find.
Yes, they're actually very common photos.
Actually harder to find are the 35 other photos that it sent back.
I don't want to see those anyway.
Yeah, fair enough. And that's, I think, what most people say in the UFO community.
So this rumor starts to go around and it's uncontested for well over a decade as it was behind the Iron Curtain.
And then once it kind of fell apart, this was kind of left in the wayside to everything else going on in Russia.
Well over a decade after this happened, Phobos 2's information was released to the public.
And it turns out it's much more mundane than a UFO took out this probe.
There were way more photos. Like I said, there's 34 that nobody talks about.
And the one that purports to show a UFO in it, Chelsea, the one with the cylindrical white Tic-Tac one,
pretty much all of the photos suffer from a bit of an overexposure and have a white line streak through them.
Oh, all of them do?
And just basically, yes, but they basically go through the whole photo.
So if you're looking at them all together, it's more likely than not that it's the exact same residue from overexposure that that one suffers from.
And basically, if you blind up the photos, that white streak that is in all the photos for overexposure is in the exact spot that that cylindrical UFO is in.
I don't like that.
Yeah.
But I can accept it, I guess.
Yeah. And then the shadow cast by the UFO was likely just an elongated exposure.
And it's the shadow of Phobos on the planet Mars.
It's just, you know, it didn't take a short photo, so it kind of elongated the shadow.
So those are the explanations for those two photos.
Okay. Do we accept them?
I accept those answers.
There's obviously people out there who do not, and we're going to talk about that in a bit about what's actually going on up there.
And finally, it turns out that there was an onboard computer malfunction.
Basically, whenever the probe would go onto a dark side of the planet or the moon, it would shut itself down and then have to restart itself because it needs to conserve power.
It's solar powered.
So when it goes into the dark part, it would shut itself down.
Once it got onto the light side, it would turn itself back on.
They did a software update, and basically what happened at the software update is when it turned itself off, there was a glitch in the software that stopped it from turning itself back on.
And that's how they lost connection with the probe.
Simple enough, especially, you know, I'm not great with technology when it's in front of me, let alone several million miles away.
Sure. That would be really bad.
That would be really hard.
Yeah.
But that's not the only time that Russia's attempted to go to Phobos.
In fact, they tried much more recently.
In fact, in November of 2011, they launched another probe.
It was going to orbit Earth to get a gravitational slingshot to take itself to Mars.
However, it lasted two months and then plummeted back into Earth's atmosphere on January 15th of 2012.
Basically, they screwed up their calculations.
Sounds like it.
Basically, every time somebody tries to go to Phobos, apparently things go wrong.
However, it appears that basically only Russia's ever tried to send things to Phobos from at least everything I looked into.
I wonder why they chose Phobos of all places.
That's a good question.
I do think there are some mysteries about it.
And particularly with how close it is to Mars, it seems like it's more worthwhile to just go to Mars.
Yeah. And they've made three attempts.
They made three attempts and they've all failed miserably.
Well, somewhat miserably in one attempt.
The probe that was sent in 2011 cost $165 million and it broke apart over the Pacific Ocean, allegedly.
Mostly because Russia wouldn't share the data.
So everybody had to assume what happened with it because you have to be able to find it and know where it is to kind of calculate everything that happens.
Yeah.
And then also Russia keeps harping on it's not their fault.
It's actually the US or it was shot down by a UFO in space is also a very common answer as to what Russia is using.
No, I've heard it from conspiracists.
However, Russia has said that it was interference from the harp solar array that actually destroyed it.
That's hilarious.
I would also love if they said it was UFOs.
I don't know.
UFOs.
I mean, if something did take it down, technically it would be unidentified and at least floating.
True.
And it was designed to go to Mars and the moon Phobos and collect soil samples and return to Earth in 2014, which never happened.
So we're all for three right now on visiting Phobos.
Well, Russia is Russia is but as a planet, we're all for three.
Okay.
I accept that too.
Russia and the planet, which so far it doesn't outside of that monolith, which I guess is kind of weird.
It is a fairly big rock that NASA fully admits is there.
They are the ones that found it.
There's a weird rock.
There's a weird rock on it.
That's basically the controversy.
But let's look at one David Wilcox writing on the subject.
Oh, good.
And don't worry.
He is not the only character that you guys have grown to known through our episodes that will come up in just these next few paragraphs.
And right off the bat, we start with a huge flex.
This comes right from his blog, Divine Cosmos.
Oh, God.
And it's about Mars and Phobos.
I took his halfway through a blog article.
The entire article is entitled, Is ESA planning to announce Phobos is an ET base by David Wilcox, April 17th, 2010.
And spoiler alert, they did.
Yes.
Does everyone remember when that happened?
Because everybody remembers the last 13 years at some point where they announced it.
Okay, let's hear it.
Okay, let's Chelsea, find some way to hold your eyes from rolling too far back in your head.
Because this is how this starts.
I'll have to touch them, though.
I have the benefit of Hoagland's home telephone number and a rapport where we can talk whenever I can spare the time for it.
After email started pouring in about this most recent news, I dropped everything on the book for three hours and spoke to him directly.
This information is so ridiculously time sensitive that I have yanked myself away from my urgent deadline.
Keep you in the loop about what is now happening in real time.
And I skipped because I like it way more as this is how we get to the point.
Rather than quoting from part one and part two of the updates on Richard's site, there's hyperlinks there for part one and part two.
I've got news for you.
They don't exist anymore.
Because Richard Hoagland knows to take down when he's wrong.
Where he goes to great lengths to establish a scientific criteria for what he was told and presents evidence that it has been leaking in subtler forms for some time now.
I'll share with you what he told me in his own words.
Over 100 different European space agency scientists are working on the Phobos puzzle.
One of their space probes zipped around it and bombarded it with high intensity energy fields, which took snapshots of the moon down to a millisecond of accuracy.
This was done in three dimensional pattern around the entire moon.
The effect is akin to ground penetrating radar.
And the more snapshots you take, the more you can filter out the noise and see what the inside actually looks like.
The scientists who spoke with Hoagland have already seen the complete three dimensional reconstruction of the interior Phobos.
And this leads great into your episode, Chelsea.
Guess what? It's hollow.
Yes.
And it absolutely, unquestionably, 100 and Godzilla percent artificial inside.
Cubical rooms up to half a mile in diameter.
Bulkheads, structures, habitable spaces, right angle geometry, and apparently even signs of an atmosphere.
Though we are not clear as to how they know that.
And then this is just a quote. I don't know what he's quoting, but he's quoting it.
In describing the internal geometric structure on this moon, as revealed by Marsis, our European ESA contact repeatedly emphasized that several of these interior Phobos compartments also appear to still be holding some kind of atmosphere.
Our source repeated this several times, raising all kinds of fascinating questions regarding how the radar could, in fact, determine this.
That some of the vast rooms inside Phobos, remember from a quarter to a half mile in diameter, were still maintaining an internal pressure.
So that's the big news. He had to take a break, call Richard Hoagland, because, of course, David Wilcox, the busy one, who can't take time out of his day.
Yeah.
When Richard's just like, hey, you know, I'm just a lonely guy. Like, just call me whatever. I'm here to chat.
I love that both of them made an appearance on this episode.
So what do we do with it? And this is still this is still part of his blog post.
According to scientists who spoke with Hoagland, it has already been decided that this is going to be announced to the public.
For obvious reasons, he was not told when this would happen, but it seemed very clear that it was intended to be some time this year.
It may also have been planned to arrive significantly sooner rather than later.
Again, the minute you make a prediction or try to make these plans actually happen, you've changed the future for very tangible reasons.
The wrong people find out about it.
It is also not clear whether the folks behind the ESA hope that we will help pave the way for their announcement by talking about it first.
The contact made with Hoagland seemed to be intentional, and by extension, they knew it would percolate to many others, including myself, as one of his chief associates.
And now we have Buzz Aldrin setting the stage for such an announcement.
In his C-SPAN announcement, as well as on Dancing with the Stars, John Glenn's announcement on Frazier seemed to be the results of an initiative that was aborted at the time.
But this is not over. What's the connection between ESA and Obama? It's simpler than you think.
NASA's still under control of the Rockefeller faction, which fear to be opposing this every step of the way with deadly force. ESA, however, is not.
And that's where I and their blog post was like eight times larger than that. I had to keep it brief.
But you guys all remember when it was leaked to us through Frazier that it turns out there's a secret space program out of the Phobos moon, right?
Yeah, that's where I know it from.
I actually know the episode he's talking about and it's a joke that there's an astronaut that goes on the show and they end up not airing it.
But he like discloses that he found aliens on the moon. Like it's a joke.
Yeah, of course.
Hoagland, although it wasn't in an article, I listened to him talking about this. He believes that that last attempt by Russia to send a probe to Phobos wasn't actually destroyed.
They just said it was destroyed because they wanted to secretly look at the Phobos.
So they lied about a UFO taking it out so that they could monitor what was going on at the spaceship that is Phobos.
I mean, I'm not an expert on these kind of things, but I feel like lying about a UFO taking it out would be the worst.
Yeah, the way he described it, it was hilarious.
Like, no, that's the easier way of explaining it. Like that's simple.
Yeah, like duh.
And I think we can safely say that we kind of are experts on this field.
Well, amateur experts. So.
Yeah, I would agree with that.
Okay, that's that whole thing. We just had to include that there because we have to put our clout in there and the people that we chase clout from.
Because, you know, at the end of the day, we just like to put names down there because we're important people.
But it is kind of weird that there's only really been the three attempts to go there.
There's plenty of probes that go to Mars, but nobody really goes to Phobos. So what's up with that?
Yeah.
Well, people have at least proposed going to Phobos in the past or are planning to go there in the near future.
So one that actually really surprised me was the Canadian Space Agency, the CSA, actually intended to send a probe to Phobos.
It was called the Prime Science Team. I'm going to read this in present and then I'm going to talk about it after that.
The Prime Science Team has tentatively selected a specific and compelling feature on the surface of Phobos as the targeted landing site, popularly known as the Phobos Monolith.
It is a building size object that appears to be a boulder exposed relatively recently in an otherwise desolate area of the asteroid like Moon.
Scientists on the Prime Team are interested in such boulders as they might present unique opportunities to examine actual samples of Phobos bedrock up close.
Prime Deputy Principal Investigator Dr. Alan Hildebrand believes that the Phobos Monolith could hold the answers to the Moon's composition in history.
Quote, if we can get to that object, we likely don't need to go anywhere else, he advised the Science Team.
So Canada did have a plan to send a probe there and actually visit the Monolith because it would be an open invitation to look at the under surface.
That paragraphs from 2007 and I don't know if you've heard anything about the CSA, Chelsea, but I have not heard anything about this planned trip to Phobos or what it found.
And I was looking really hard. I could find nothing on the CSA's web page about Phobos and really Google searches weren't doing anything for me.
But I did find generally I hate this subreddit. The conspiracy subreddit is absolute garbage, absolute garbage.
It is just 90 percent anti-vax and Trump supporters at this point.
But in that one percent, I did find a posting from a Reddit user by the name of Roundeye007 made a post on our conspiracy.
The Canadian Space Agency cancels and deletes all info about their mission to the Phobos Monolith.
The Canadian Space Agency mysteriously canceled their planned mission to land a rover on Mars, Moon Phobos to examine the strange Monolith there and remove all traces of its existence.
The Canadian Space Agency is very careful about how it spends its funding.
In 2007, out of the 12 proposed missions, the team decided to land a rover on Phobos.
The landing spot was to be the Monolith.
This was the direction they would take the entire space agency over the next 20 years or so, starting with the feasibility study.
Recently, the CSA wiped their entire database website and access to public material about the mission called the Phobos Reconnaissance and International Mars Exploration Mission Prime.
Their initial analysis of Phobos was very interesting.
The Monolith was the exact spot they would land and explore with their rover.
It was featured on their published material as the centerpiece of their study.
It was estimated by the agency to be in the shape of a triangular tower.
The width of the structure is 90 meters, nearly 300 feet wide.
That varies depending on who you talk to.
The height was unknown, but roughly several hundred to several thousand feet tall.
That's speculation in the conspiracy community.
NASA has this official statement as to how big it is.
We talked about it earlier.
The surrounding area and the rest of the surface of Phobos does not have this characteristic type of formation.
It's why this landing spot was deemed to be of great interest, like we said earlier.
For reference, the largest block of stone ever quarried by humans on Earth is Balbac in Lebanon, and it is only 16 meters wide and 64 feet long.
SETI was a partner in the project as well, a search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
I couldn't confirm that, but that's what he says.
And it must mean the CSA thought this would be relevant.
I have reached out to numerous members of the disbanded project team to understand the reason this was canceled
and about all the information removed from the CSA government of Canada website.
Japan, China and Russia have an interest in Phobos as well.
That was literally the only thing I could find about this project.
That's super weird.
It appears to have been scrapped.
It is weird.
Like...
Like, to scrap it, you say like, look, we're not doing this anymore.
Yeah, you don't pull everything from it like Richard Hoagland.
I mean, David Wilcock even leaves his stuff on there.
Out of everything, I actually found that the oddest thing I actually ended up looking at.
Yeah, that's so true.
But that's not the only proposed attempt to go to Phobos in the last little while.
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, plans a Phobos sample return mission.
So the spacecraft is scheduled to be launched in 2024, orbit both Phobos and Deimos,
and retrieve about 10 grams of Phobos regolith back to Earth in 2029.
The Phobos regolith represents a mixture of endogenous Phobos building blocks and exogenous materials
that contain solar system projectiles and ejecta from Mars and Deimos.
Under the conditions that the representatives of the sampling site is guaranteed by remote sensing observation
in the geologic context of Phobos laboratory analysis, mineralogy, bulk composition,
O-CRE-T-I-P, oxygen, chromium, titanium isotopic systematics, and radiometric dating.
I'm probably going to edit that out because I don't know what that means, and I'm probably saying it wrong.
Other return samples will provide crucial information about the moon's origins,
capture of an asteroid, or in situ formation by a giant impact.
So that one, at least in theory, is going to be going forward and we'll actually be bringing some of Phobos back.
I feel like it won't.
Based on everything that you've seen, yeah, it kind of feels like that's just kind of the way it goes.
But Japan actually has a good track record of going places, grabbing material and coming back.
They landed a probe on a comet several years ago now and actually took some of the comet and brought it back.
I remember that. If anybody's going to be able to do this, I feel like Japan actually has the technology for it,
as they've successfully done something similar in the past.
We'll keep our eyes on that. Yeah, so let's keep our eyes on that.
Phobos is very interesting, if nothing else, because it's the lovable potato that floats just above Mars.
And that's where this episode leaves off.
Maybe it is a hollow spacecraft that we were informed about in 2010. Who knows?
I sure don't remember that. Remind me if I am correct or incorrect on this.
Buzz Aldrin has gone publicly and said that it is a spacecraft, right?
No, he has gone public saying that the monolith is super weird and is left there by the universe or God.
And he's kind of alluded to it being an alien structure.
Who is it that has said that it's an alien spacecraft? Someone famous?
Richard Hoagland has said it. I don't know if you consider him famous, but Richard Hoagland has.
Maybe I'm getting it, the two mixed up.
Also, I think we do have to congratulate Buzz Aldrin on his new marriage.
The 93-year-old Buzz Aldrin got married to a 63-year-old,
which 30 years may seem like a big difference between two people, especially when I think she's a Russian asset, just like jokingly.
But she meets the rule of half your age plus seven. So he's well within his range.
When you're 93, you get quite the room. Yeah, you're right.
I'm not that I doubted you, but you're right. It wasn't.
That's just math. And we're doing math all the time.
Of course we are. And Buzz Aldrin also didn't say that it was an alien spacecraft. So forget I said anything.
He has kind of alluded to it. Yeah, but he said some crazy things. We need to do an episode on Buzz Aldrin.
Yeah, we do. Chelsea, anything you want to add? I think that was all I needed to add at this point.
But yeah, it's more mysterious than I thought it was. And why so many people are trying to go to Phobos is weird, I think, in my opinion.
That's just me measuring everything on how far we are from Antarctica.
Yeah, like the odd thing about it is that things just like we can't seem to actually get there, no matter where in the project it ends up.
At some point, it just seems that, yeah, we can't get to Phobos.
Yes, which will add to people, especially with conspiracy theories and David Wilcock.
Yeah, and with David Wilcock, we need to get the hell out of here. I have been Taylor here with Chelsea.
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