Buzz Aldrin’s Monolith Madness

I was poking around the underbelly of the Intertubes yesterday when I came across some entertaining astronomy nonsense that I somehow managed to miss last year—excited twittering (of the original kind) from the UFO community about former astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s appearance on C-SPAN last May when he talked about the existence of a monolith on a Martian moon:

Aldrin was on the show talking about the future direction of the NASA space program, and whether we can afford to build a permanent base on the Moon, when suddenly his comments took a more fanciful direction:

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 there, 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 gonna say, “Who put that there?  Who put that there?”

Well, the Universe put it there. if you choose, God put it there.

First all, kudos to Aldrin for not splitting his infinitives, but things go downhill quickly after that. A monolith? On a moon orbiting Mars?

The little potato-shaped object he is talking about is Phobos, the larger of the two moons orbiting Mars, and thanks to NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, we now have some wonderful high resolution images of it:

So where’s this monolith he’s talking about? Well, this is what he’s talking about (caught on film by Mars Global Surveyor back in 1998):

I don’t know about you, but I can’t say I find this photographic evidence very compelling. The long shadow does makes the image more striking, but its length caused by the low angle of the Sun when the photograph was taken, and not by the type of towering monolith that featured so prominently in Arthur C. Clarke’s scifi classic, “2001.”

Indeed, Aldrin’s use of the word monolith deliberately entertains the notion that the object could be alien in nature, despite the rather feeble evidence to support the theory. It just looks like a big lump of rock to me, but ufologists everywhere, using Aldrin’s perceived authority as a former astronaut, have seized on his comments as compelling evidence of Phobos being anything from an ancient Martian outpost to the archeological remains of an interstellar spacecraft.

At the end of the clip, Aldrin appears to realize that he’s heading out on a limb with his comments, and throws in a rather vague suggestion that Universe or God “put it there” rather than coming right out and saying that aliens could be responsible.

I don’t think there would be anything more exciting than to discover some real, unequivocal evidence that we are not alone in the universe, but this isn’t it, not by a long shot. Ufologists will argue that they just want us to go there to confirm it one way or another, but if NASA went chasing off after every supposed alien artifact these people find amongst the JPEG image artifacts, then they would have gone bankrupt decades ago.

As with the ufologist’s greatest bust of all time—the so-called Face on Mars—we will eventually take closer and sharper images of this object and prove that it was just a rock all along. But by then, of course, the pseudoscientists and ufologists will be on to the next “possible alien artifact,” blithely unaware and unconcerned that their record in this matter is an unsurpassable one of perfect failure.