Latest / Lost Civilizations: Ancient Aliens & Forgotten History / Was Mars Destroyed by a Nuclear Attack? The Shocking Theory of Physicist John Brandenburg

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Was Mars Destroyed by a Nuclear Attack? The Shocking Theory of Physicist John Brandenburg · Lost Civilizations: Ancient Aliens & Forgotten History

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  Hello and welcome back. Today is Sunday and hereby time for another edition of
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  the podcast. Today we are going to do a deep dive in one of the most
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  controversial and thought-provoking figures in alternative planetary science
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  Dr. John E. Brandenburg. Many of you know him as the guy who found the ocean on
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  Mars or the one that talks about a nuclear war on one of our neighboring
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  planets, but who is he really? Brandenburg is not some random conspiracy
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  theorist sitting in his mother's basement. He holds a PhD in plasma
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  physics. He works at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of America's
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  primary weapons labs, under none other than Edward Teller, the Hungarian-Jewish
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  physicist who invented the hydrogen bomb. He worked at Sandia National Labs on
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  directed energy weapons. He has been a consultant for the Pentagon and the
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  Intelligence Agency and he holds patents on a microwave electrothermal thruster
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  that has actually flown in space. So when this man says he has found evidence of
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  a dead civilization on Mars and that it is wiped out by a nuclear weapons from
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  space, it is worth listening, not necessarily to believe him, but to
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  understand the arguments because they are more sophisticated than you might
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  think. Today we are going to unfold his argument layer by layer as he presents
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  them in two of his books and a couple of interviews that I found on the Internet.
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  So I will use the same format as I've done earlier, so that means that when I
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  read the citations of John E. Brandenburg, my voice will sound like this in order to
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  differentiate between me and Dr. Brandenburg. So, back on track. We are going to
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  understand how a plasma physicist ended up weeping in his office over a
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  civilization that died 250 million years ago and we are going to look into
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  what mainstream science actually says about all of this. To understand
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  Brandenburg's drive we have to understand his mental state in the beginning of the
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  1980s. He was not a cold, detached academic. Curiosity examined some
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  pictures. He was a man in a deep existential crisis. Image working at
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  Sandia National Labs in 1983. This is where the United States developed its most
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  advanced weapons. You are surrounded by people designing the future of warfare.
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  And then the nuclear winter theory survived, developed by Carl Sagan and
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  others. Ironically, based on observation during dust storms on March. Brandenburg
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  described the mood of the lab with an anecdote of one of his office mates.
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  My office mate turned to me one day and blurted out that he has been planning to
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  run home, grab his family in case of a nuclear war and then head for the hills
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  to try to survive. But now, because of this nuclear winter that was in November
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  1983, instead of heading for the hills he said he was going to climb up the roof of
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  his house with a six-pack of beer and watch for the whole thing to go.
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  That was not a joke. That was despair. At the same time there was the Apple Archer
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  crisis in 1983, November. A NATO exercise that Russia misinterpreted as
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  preparations for a real attack. We were, according to Brandenburg, as close to a
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  nuclear war as in the Cuban Missile Crisis. But this was secret. Only people
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  inside the fence of the lab knew how bad things really were. Then comes Christmas
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  break. In December 26th, Brandenburg sees a TV program about the phase on Mars and
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  suddenly hope ignites in him.
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  I remember putting my little daughter to bed with a bedtime story and suddenly I
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  found myself full of hope that perhaps a big discovery like this, that there has
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  been a dead civilization on Mars, would end the Cold War. The Russians and the
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  United States would together go to Mars in search of other things. I could see a mental
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  pathway out of this Mexican standoff we had become involved in.
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  It's crucial to understand Brandenburg's Mars research is motivated from the very
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  beginning by a deep, almost pacifistic desire to save humanity from itself.
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  He thought, if we can show both superpowers what happened to Mars, a
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  planet that once resembled Earth but is now a frozen desert, they will wake up
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  and stop this madness. That was the emotional engines that drove him into
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  the independent Mars investigation. Brandenburg joined a group led by
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  Richard Hoagland in Silicon Valley. They used data tapes from the Viking
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  missions and quickly found something remarkable. The phase and the pyramid at
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  Cydonia Mensa in the northern part of Mars. But there is a core argument. NASA
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  never showed them together.
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  NASA never showed the picture of the phase beside the pyramid together
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  with another public photos because it becomes obvious, really. We are looking
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  at archaeology. They are only five miles apart. Later we found that the Viking team
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  originally wanted to land there. It was the River of Mars. But they suddenly got
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  overruled by a group that they didn't even exist in the project. The boys
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  downtown say, you can't land there. Cydonia has been declared too rocky. It
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  wasn't too rocky. It was the fact that the face was there and the pyramid was
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  there. That is the key argument for Brandenburg. Not only are the structures
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  there, but NASA has taken active steps to avoid documenting it properly. He says
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  the boys downtown and that refers to intelligence agencies. NASA is, in his
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  word, a hood ornament on mysterious black sedan which the wheel space program
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  reels. But Brandenburg did not stop at Cydonia. He and his colleague reasoned, if
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  Cydonia was on the shoreline of the Northern Ocean, there must have been
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  other cities along the coast. They ordered pictures from the other side, the
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  halfway around the planet, same latitude, sight unseen, and they found two more
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  phases in the area now called Galaxus Chaos. And this is when Carl Sagan
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  entered the picture. Carl Sagan actually called me on the phone. He said,
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  Brandenburg, why are you causing this trouble? I was deeply honored, but the
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  conversation was actually basically, why are you causing trouble? Later we found a
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  second phase. He called again and apologized for being short with me and
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  asked for the pictures. I stuffed them in a bunch of photos in an envelope addressed
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  to Carl Sagan, Cornell University, Astronomy Department, and I mailed them. I
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  actually watched the mailbox truck take it away. When I moved to Washington DC
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  and was called to follow up, we played telephone tag for two weeks. Then I
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  finally caught him and he said, I never got them. There was a long pause. I know
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  what I put in that envelope. What happened to the envelope? Brandenburg strongly
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  implies that it was intercepted. Shortly after, the area was renamed to Galaxus
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  Chaos, a name Brandenburg interprets as an inside joke. Someone threw somebody's
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  galaxy into chaos by finding a second phase. And there is the crucial point.
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  Brandenburg says that Sagan, the great skeptic, ended up admitting that the
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  second phase, smaller than the first, was very interesting. This is not exactly a
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  full conversation, but it is as far from the total dismissals as you might expect.
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  Let's talk about the border, because here Brandenburg actually has a fair amount of
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  mainstream science on his side, even if he feels stumped.
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  I was the one to find the Martian ocean. If you look up Mars ocean theory on Wikipedia,
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  I am reference number one. I was the first person to propose that there is a
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  scientific meeting with evidence. I gave my paper to a scientific
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  conference in 1986 to a room full of Mars scientists, and yet nature never
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  mentioned my name. It should be called the Brandenburg ocean. I just call it
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  paleo ocean of Mars, but it should have been called Brandenburg ocean.
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  His method was elegant in its simplicity. By studying elevation maps from the Viking
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  missions, he found that a particular contour line called zero kilometer
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  wrapped all the way around the planet, about the line in the term is rocky and
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  rock below is smooth like ocean bottom. All the river channels on Mars feel into
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  that percent. For Brandenburg, this conclusion is inescapable. There was an
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  ocean, and the notion means the possibility of life. This is where the
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  controversial results of the Viking missions come in. In 1976, the two landers
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  conducted experiments to find life in the soil, specifically labeled a release
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  experiment designed by Gilbert Levin. The results was positive. The soil produced
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  gases exactly as you would expect if it contained metabolizing
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  microorganisms, but NASA rejected it because another experiment failed to
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  find organic molecules. Brandenburg's argument is that NASA now has been
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  caught by its own logic. They say we didn't find life on Mars because there
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  was no organic matter in the soil. Now they found tons, billions of tons, of
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  organic matter on Mars. Mars is covered with organic matter as if it were a
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  living planet. The planet is still alive. It breathes oxygen and methane. We know
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  there's an active biosphere there, and by the way, the color of the planet on Mars
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  would not have been green like on Earth. It would have been red because if you
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  grow plants in dim light, like on the ocean floor, they alter their chlorophyll to
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  make it red so it absorbs energy more efficiently. Mars is partially red
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  because it's alive. And now we are coming to the nuclear bomb signatures, and that
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  is, the core of the matter, one of the most sensational and most controversial
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  claims. While Brandenburg was working at Sandia Labs, he was standing in line at
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  the Ceres machine one day, chatting with a colleague about a strange isotope on
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  the Martian atmosphere. I mentioned it to a guy in the line next to me that Mars
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  has a very unusual pattern of isotopes. On Earth, Xeon-129 and Xeon-132 is almost
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  exactly equal, but on Mars, there was two and a half times more Xeon-129. His face
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  suddenly left all of his composure, and he said, someone nuked them. I was stunned.
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  At Sandia, they had a department that monitored the atmosphere for signs of
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  nuclear tests, and he was basically telling me that there was a nuclear
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  weapon signature in the Martian atmosphere. Let's pause here and
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  understand what science is behind this claim. Xeon-129 is a stable isotope. It
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  does not decay. It is formed by two processes, supernova explosions and
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  hydrogen bomb explosions. We know there is no supernova on Mars. If there has been
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  one, there will be no solar system left, and we will not be there. So that
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  leaves hydrogen bomb explosions left. In addition, there is Argon-40. When
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  potassium in rocks irradiates with neutrons, a classic byproduct of nuclear
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  weapons, Argon-40 is formed. Mars has a huge overabundance of Argon-4 in its
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  atmosphere. Brandenburg's argument is simple. Two independent isotopes are
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  normally both points to the same cause, massive thermonuclear explosions. And then
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  there is the forensic evidence that is stable and measurable. The consequence
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  among real experts on isotopes, not just on Mars, but on other planets and
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  meteorites is there is no explanation for this superabundance of Zeon-129 or
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  the Argon-40. I have reviewed the literature very carefully on this. You
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  can imagine me sticking to my neck out as a scientist, but I found that the
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  experts agree there is no natural explanation. He goes into quantified the
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  catastrophe. That was just not one bomb. It was the equivalence of the entire
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  nuclear arsenal on Earth detonated at once. Two hydrogen bombs, each as big as
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  the Empire State Building, dropped from space, airburst about 20 kilometers above
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  the surface. And notice the radioactive hotspots, you know, the locations with
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  elevated concentrations of thorium and potassium has no craters. If this were
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  natural uranium deposits that has gone critical, something we've seen on Earth
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  like the Oklo reactor in Gabon, which I covered previously in this podcast, they
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  would be massive crates. Brandenburg's conclusion is that the explosion happened
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  in the air exactly as you would design a hydrogen bomb to maximize destruction.
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  Here comes the emotional core of the story.
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  When it hit me, I was sitting in my office. I wept like a child for about four
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  or five minutes, because they were all dead. I looked at it at the German nuclear
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  Holocaust, and it happened up there, and we were so afraid that it could happen
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  on Earth. After a few minutes, I said, get hold of yourself, don't be sad, be happy,
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  because now you know that the universe is not... has a safety net.
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  Bad things happens in the universe, so make sure that it doesn't happen here.
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  This reaction is crucial to understanding Brandenburg. He is not a
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  co-scientist selling books about aliens. He is a man who, on the basics of isotope
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  data and images, generally believes that he discovered a genocide on a cosmic
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  scale, and it broke him. But it also gave him a new purpose, to warn humanity so we
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  do not end up in the same way. So, why is this not on the front page of every front
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  page on papers, etc.? Brandenburg's answer is twofold.
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  By erotic self-interest at NASA, combined with an 80-year-old UFO cover-up, on the
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  prerogative level, he explains that it will be an anecdote from a Whitley
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  Strieper. One of the managers of Jet Propulsion Lab said to the other
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  managers, don't you realize that life on Mars means death for JPL? Because
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  that means that all the money will go to human spaceflight and not robotics.
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  It's Houston versus Pasadena. Mars is right now a kind of all-you-can-eat
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  buffet for Jet Propulsion Lab. But I don't think that is just that. There is a
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  chilling effect on the American science from the UFO cover-up. And then there is
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  the UFO cover-up. Brandenburg tells a personal story. I asked the colonel on
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  the staff of the Joint Chief, a friend of a friend. But I spoke directly to him. Is
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  there really a UFO cover-up? And he said, yes. He says, and that's all I can tell
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  you. The rest you can figure out yourself later. I called Spain command and say, I
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  heard there is an extraterrestrial threat. Those existence is classified. I
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  would like to help with that program. And they said, okay, let me see if I can make
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  you with somebody. We have to call you back on that. And out of this grew
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  Brandenburg's theory on the Mars disclosure. He believes that the
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  government, especially after the 3I Atlas Oumuamua incident, realized that it needs
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  to prepare the public for life in space. But they wanted to do it gradually, not
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  catastrophically. Step one, acknowledge microbiological life on Mars, which Bill
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  Clinton almost did in his 1996 with the ALH84001 meteorite, but it fizzled. Step two,
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  send astronauts to Mars to confirm it. Step three, find the archaeology, the
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  pyramids. Step four, uncover what happened to the civilization. Mars is a gift for
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  the US government. It is a way to do disclosure without talking about the UFO
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  problem, because the civilization is dead. They can't invade us. They look
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  primitive, like bronze age, and they look like us, and they are dead. Did I forget
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  to mention they are dead? That means that we can go to Mars and find out what
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  happened, so we can make sure it does not happen on Earth.
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  This is the ultimate argument, and it's difficult to discuss, sorry to dismiss it
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  on a strategic level. If you are a government wanting to acclimate the
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  population to the idea of life in space, a dead humanoid civilization on Mars
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  is the perfect soft entry. There's no threatening. It validates our own
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  significance, and it provides a moral justification for becoming a space-faring
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  civilization. So what does the traditional science say to all this? So I
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  have tried to compile different arguments from the traditional, or for
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  the mainstream science argument. First of all, there's the phases and the
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  pareidolia. Brandenburg himself mentions the concept and calls it reverse
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  hallucinization. Denying a pattern is there because the implications is
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  unacceptable, but the scientific explanation is the opposite. If the
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  human brain is hardwired to recognize phases, then we see them in clouds and
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  toast and hill formations and all over. Newer image from Mars reconnaissance
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  orbiter shows that the phase is a natural measure, a flat top hill, that
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  from the other angles and under different lightning conditions does not
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  look like a phase at all. Brandenburg's counter-argument is that
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  he has seen it from multiple angles, including morning illuminations, and it
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  has symmetry holes. But the critics say that this is subjective. Second, there's
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  the water and the ocean. Here Brandenburg is actually aligned with the
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  mainstream science. Most planetary scientists agree that Mars has had a
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  liquid water and likely another ocean. The disagreement is over why it
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  disappeared. The mainstream explanation is atmospheric stripping. When Mars'
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  magnetic field died because of the planet's smaller mass, it caused it to cool
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  faster. The solar wind simply blew the atmosphere away over hundreds of
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  millions of years. Nothing suggested a sudden catastrophe. It was a slow
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  suffocation, not a murder. Third, there's the isotopes. Here the scientific is
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  crux. Brandenburg claims that the CN-129 and the Argon 40 anomalies is
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  inexplicable without nuclear weapons. Mainstream research has proposed several
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  mechanisms. First, Xeon-129 could be a remnant from the planet formation
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  differentiated in the mantle and then released over time. Argon 40 forms
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  naturally through radioactive decay of potassium 40, which is present
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  in all rocks. A higher concentration on Mars could be due to the planet's
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  geological history and not to a neutron bombardment. Some researchers point
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  out that Mars' lower gravity means lighter isotopes escape to space more readily,
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  altering the isotope rotations without any explosions. Brandenburg dismisses
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  this explanation with the argument, there is no crater at the hotspots. But critics
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  would respond, if the bombs were airburst, there would be no craters. So his own
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  argument about the lack of craters can be turned against him. It's equally
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  consistent with no explosions at all. The fourth, the conspiracy. Brandenburg's
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  knowledge of UFO programs comes from anecdotes, water cooler talks, and friends
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  of friends. There is no evidence in any strict sense. His explanation for
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  NASA science could also be for more proactive, radical risk aversion. As he
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  himself said, if you're on the upper management of the Jet Propulsion Labs,
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  you are risk adverse. You are bureaucrat, you will not get fired for doing
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  nothing. So where does it leave us? Brandenburg is a man with legitimate
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  scientific credits who ventured into a controversial waters. His strength is, to
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  this point, is his concrete, measurable anomalies, especially the isotopes. It
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  deserves further investigations. His weakness is that he jumps from, we have
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  an unexplained anomaly to, therefore, it has to be an interstellar genocide in a
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  single leap. But regardless of one thing, of his conclusions, his core message is
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  hard to argue with. We should go to Mars, not with robots, with humans, with
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  showers, to dig. Because, as he said, ask any archaeology. Archaeology is based on
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  digs. You can drive rovers around to Cydonia Mention for years and maybe find
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  nothing at all. You have to go up there and dig. You have to find hieroglyphs, the
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  final piece of evidence. Thank you for listening. Whenever John Brandenburg is
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  right or wrong, he has given us something of value. A mystery that calls for
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  answers and a reminder that our neighboring planets still hold secrets that we
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  have yet to discover.