NASA Gets Sued For Not Noticing That Mars Mystery Rock Is Totally An Alien

You got served, NASA!
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The Case of The Jelly Doughnut-Rock On Mars has yet to be cracked, and in an extreme development yesterday, one alien enthusiast is even suing NASA for failing to pursue the extraterrestrial origins of Pinnacle Island. Thanks to the e-mails that we’ve also been getting from the Plaintiff, we can tell you exactly why he’s pursuing legal action.

The lawsuit was filed in California yesterday by Rhawn Joseph, founder of the Journal of Cosmology, to ensure that NASA “perform a public, scientific, and statutory duty which is to closely photograph and thoroughly scientifically examine and investigate a putative biological organism.”

Joseph believes that the “rock” NASA says may have been overturned by the rover’s loose wheel is, in fact, a biological organism, and that had NASA just taken the time to look a little closer, they could have figured that out, too.

Apparently Joseph was easily able to identify the mysterious object as evidence of life in space, saying it resembled “a mushroom-like fungus, a composite organism consisting of colonies of lichen and cyanobacteria, and which on Earth is known as Apothecium.”

The lawsuit also explains that even in the rover’s lamentably poor-quality pictures, Joseph was easily able to see “tentacle-like growths typical of Apothecium” on Pinnacle Island.

The miraculous findings were explained to us more thoroughly via an unsolicited e-mail from Joseph at the Journal of Cosmology:

NASA is insisting on calling this structure a “rock” and have attributed to this structure a chemical and mineral composition which is unlike anything believed to be associated with the Martian surface. How NASA determined the structure’s composition has not been explained. Note the miniature “bowl shaped” growth in the exact same location where the larger bowl-shaped structure appears 12 Martian days later. Clearly, obviously, the “mystery” structure reported by the Mars Rover team was already there in miniature (3528) before the larger structure was photographed 12 Martian days later (3540).  It was alive. It was growing. Its not a magical “rock” or a “meteor” which suddenly appeared out of thin air as NASA claims. Rocks and meteors do not grow in size; and they would leave a debris field or evidence of impact–and there is none. NASA’s Steven Squyres and John Callas are in charge of the rover and they failed to perform the basic functions expected of science= Re-Search = keep looking

Not convinced? Here are some enlarged pictures of Pinnacle Island that Joseph sent us to support his theory.

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Yup, seems pretty conclusive. Essentially Joseph is frustrated that it was up to him to do the real scientific work of enlarging a picture, looking at it, and forming opinions. As he wrote to us,

A legitimate scientist would have taken hundreds of close-up pictures from every angle. There are NO close up pictures. WHY? The few photos released are from a distance and from the same angle.The rover is equipped with a “microscopic imager.” Yet NO microscopic investigation was taken and no microscopic pictures released. Why?

The suit is pretty laughable — not because of Joseph’s enthusiastic belief in a fringe theory, and not because it completely fails to convince us of any possible law breaking on NASA’s part, but because of the arrogance with which Joseph dismisses scientific work done by others, saying that NASA simply “didn’t bother to conduct a close up and microscopic investigation!”
Joseph fancies himself an unrecognized space martyr in the search for alien life, having “done what these two arrogant, incompetent, negligent fools should have done.” In the e-mail he sent us, he even gave us the contact information for our man Space Detective Steve Squyres, so that we too can condemn the NASA Investigator for just, you know, letting the ball drop and forgetting to pursue that whole alien thing.
Okay, alien enthusiasts, you win. Obviously NASA is full of slackers who can’t be bothered to do their jobs. I’m going to go do some “scientific research” of my own and look at past images taken by rovers until I finally see that colony of unicorns I always expected was on Mars. Then I’m going to sue Joseph for not finding them for me earlier.

(via io9 and NASA)

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