Alien Enthusiasts Believe They’ve Spotted Something Indicative of 'Past Civilizations’ on Mars

Alien enthusiasts have been scouring the feed of videos and images that come in from NASA's Mars rovers, looking for signs of extraterrestrial life, and they claim to have found what they consider yet another example.

Video posted on the YouTube channel Paranormal Crucible claims to show a "remarkable artefact [sic] [...] found on the red planet by the Mars Curiosity Rover." The host of the channel wrote that he thinks the "size of the object [is] about the scale of a small car." He speculated that it is the "capstone of a much larger pyramid possibly buried deep beneath the surface or perhaps a marker stone."

Image source: NASA

Image source: NASA

NASA's original picture can be found here.

Here's Paranormal Crucible's video:

Dr. Michael Salla, who at one point taught at American University in D.C. and went on to found the Exopolitics Institute, which covers the "political implications of extraterrestrial life," wrote that he believes this image "helps to confirm that life presently exists on Mars, and did so in the ancient past."

He went on to call some of NASA's images "only the proverbial tip of the pyramid when it comes to evidence of artificial structures and past civilizations on Mars."

The fact-checking website Snopes took up the issue this week and noted several considerations that need to be made with respect to this image:

NASA did not highlight this particular photograph nor make any mention of a “pyramid” having been found on Mars. The space agency also didn’t include a scale with the photograph, so it’s difficult to verify whether this stone is the size of a “small car” as state by the Paranormal Crucible.

Furthermore, there are no additional photographs showing differing views of this “pyramid” rock. While the rock formation does resemble a triangular shape in the above-displayed image, without additional pictures we can’t know what the other side of the rock looks like.

Therefore, for now we’d have to classify this “pyramid” photograph as another example of pareidolia, like the “human shadow” that was supposedly spotted on the red planet.

Though alien enthusiasts might take their interpretation of objects spotted in some photos to the extreme, NASA scientists don't discredit that the possibility of finding evidence of life on the red planet. In fact, the mission of the Curiosity rover overall is to see if it "ever had an environment able to support small life forms called microbes."

But that hasn't stopped ET hunters from their speculation.

The "pyramid" sighting on Mars came just a few days after a pyramid shape was also spotted on Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt. NASA explained that this mountain, pictured by the agency's Dawn spacecraft, was about three miles high.

A pyramid-shaped mountain on the dwarf planet Ceres was pictured on June 6. (Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

But in recent months since the robotic craft arrived at Ceres, it's the mysterious bright spots that have gotten the most attention. Scientists think the shiny patches in a crater are signs of possible ice or salt.

This image of the bright spot Ceres was taken by the Dawn spacecraft on June 9. (Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

Dawn will spend 16 months photographing the icy surface of the dwarf planet. It previously spent a year at Vesta exploring the asteroid and sending back stunning close-ups of its lumpy surface before cruising onto Ceres, which is the largest object in the asteroid belt.

(H/T: Daily Mail)

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.