By Sebastian Kettley
PLANET Mars teemed with alien lifeforms until nuclear warfare wiped out all evidence of life on the Red Planet, a plasma physicist has astonishingly claimed.
Dr John Brandenburg, an American physicist and book author, believes he has found evidence of a nuclear winter wiping out an ancient Martian civilisation. Speaking to Coast to Coast AM radio, the scientists argued alien life on Mars was cut short by the power of the atom and the deliberate use of nuclear weapons by a foreign force. The researcher further argued humanity stood on the brink of a similar cataclysm at the height of the Cold War. In his estimate, Dr Brandenburg said Mars was nuked into oblivion by two nuclear devices detonated on the Red Planet.
The physicist said: “The best working hypothesis is that Mars was like Earth and developed an indigenous, humanoid species like us, that evolved to a primitive civilisation.
“It looks primitive. We don’t see any roads, airports, anything like that.
“It appears that there was a primitive civilisation on Mars and somebody attacked them from space because the explosions were airbursts of two massive nuclear weapons.”
The extraterrestrial revelation came to the physicist at the height of the proxy Cold War with the Soviet Union, when he came across atmospheric readings from Mars.
During a stint in Sandia National Laboratories, in California, Dr Brandenburg said he learned Mars’ atmosphere was “loaded with a peculiar isotope” known as Xenon 129.
High concentrations of radioactive Xenon are typically associated with nuclear reactors, nuclear fission and the fallout from nuclear explosions.
Dr Brandenburg, who holds a PhD in Theoretical Plasma Physics at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, believes Mars’ nuclear destruction was deliberate and meticulous.
He said: “The two regions of residual radioactivity on Mars, which are very weak but they’re still easily detectable, and Thorium and Potassium are correlated with Cydonia Mensa and Galaxias Chaos, this other centre of civilisation.
“There certainly would be levels of radiation in these areas that would be easy to detect for human beings.
“I don’t think that this would present any hazard for humans unless they maybe dug down below the soil deeply in the centres of these areas.
“One of the reasons I have published this now is because I sense a growing danger of nuclear war between us and China or Korea.
“I don’t want that to happen, I don’t want this planet to end up looking like Mars.”
However, according to data collected by NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover, vast amounts of Xenon in the atmosphere can be explained by cosmic rays bombarding the planet.
The US space agency said the particular chemistry of the Red Planet’s surface material “contributed dynamically” to Mars’ atmospheric makeup.
A research paper on the findings, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, reads: “The Xenon measurements suggest an intriguing possibility that isotopes lighter than Xenon 132 have been enriched to varying degrees by spallation and neutron capture products degassed to the atmosphere from the regolith, and a model is constructed to explore this possibility.”
