Mars or Bust:
From discovery to disbelief to denial

Four years have passed since the publication of Alien Intelligence and the Pathway to Mars. To date the desire to get human beings to Mars hasn’t changed, at least in terms of aspiration. NASA still asserts that astronauts will have boots on the red planet within the next decade. As does Elon Musk of SpaceX.

What’s the rush?

I suggest that this sense of urgency stems from the decisions taken by the space agencies and governments in the 1970s when probes first discovered anomalous landforms at Elysium and Cydonia, and again in 1976, when a NASA contractor at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory created a public furore by naming the photograph of a Cydonian mesa ‘The Face’.

Past Tensions ...
During the 16th and 17th centuries European religious institutions refused to support the notion that the Earth was not at the centre of the known universe. Those who suggested otherwise were accused of heresy and burnt at the stake. In 1515 Copernicus, himself a priest, developed his heliocentric theory but avoided this fate by publishing just before he died in 1543. Fifty-seven years later Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for promoting this heresy. Nevertheless, the tide was turning and when Galileo Galilei used the newly-invented refracting telescope to discover Jupiter’s four principle moons, and subsequently observed the phases of Venus, the heliocentric hypothesis became scientific fact. That did not deter the religious authorities and this bringer of bad news was also convicted of heresy. Galileo avoided the stake by retracting his heliocentric assertions, but was confined to house arrest for the rest of his life.¹

… Revisited
Just as our horizons were enlarged by the invention of the telescope, horizons were again enlarged when space probes were developed with the ability to return detailed images of planetary surfaces. In the 1970s the status quo would be disturbed once again, only this time it was the turn of the scientific community to take the role of fundamentalists, when they saw imagery returned from the red planet. There were striking landform groups both at Elysium and Cydonia.

Fig 2. Left: Elysium’s three pyramidal forms recall both Giza and Teotihuacán. Right: NASA’s Viking image of the five-sided pyramid with added overlay lines.

Recognisable stand-alone features included that Face mesa and a huge five-sided pyramid. If that was not enough, a geological map of this area of Cydonia, published in 2003 by the Astrogeology Science Center of the United States Geological Survey, revealed volcanic material foreign to that region. (The nearest location of this material being some 101km (62.721 miles) to the south), as below.²

Fig 3. Geological map of Cydonia by the Astrogeology Science Center of the United States Geological Survey.

Interpreted by the cartographers at the Astrogeology Science Center as volcanic constructs, on the map the largest of these two imported deposits form an angle of 30 degrees with the Face mesa and the five-sided pyramid.

Fig 4. Close view of the Cydonia region with overlaid special right triangle. USGS

of these two deposits revealed a mound with an implied spiral.

Fig 5. Viking image of the Cydonia spiral mound. NASA

To those paying attention, that finding immediately brought to mind Europe’s largest artificial mound – Silbury Hill, Wiltshire, England. Primarily constructed of chalk over a small central mound of soil – Silbury Hill has a slope angle of 30 degrees.

Fig 6. Silbury Hill, Wiltshire, UK. David S. Percy.

Quandry
What to do? What to say about those Martian findings which looked very much like the arrangement of some of our most ancient pyramids and earth structures? Burning at the stake not being an option, those in charge of this information chose to say as little as possible. The public were informed that the sightings at Elysium were “interesting … worth investigating”, but nothing further was said publicly. At Cydonia the so-called Face was declared as simply “a trick of light and shade”, inferring nothing to see here. Discussion of those two anomalous geological deposits was avoided altogether, thanks to the continual reconfiguration of the Martian maps by the ASC. Also avoided were three salient facts:

• The spiral mound, the five-sided pyramid, and the Face form a special right triangle with angles of 30° 60° 90° respectively. As seen in Figure 7:
  

Fig 7. Phi spiral and the 30° 60° 90° special right triangle. NASA with overlays

• The spiral pathway centred on the mound developed into a phi spiral which incorporated the huge crater on Cydonia, and here on Earth, it connected Silbury Hill to the largest earthen rampart and ditch in the world – Avebury Stone Circle, Wiltshire, England.

Fig 8. Left: Crater on Mars, NASA Viking image. Right: Cydonia crater overlaid by the outline of the Avebury Stone Circle, 1993 DSP.

Beyond the looking-glass

Fig 9. The Avebury Circle. The arrow points to the tetrahedral protrusion on the rampart that precisely matches the one on Cydonian crater. David S. Percy.

The reaction of 1970s scientists towards the Cydonian enigmas revealed their inability to cope with ramifications of such discoveries – namely that we are not necessarily the only intelligent species manifesting in this solar system. I suggest in Alien Intelligence and the Pathway to Mars that this information, transmitted thanks to a series of extraordinary events over the following thirty years, was then offered to the wider community. Everyone on Earth could choose whether to pay attention to the apparent UFO/UAP sightings, enigmatic Swiss geoglyphs, and prolific crop glyphs in the UK, to name just three of the paranormal categories involved.

Various agencies sent their own experts to examine the geophysical evidence in the UK and Switzerland, and it looks as if a link had indeed been made, because these events were treated in the same way as those Martian anomalies. Since the 1940s the UFO issue was considered containable by the US agencies. However, when one of the most important crop glyphs of all turned up something changed completely.

During the night of July 16, 1991 a huge tetrahedron glyph appeared at Barbury Castle, north east of Avebury. After the Belgian Air Force reports on Triangular UFO forms, that particular formation was of special interest to the British MoD. On July 17, 1991, Nick Pope, already working at the British Ministry of Defence since 1985, was tapped for the ‘UFO desk’ position which he accepted, taking over from Owen Hartop, by July 29 he was flying solo.

Fig 10. This Barbury Castle crop glyph arrived during the night of July 16, 1991, twenty-two years after the launch date of Apollo 11. Other paranormal events occurred at the same time at the location. Busty Taylor.

In post until 1994, Nick Pope presents his time on the UFO desk as that of an assiduous maverick (Open Skies, Closed Minds). Far more hands-on than his predecessors, he interacted with the UFO groups and those investigating crop circles. But if he formed good relationships outside the office, he was still the 'Man from the Ministry', with his duty to keep an eye on the threat from the skies and the management of anomalous phenomena.

Pope also used the term Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) – and it is well known within the military that lights acting with reactive intelligence to their helicopters, also on site, were to be seen in the vicinity of the UK crop glyphs.

The patterns in the crop fields of England were mostly contained thanks to the collaboration of human artists prepared to make copycat field ‘art’ and create diversions and divisiveness.


Fig 11. Locations of the four cylindrical holes of missing mass which appeared from 1972 through to 1990 around Lac Léman, Geneva, Switzerland. Google GeoBasis-DE/BKG (2009) Landsat/Copernicus. Google Earth, 2016, with overlay and captions.

The four geoglyphs associated with Geneva's Lac Léman were not generally discussed outside Switzerland, and only featured in the Swiss media very briefly. Given the locations and timing of these Swiss cylindrical holes of missing mass, and the suggestion of ET interaction, it is more than interesting that the name Lac Léman comes down from the Ancient Greek via the Latin equivalent and translates as ‘the port’s lake’.³

For all these topics, further serious public discussion was avoided through the use of peer pressure allied with the public ridicule of those who persisted in asking questions such as:

• Were we talking to ourselves, or was this extraterrestrial contact in ways we had not perhaps anticipated?
  
• Did these events contain more information than simply their obvious ‘high strangeness’?
  
• Did it finally dawn on our authorities that our attention was being drawn, via obvious discrepancies and geometry at Cydonia, and those active events here on Earth, to the fact that technical data helpful in resolving our space travel problems is to be found at Cydonia?

Therein lies the urgency manifested by NASA, Musk, and all those anxious to get human beings out to the Moon and to Mars. Which itself is a problem. When it comes to space travel using automated probes, we are demonstrably growing into an aspiring space-faring civilisation. Human space travel however, is another matter altogether, because current space capability does not support the optimal health of human beings – even in a space station orbiting some 240 miles off the planet.

One day at a time
Data gathered from Earth orbit and studies performed on Earth reveal serious detrimental health effects for all space travellers. In 2013 the Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield noted that NASA calculates that for every day in space, it takes a day on Earth to recover. ⁴

Colonel Hadfield visited the ISS three times, his third and final mission of five months theoretically required some 153 days to full recovery. He also describes landing on the Kazahkstan steppe, as a rough ride. As was perhaps surprisingly, the Space Shuttle landing. ⁵

Bearing in mind that even after some 14 days in orbit the ISS astronauts are hauled out of their craft by strong Russian minders, due to their difficulties in adapting to Earth gravity.⁶ The same problem surely applies to a long Martian journey. The SpaceX website states that the voyage will take six months and that a landing on the surface of Mars will be harsher, and that the gravity on Mars is 38% that of Earth’s.⁷

Using NASA’s criteria, that would take some 183 days of recovery before an astronaut arriving at Mars could reach full physical capacity. Even supposing that the near one-third Martian gravity permits a recovery that is near two-thirds faster than here on Earth, a crew is still potentially incapable of doing very much at all for some 70 days.⁸

Which poses a difficulty. With no burly Martians on hand to pull them out of their spacecraft and sit them down while they recover their abilities to actually stand up, that first crew will have to simply cope. Ignoring this issue entirely, the SpaceX website lists the challenging physical tasks for the first crewed Martian missions in this order:

Surveying local resources, preparing landing surfaces, setting up power generators and building habitats for future crews. As for when all this activity will start, Musk is expecting to see astronauts on the Martian ground four years after the start of his Starship’s reconnaissance missions. At the time of writing the first of these is scheduled for 2026, although there are currently rumours that it will more likely be 2028 before it launches, pushing his first crewed mission to 2032.

Occupiers of the threshold
As for NASA’s Gateway program – much criticised as being an Ill-judged project by many in the aerospace industry⁹ – it envisions a future circumlunar crewed space station orbiting in a near rectilinear Halo orbit (NRHO), with a low perilunar orbit of some 1900 miles, and an apolunar orbit of some 43,000 miles. Reading between the lines,¹⁰ while this space station will be very much in the business of evaluating the safety of cis-lunar space for crews, it will not necessarily be manned on a permanent basis, as is the ISS. As part of this program NASA is sending a crew of four on a trip around the Moon. This Artemis II flight is designed to “provide vital insights for future missions to destinations beyond low Earth orbit, including Mars”. The launch is planned for February 2026, and no later than April 2026 – "if all goes well", as NASA likes to say.

Notwithstanding the technical problems involved with these ambitious chemical rocket programs, there is the faint suggestion of delaying tactics being applied. One notable example being the omission of a flame path at the SpaceX concrete launchpad. Standard practice for rocket launches, it is hardly credible that this so-called rookie mistake was not called out by NASA or other experts when the pad was under construction. The subsequent damage incurred by its absence led to considerable comment, a lengthy rebuild of the pad, and the general public noticing that what was apparently possible during the 20th century seemed to be impossible for humans in the 21st. No surprise then, that a US survey revealed that between 2020 and May 2025 there was a 4% increase in the number of people who consider the Apollo missions were not the actual lunar missions presented as such by NASA.¹¹

Waiting in vain
Watching the stop-start of both NASA and Musk’s endeavours over the years reinforces the sense that everyone is playing for time. Which would be entirely reasonable, when studying the health effects of space exploration on the human body as documented by NASA’s Human Research Program (HRP).¹² After nearly 70 years of data collation the one conclusion that can be safely drawn is that using the current technology, space is extremely hostile to human beings. In a study from 2020, over 30 human health risks are linked with the hazards of space exploration among which are: space radiation, altered gravity fields, isolation and confinement, closed environments, and the distance from Earth. When it comes to what might occur during a long stay mission on station around the Moon, or the lengthy journey to Mars, “more research is needed”.

It could well be that Musk is waiting for the results from Artemis II before even starting on his own Martian exploits. That wait could prove to be fruitless, since the health risks for human beings in space have not substantially changed since 1960s.

The big show stopper
The ever-present danger for human crews using current rocket technology always was, and still is, ionising radiation. Data acquired from laboratory animal testing in orbit and on the planet; plus the data from human beings in low-Earth orbit (LEO) some 240 miles up (and only exposed to the inner Van Allen belt during traversal of the South Atlantic Anomaly) plus data derived from land-based studies of all those exposed to nuclear effects from 1945 through to the present day has led to this conclusion published in Nature :

To summarize, the health risks posed by the omnipresent exposure to space radiation are significant and include the “red” risks of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and cognitive and behavioral decrements. While research on the late health risk of cancer is currently delayed, research on the in-flight effects of radiation on the cardiovascular system and CNS [central nervous System] within the context of the space exposome* are considered the highest priority and are the focus of investigations. Major knowledge gaps include the effects of radiation quality, dose-rate, and translation from animal models to human systems and evaluation of the requirement for medical countermeasure approaches to reduce the risk.¹³

*Adopting the use of specialist language such as ‘exposome’ masks the severity of this ionising radiation problem from the mind of those readers unfamiliar with this term, and that would be most of the general public, since the word was created in 2005 by an oncologist specialist. He intended it to mean the entire environment that contributes to the disease occurring in the human body. Thus the Space exposome conveniently separates the causative factors of cancer acquired during space missions from those which could be acquired from genetic inheritance (the biological exposome) or those cancers contracted from external Earth based causative factors (the Earth exposome).

NASA places great value on these distinctions when it comes to medical treatments for its astronauts, as we shall see. It is also is extremely interesting to read that radiation is considered to affect human behaviour, although the fact that the late health risk of cancer is “currently delayed” infers that the necessary data has not yet been acquired, which in turn infers that the radiation data from the Apollo missions (many of whom lived to old age) is not relevant.

Mens sana in corpore sano ..
Remembering Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s assertions that he saw cosmic rays flashing through his eyes brings us to what is now called Spaceflight-Associated Neuro-Ocular Syndrome (SANS). Specific effects on the eye and brain are known and examined, yet, once again the Apollo data is not considered as viable, because this HRP report states that the effects of exposure beyond LEO are not known! When in Earth orbit, it’s a different matter: ISS astronaut Don Pettit states:

There is a radiation hot spot in orbit, a place where the flux of cosmic rays is 10 to 100 times greater than the rest of the orbital path. Situated southeast of Argentina, this region (called the South Atlantic Anomaly) extends about halfway across the Atlantic Ocean. As we pass through this region, eye flashes will increase from one or two every 10 minutes to several per minute.¹⁴

With three spacewalks totalling over 19 hours and a total of 212 days on orbit, ISS Astronaut Cdr. Terry Virts is likely in agreement, having experienced the flashes attributed to radiation when his eyes were closed. He wrote that this was especially notable when the ISS was passing through the South Atlantic Anomaly.¹⁵

The unknowns
When it comes to time spent in space, NASA defines long duration human spaceflight as 30 days or more off-planet. However, data collated during or immediately after space flights lasting as little as 10 days have registered effects on the eye and while many do recover it is not a given, and some never recover their pre-flight vision capabilities. Further, since 2009 there is growing evidence that structural changes occur in the brain during long-duration spaceflight in LEO. Whether these changes to the eye and the brain are linked is not known and SANS is considered a top risk.

In his 2020 book How to Astronaut ISS Commander Terry Virts has provided an honest and shocking insight into the state of affairs at NASA when it comes to ionising radiation affecting human spaceflight. He writes:

Radiation is the elephant sitting on your couch in the living room. It’s a problem we haven’t yet figured out how to solve, nor do we understand its extent.

In February 2010 Virts had piloted the shuttle Endeavour to the ISS, and was then on orbit for its final assembly mission. His second mission started in November 2014 when he launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a Soyuz for Expedition 42. When the crew swopped out, he remained on station and became ISS Commander of Expedition 43, returning to Earth 200 days later in June 2015.¹⁶

After each flight his skin developed Basal Cell Carcinoma, and it was particularly noticeable after his longest flight. VIrts retired in 2016 after 16 years with NASA. However, when it came to his health the surprises kept coming. The good news came in the form of the 2017 Treat Astronauts Act which promised all astronauts “…support for medical issues associated with their service”.¹⁷ The bad news came when he returned for follow-up treatment for his skin cancer and discovered that this particular government agency, NASA, did not consider that 2017 bill applicable to its retired astronauts.

Why? Because it could not be absolutely proven that space flights (that space exposome) were responsible – genetic or environmental factors might have been at the origin of the disease. So unless the astronaut was destined for another mission, NASA did not consider itself responsible for any post-flight cancer treatment. Despite the literature on the NASA website implying a very careful follow-up routine throughout retirement, when Virts went for his annual medical, he was merely asked if he had seen a doctor in the past year and if so, what were the results?

Virts has also observed that NASA measures radiation dosage on the ISS with great precision but the agency does not measure its effects on the human body! Nor does the agency invest in any sort of DNA testing of their astronauts before or after missions. The lack of medical research in these areas conveniently supports the refusal to provide post-flight care to retired astronauts and NASA is the only space agency in the world that fails to provide its retired astronauts with health care for life.

However, it is evident that for all its public statements of intent concerning human spaceflight, of which:

Although the short-term health effects of radiation exposure seem benign in low Earth orbit, the long-term effects of exposure to relatively low doses of radiation on various organ systems are unknown and need to be monitored.¹⁸

Remembering that long term spaceflight is defined by NASA as 30 days or more in space, one wonders why there is no data. But of course! thanks to Terry Virts’ discussions with the agency’s doctors these unknowns are due to the fact that NASA is not doing the required monitoring. The attitude of the US space agency concerning the insurmountable problem that is ionising radiation in space has important implications. After all, if the ISS astronauts can suffer physical damage even after ten days in the relative safety of LEO, demonstrably none of the current technology is up to the job of adequately protecting the orbiting astronauts.

To come clean or cover-up – that Is the question
Today, in 2025, on the one hand the public is informed that crewed space travel is not doable yet, and on the other hand we are told crews are venturing out beyond LEO and beyond the Moon to ascertain the dangers! This paradox indicates that there is a desire to maintain the fiction that Apollo missions actually happened, while all those medical reports only contribute to the understanding that no one has yet travelled beyond LEO and lived to tell the tale.

Terry Virts was allowed to publish these unfavourable accounts of NASA behaviour, concerning radiation protection, and the world’s media are full of reports on the problems of space travel for human beings. So it is reasonable to assume that NASA wants this information in the public domain. We also know that the surface of the Moon is hostile to humans, since it is totally unprotected from any ionising radiation, and it is now understood that the examined surface of Mars is toxic! From that we can deduce that the percentage of people who do not believe the account of the Apollo missions as recorded by NASA is going to increase exponentially.

This information raises questions about the next Artemis II flight beyond LEO which is supposed to “provide vital insights for future missions to destinations beyond low Earth orbit, including Mars”. Noting that the Apollo missions have apparently not contributed to the store of human medical knowledge when it comes to travel beyond LEO, one might ask if the aerospace industry is going to procrastinate leaving LEO until the problems of human health are resolved. Possibly with administering pharmaceuticals, or whether the Artemis II crew of four are merely disposable lab rats.

There is a further possibility. We are going to be treated to more docudrama fairytales, if indeed from the very start, this whole Artemis-Ares program is NASA's facts supported by creative fiction resulting in performance art. A symbolic journey, and the completion of the NASA ritual which originated in the 1960s – a crew of one astronaut for Mercury flights, two for Gemini, three for Apollo.

The Artemis four representing the endgame Mars via the lunar Gateway. Which explains their various crew photos, in both blue coveralls and in bright red flight coveralls. It is entirely within this Martian storyline that as of September 5, 2025, another four principle research volunteers are simulating a year-long mission to Mars in the NASA habitat – Mars Dune Alpha (MDA).

Fig 12. View inside the Mars Dune Alpha Habitat. NASA

Choosing to call the habitat Mars Dune Alpha is surely an intentional link to the 2021 movie of the book by Frank Herbert. His book inspired the naming of a crater Dune on the Moon, and Saturn’s moon Titan has had features named after his fictional planet Arrakis, which in the 2021 film Dune looks a lot like Mars, and the interior of that Habitat!

Frank Herbert’s Arrakis is the only source of melange or 'spice', which is described as drug that extends life and enhances mental abilities, and costs a fortune. Here on Earth the acronym MDA is linked to a drug that produces psychedelic effects in its users. Emphasising the link between NASA fact and creative fiction, Matthew Montgomery, the volunteer Science Officer on the MDA is also in the film business, a founder and co-owner of Floating Lava Studios, an independent film production company in Los Angeles.¹⁹

Fig 13. Matthew Montgomery, Science Officer on Mars Dune Alpha. NASA.

NASA states that his focus areas include LED lighting, robotics, controlled environment agriculture, and embedded control systems. Montgomery's website tells us more about himself:

I am a producer, in every sense of the word, having spent my life bringing all sorts of ideas to life. I was originally educated as an engineer and worked in the product development and venture capital world. What does that mean? Basically, when people have product concepts that they want to make, they come to me and I guide them through how to do it. As a result, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some pretty cool people, technology, and start-ups. Among other things, this has taught me what it takes to start, grow, and scale financially responsible businesses...

...I thrive in high-pressure situations; this was an appeal of start-ups and now also with film. Finding ways to tame the chaos and deliver when a deadline is approaching is an art and I am a master of balancing the inescapable “iron triangle” of schedule, budget, and quality. One of my mentors often referred to the point in product development where things tend to fail as the “valley of death”. Film projects have no shortage of these valleys and bringing a motion picture to life takes a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck. I look forward to walking through and out of these valleys many more times to produce stories that constructively guide the world forward.²⁰

Has all the public relations hoop-la, over the years been about of protecting the history of our alleged past exploits while deferring the actual issue of crews going beyond LEO? Does mixing fact and fiction keep the general public both confused and then uncertain, and therefore silent? Science Officer Montgomery’s aspirations might be construed as not so much a metaphor about movie-making and more a hint of future scenarios, given that his website also tells us that:

Floating Lava Studios is a Los Angeles-based, independent production company focused on utilizing the medium of narrative feature film to elevate stories with novel voices and themes that can positively shape the collective consciousness.

NASA certainly has form when it comes to collecting musicians, film makers and writers to promote its space programs.¹⁹ Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey kept pace with the development of the Apollo lunar missions, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind portrayed the US government’s attitudes towards UFO/UAP disturbances and ET interactions.²¹

Fig 14. Devil’s Tower, Wyoming. David S. Percy

So it is perfectly in order to enquire as to whether the future missions to Mars are going to follow in their footsteps. Are we now going to have the 2016 and 2024 Dune films escorting the Martian missions into the land of make-believe?

Fig 15. Left: Curiosity’s Trackprint, Mars. Right: Apollo bootprint. NASA. Traditionally, during an exploration of unknown territory, a single footprint imprinted on soil implies possession of that place by the owner or the sponsors of the expedition.

Space technology

• Rockets produce no natural on-board gravity field needed for astronauts on long journeys.
• Rockets are entirely reliant upon a finite, on-board fuel supply.
• Demonstrably rockets and our spacecraft offer inadequate radiation protection for astronauts travelling anywhere in space.

In summary, as none of the current approaches are going to be feasible in advancing human space travel, surely it is now time to move on from thousand-year-old 'fire and brimstone’ propulsion systems and adopt a totally new technological approach.

• Rockets are painfully slow compared with the speeds attainable with advanced spacecraft concepts – as demonstrated by UFO/UAP sightings and attempted encounters.

Whatever anyone's views on UAPs, they leave no trail of chemical smoke behind them!

Advanced space technology
Surely, thinking very differently about the mode of travel for human beings in space is needed. A total conceptual renewal, one that includes a new mindset. Since the advent of rocketry, many people have worked on alternative solutions. The history of the subject also demonstrates that any advance in understanding is soon shut down by vested interests, whether commercial, governmental or the military, always on the lookout for the next best weapon. ²²

Those practical reasons as why the research into advanced spacecraft technology appears to have gone dark, surely go hand in hand with the state of physics today, which is a discussion that goes beyond the remit of this particular article. Suffice to say that Scientific American, having previously published an article which had established the implausibility of drawing on the zero-point energy for practical use, published a follow-up article in August 1997.²³ This article provided further technical details as to why this should be so, it also looked like an attempt to close the subject.

It should be noted that the photons that are a fundamental concept within particle physics and Quantum field theory, are "virtual photons" and as such considered not to exist as free particles by these theoretical physicists. Without digging deeper into the basics of quantum mechanics and particle field theory, a couple of extracts should make the point.

John Baez, a member of the mathematics faculty at the University of California at Riverside advised readers “…one should not get one's hope up when people talk about vacuum energy. It is just how we do our bookkeeping in quantum field theory.” John Obienin, a materials science researcher at the University of Nebraska at Omaha added:

At present, nobody knows how to exploit the zero-point energy in a macroscopic device that delivers sizable amounts of energy. There is, however, a considerable fringe element (similar to those attracted to UFOs, astrology, numerology and so on) of people who speculate and fantasize about the possibility of exploiting the zero-point energy to achieve various technicalmarvels and the long-sought 'perpetual motion'. Consider yourself warned.

That warning sounds an awful lot like "unless you want to be ostracised by the scientific community".

X never marks the spot
Accusations of speculation and fantasy concerning UFOs seems to be the trigger point here, so it is of interest that across the pond, in 2005, the year before Nick Pope left the MoD, the UK Freedom of Information Act (UKFOIA) came into being. Nick Pope’s own website has a (now archived) full biography that states, “While working on the MoD's UFO project Nick Pope also looked into alien abductions, crop circles, ghost sightings at military bases, and people who claimed to have psychic abilities and wanted to volunteer their services to the UK's intelligence agencies.”²⁴

Nick Pope’s last posting at the UK Ministry of Defence was as an acting Deputy Director in the Directorate of Defense Security. Notably, he uses the American spelling of the word ‘Defence’ in this autobiography, while also reminding us that his signing of the UK Official Secrets Act is binding for life. It reads as if a merger of some sort is happening. Perhaps the old Intel adage "one never really retires from the game" is also true of those involved with ETI activities.

Following his 2006 departure from the MoD, Pope built a reputation as being the go-to rational thinker for all media dealing with all those unexplained subjects that had previously landed on his UFO desk. Now describing himself as an author, journalist and TV personality it was indeed fortuitous that Pope was perfectly placed when in 2008 he became, as he puts it, "the public face of the program to declassify and release the entire archive of the British UFO files advising the UK government on which files would be of most interest to the media."²⁴ (Noting that Pope does not use the acronym UAP in this particular autobiography, perhaps conversely also making sure nothing too revealing was released.)

However, it is also interesting that during his time in post at the UFO desk, both the US and the UK governments tried to avoid the loaded term ‘UFO’. The DoD in the US introduced RDA, (Radar Detected Anomaly) and VOA (visually observed anomaly). The MoD in the UK experimented, as Pope puts it, with UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). None of these acronyms made any impression on those working within their respective governments in the mid-1990s.²⁵

Fast forward to 2008 and Pope asserts that controlling the delivery of those UKFOIA releases, earned him the title of 'the Real Fox Mulder' in the international media. Although in truth he had already got that title because he writes that he does not entirely buy into that concept in his 1996 account of his time at the UFO desk. But then those X-Files productions are another example of entertainment being used to link facts with fiction.

In TV fantasy-land Mulder was portrayed as a believer in the paranormal, which fits with Pope’s maverick persona relative to his colleagues. However, Pope also tells us he is an intelligent, rational thinker. In the real world, Pope went to live in the United States in 2012, where he married another rational thinker who has become somewhat of a maverick in her own profession. His wife, Elizabeth Weiss is an anthropologist whose actions and cultural opinions, coupled with the photos she has posted online have caused controversy within her profession and beyond.²⁶

From the point of view of this discussion about attitudes towards the subject of ET and UFOs her posting of a photo featuring the elongated skull of a native American on Musk’s platform X immediately linked it to notions of ET, and the speculation about aliens brings to mind Musk’s obsession with that same letter, and his urgent need to get his SpaceX Starship flight-ready in order to "Occupy Mars" as he puts it.

MoDs and Rockets
In 2016, four years after Pope’s arrival in the US, a photon was imaged, so demonstrably photons have mass. Around this time, the term UAP was pushed into the public domain rather more firmly.²⁷

Fig 16. Hologram of single light particle, a photon, reconstructed from raw measurements (left) and the theoretically predicted model (right). Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw.

As more theoretical physics models are seen to be lacking, most of these traditional theoreticians are digging in their heels. But understanding the true nature of the photon changes everything when it comes to practical matters.

As does the potential utilisation of the photonic charge field source that is freely available throughout space everywhere. This returns us to those anomalous interventions into our planetary environment back in 1993. That was the time when Myers & Percy suggested that encoded within the UK crop glyphs and world-wide monuments are elements that could be construed as blueprints for a viable and innovative spacecraft technology using energy available universally throughout space.

This theme is again addressed in Alien Intelligence and the Pathway to Mars, where David Percy’s further research into a highly-advanced propulsion system offering rapid space travel with total protection for crews is discussed as being part of a paradigm shift. A shift that is required if we want to become a space-faring civilisation.²⁸ A shift that involves our consciousness, because how we interact with both our home planet and with the wider environment of our solar system and our galaxy is the key to our adaptability and our long term future.

However, it appears those in the military have not read the memo. In 2019 the US created a sixth department of its Air Force and called it the US Space Force. In 2025 President Trump decreed that the Department of Defense be rebranded as the Department of War.

Fig 17. The US had created a provisional Air Force Cyber Command in 2008 which was later incorporated into the 2019 Space Command. Its shield echoes the title of Pope’s second sci-fi book Operation Lightning Strike.

Reading between the lines, it would appear that Nick’s Pope’s usage of the US spelling of defense even when referring to the UK MoD, is a reflection of both governments efforts to get to grips with phenomena which tend to produce cognitive dissonance within those organisations – and fear. The war offices believe that the winner of any battle is the side with the better technology. Since 1947 the manifestation of ETI abilities on display have created a paradoxical reaction. Knowing perfectly well that our technological capability is not comparable has resulted in a mix of paranoia and a head-in-the-sand approach.

Even Pope, who considers himself more open minded than many of his colleagues, is not immune to this belief that our skies are threatened and we are at war already. Late in his book Open Skies, Closed Minds we also learn that he only occupied the UFO desk part-time, having other duties, elsewhere. Might one of those duties been writing a summation for the MoD concerning all aspects of ETI to that date? His text reveals that he was already writing it in 1995 and after leaving the UFO desk for good in 1996, he was promoted to other departments within the MoD. Yet he still took the time to follow his 1996 non-fiction book with two science fiction novels. All three books would require clearance by the MoD, and those science fiction novels, the 1998 Operation Thunder Child and the 2000 Operation Lightning Strike concerned scary and hostile alien interactions with Earth. (See Fig 17 above.) Both have been republished in 2020, potentially reinforcing in the public mind that ETI in all its aspects is hostile.

If the prevailing tone of his non fiction book is one that supports the government paranoia about open skies he is not alone in this. Referring to the crop circle mystery, we learn that a former head of Pope’s department was one Ralph Noyes. He headed up Defence Secretariat 8 as it was known then, from 1969-1972 (the Apollo years). Thirteen years later, in 1985, Noyes published his own novel about UFO sightings presaging an alien invasion. However, Ralph Noyes understood the subtler aspects of ETI interactions rather better than most. In 1989 He was a founding member of the Centre for Crop Circle Studies and in 1990 edited The Crop Circle Enigma referenced by Pope in his bibliography. And there is the paradox, these government officials seem able to split into two when it comes to the questions of ETI.

Fig 18. The 1994 Spyderweb crop glyph, Avebury, Wiltshire, UK. Lucy Pringle.
This Spyderweb glyph was formed over two nights showing no trace of human fabrication.Some considered its ten-based pattern to relate to digital computing and also the web of communication satellites orbiting Earth, cyberspace. it also recalls 50hz electricity used in Europe.

Nick Pope writes that he only went into one crop circle, but he obviously spent some time looking at the data, and he featured a monochrome photo of this Spyderweb glyph ‘a beautiful formation’ in his 1996 book Open Skies, Closed Minds. At the end of a chapter on the crop circle mystery, referring to the simple quintuplet of four circles around a central circle, he wondered whether the crop circle phenomenon was indeed an attempt to make contact with us. Pope does not go into detail here but as it happens, the majority of these quintuplets appeared in the 1980s, when 47 were recorded (the 1950s and 1970s received one each). This whole set of simple quintuplets were topped and tailed by a perfectly ringed quintuplet. The first in April 1947, the last on August 23, 1989. The year the MoD was first contacted by a farmer, 1985, two partially-ringed quintuplets appeared followed by a third in 1986.

The entire sequence consisted of a total of 54 quintuplets. Nick Pope wondered whether the message was something as simple as, ‘We come from a star with four planets’ or ‘Our planet has four moons’. Then getting a bit closer to home, he added that it might be, ‘We come from the fourth planet of this star’ or ‘We come from Mars’.²⁹ Whether the UFO desk of the MoD had registered that Mars was considered a god of agriculture is unknown, but they might have been advised of the fact that the very first of those 54 quintuplets was found in a field of oats only two months before Kenneth Arnold saw a formation of 9 crescent-shaped disks flying in a 5-4 formation. For the defence organisations, thinking of Mars as representative of warlike attitudes, that might be a bit too close for comfort for the defenders of our skies with their antiquated rocket technology.

So how long does it actually take to change distrust and aggression born of fear into thinking differently about the way we set about things? John Davidson has this to say:

It can take a new generation to even begin to teach the possibility of a new idea. It can then take another generation to be presented with both possibilities (the old and the new) from which to decide, whilst in their youth, before ideas and mental patterns have become rigidly set.” ³⁰

If we truly want to explore our solar system, and even if we truly want to take better care of our own planet, it’s time to make that shift away from the blood-and-thunder type approach of conventional rockets. We will have to develop a truly advanced spacecraft technology – together with the thinking that goes with it – because according to the evidence from the space agencies, “that’s the way we’ve always done it”, is no longer going to hack it.

Mary Bennett

Aulis Online, October 2025

References
All online sources accessed October 10, 2025

1. Planetary Motion: The History of an Idea that Launched the Scientific Revolution
   
2. Astrogeology Science Center, Tanaka et al. 2003, The Astrogeology Science Centre has been based at Flagstaff, Arizona since 1963.
3. Mary Bennett, with David S Percy, Foreword by David Hatcher Childress Alien Intelligence And the Pathway to Mars: The Hidden Connections Between the Red Planet and Earth, Bear & Company, 2021, Chapter 11. The name of Geneva’s Lac Léman originated in the Greek for ’lake of the Port’. The Romans translated ‘port’ into its Latin equivalent Lemannus, from which the French speaking Swiss derived Léman.
4. Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth: Life Lessons From Space, HbK Macmillan 2013. PbK Pan Macmillan, 2015
5. Hadfield, ibid. Chapter 12 The Shuttle landing pp245-247. Kazahkstan pp 247-250 Pbk edition. Also Terry Virts How to Astronaut, Workman Publishing Co. Inc New York Ch 45 pp243-49
6. Medical Effects of Spaceflight Aulis Online.
   Also: Launched September 18, 2006 on Souyuz TMA-9/8 Anousheh Ansari spent just under 11 days days in space, and experienced sickness on the way up to the ISS. She kept a blog during her stay on the ISS and after returning to Earth wrote a very vivid account as to how space travellers are utterly incapacitated on their return to earth after orbiting in micro-gravity. The Russians call the extraction from the Soyuz and the ensuing state of helplessness ‘the second birth’. Extracts from her blog present the journey up problems but ignore the ramifications of space travel after the return. This short report on Ansari’s touchdown in Kazakhstan provides some insight but avoids the difficulties she explains in her blog concerning extraction from the Soyuz and the post-flight physical difficulties that occur before the helicopters can remove the cosmonauts from the landing site. She wonders how those who have spent longer than 11 days must be feeling. Terry Virts describes his adaptation after six months in space in How to Astronaut see chapter 46, pp250-55.
7. Mars & Beyond: The Road To Making Humanity Multiplanetary, SpaceX.
8. Nature: 3 months transit time to Mars for human missions using SpaceX Starship should all the technology prove to function correctly, the very shortest Earth-Mars trajectory would be of 90 days on present NASA timescale and Martian gravity allowing, that should take some 34 days to full recovery time).
9. Redirecting NASA’s focus: Why the Gateway program should be cancelled
10. FAQ: NASA’s Artemis Campaign and Recent Updates
    Also Artemis II Crew to Advance Human Spaceflight Research
11. RESEARCH ARTICLE Have beliefs in conspiracy theories increased over time?
    
12. NASA’s Human research program
    
13. Nature: Red risks for a journey to the red planet: The highest priorityhuman health risks for a mission to Mars. The term Exposome was coined by cancer epidemiologist Christopher Paul Wild on 15 August 2005. When writing “Complementing the Genome with an 'Exposome': The Outstanding Challenge of Environmental Exposure Measurement in Molecular Epidemiology”, [Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention, volume 14, number 8, pages 1847–1850] he defined it thus: At its most complete, the exposome encompasses life-course environmental exposures (including lifestyle factors), from the prenatal period onwards.
    Also Christopher Paul Wild, The Exposome: From concept to utility, International Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 41, Issue 1, February 2012, pp24-32.
14. Interview with Astronaut Don Petitt 'Seeing' Cosmic Rays in Space
15. Terry Virts How to Astronaut Workman Publishing Co. Inc New York Chapter 43 pp228-37
    Also see Why Space Radiation Matters
    
16. NASA Biography of Terry W. Virts, Jr. (Colonel, U.S. Air Force, Retired).
    
17. The TREAT Astronauts Act authorizes NASA to monitor, diagnose, and treat medical and psychological conditions associated with spaceflight.
    
18. The Artemis II mission.
    Also, see Why Space Radiation Matters – examples of ionizing radiation include alpha particles (a helium atom nucleus moving at very high speeds), beta particles (a high-speed electron or positron), gamma rays, x-rays, and galactic cosmic radiation (GCR) from space. Examples of non-ionizing radiation include radio frequencies, microwaves, infrared, visible light, and ultraviolet (UV) light. While many forms of non-ionizing and ionizing radiation have become essential to our everyday life, each kind of radiation can cause damage to living and non-living objects, and precautions are required to prevent unnecessary risks.
    And Moon 2 Mars Space Radiation Protection “Buying Down” Risks to Crew
    
19. NASA Announces CHAPEA Crew for Year-Long Mars Mission Simulation – NASA profiles of the crew performing the second of the agencies Mars simulation studies.
    
20. Autobiography, Matthew Montgomery , Floating Lava
    
21. Mary Bennett, with David S Percy, Foreword by David Hatcher Childress Alien Intelligence And the Pathway to Mars: The Hidden Connections Between the Red Planet and Earth, Bear & Company, 2021, Chapter 16. Closer Encounters.
    Also, Stanley Kubrick and Apollo parts 1, 2 & 3, Aulis Online.
22. For the background to rocketry and attempts to get human beings into space in the 20th century Mary Bennett & David S. Percy, Dark Moon Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers, Aulis Publishers, London 1999, Adventures Unlimited Press, Kempton Illinois USA, 2001.
    
23. Scientific American, 1997, What is the 'zero-point energy' (or 'vacuum energy') in quantum physics? Is it really possible that we could harness this energy?
24. Internet Archive Nick Pope Biography
25. Nick Pope, Open Skies, Closed Minds Simon & Schuster Ltd. London, 1996. Chapter 4 p67
    
26. The biological anthropologist and author Elizabeth Weiss was a fully tenured professor at San Jose State University from 2004 until 2024 when she resigned voluntarily from her post, after having reached a settlement with the University. The background to the controversy her views have raised within academe and the wider community can be found here, October 4, 2021.
    
27. In 2016 scientists from the University of Warsaw created the first-ever hologram of a single light particle, adding new insights to the foundations of quantum mechanics. This website has the details and includes more images of this event.
    
28. Mary Bennett, with David S Percy, Foreword by David Hatcher Childress Alien Intelligence And the Pathway to Mars: The Hidden Connections Between the Red Planet and Earth, Bear & Company, 2021, Chapter 20, p450.
29. Nick Pope, Open Skies, Closed Minds Simon & Schuster Ltd. London, 1996 – Pope has a central section of monochrome photos. Oh the first page the Spyderweb crop glyph forms the background to a montage of 3 UFO images: Foo Fighters seen in WW2, lenticular clouds often mistaken for UFOs, and a George Adamski ‘Venusian scout ship’ from 1952. The quintuplet data derives from my own hardcopy binder established by Bertold Zugelder and titled Crop Circle Archive. It’s UK section has a catalogue of UK crop circles dating from the 17th century through to 2006. The archive is now online here.
30. John Davidson M.A..Cantab The Secret of the Creative Vacuum: Man & the Energy Dance. The CW Daniel Company Ltd. Saffron Walden, Essex, UK, 1989. Born in 1944, John Davidson has had a lifelong interest in mysticism. Graduating in 1966 from Cambridge University with a degree in natural (biological) sciences, he went on to work for seventeen years at the university’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. After leaving Cabbridge, Davidson wrote a series of five books on science and mysticism. The intention was to give a voice to the idea that an understanding of science was in no way incompatible with a spiritual perception of things.
    

This article is licensed under
a Creative Commons License

AULIS Online – Different Thinking