T or E

For a change of pace here are some mechanical looking objects from M0202913.

"Robot."



"Wrecked Ship." Note cylindrical base and tower dome (bridge?).



Wrecked Ship colorized.



Neil

Here are some more comic strip characters from M0304877.

"Spidey"



Spidey in his red suit.



"Hulk," Rock-like Hulk before Ferrigno played him on TV.



Green Hulk.



"Ozzy"



"Woody," (Allen, not Woodpecker).



Neil

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by tvanflandern</i>
<br />But with a few hundred man hours of programming by an image processing specialist, one could modify all the border pixels so that each pixel had exactly the right proportion of background and feature. It would then be impossible even for an expert to determine that the image had been modified -- for the moment. Of course, as soon as any other nation's space program takes its own picture, the fraud is discovered and heads roll and criminal charges of destruction of public property are leveled. Even without waiting for another space program, the insane perpetrator would have to be ever vigilant because another image of the same area could come in at any time, and he would have to make corresponding modifications to that image, allowing for different camera and Sun angles and brightness/contrast settings.

Discovery of the crime would always be just a slip away, and JPL would likely lose its billion-dollar-a-year contract with NASA over it. So the only apparent logic behind such a move would be to sabotage JPL and bring the agency down. Normally, though, such criminals are not that talented, dedicated, or clever.
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

I asked a friend of mine, what would be involved in modifying these images. Basically, the message I'm getting is that it would be fairly easy for a developer.. Even taking all of your objections into account.

I did a quick survey of the last company I worked for. I figure there were roughly 12 divisions. Each division had approximately 40 folks capable of modifying these images. Say ~500. Ok, let's cut that in half and say 250 developers, who if motivated to do that, would be capable of doing it.

If you couple that with the mind-set of a motivated ex Microsoft employee, who has been wreaking havoc on MS for 10 years writing virus programs, it doesn't seem all that unusual to me.

I ran this by my wife, today, and her comment was, "all you need are 2 people, forget about 250."

The only real hurdle, in my estimation, and in the mind of the developer I spoke to, would be having access and/or privledges to "re-upload" the modified image. Doing the modification itself, is not all that big a deal, to someone who's doing it, because (a) he can, and (b) he thinks it's funny.

All he needs is a comic book, a scanner, and a couple of utilities to modify the data. With a little ingenuity, he could probably leave the original grayscale arrangement, and superimpose the new stuff over it, in various little small blocks. Maybe by summing, or something like that. But first he would reduce the pixel data of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to some small fraction of it. This might result in some sort of "superposition" of the two data sets.

Compared to sending men to the moon, I'd say this is trivial if the right person was motivated enough, and had the right privledges.

rd

Just a reality check here. If it did turn out that some hacker or hackers placed little "nuggets" here and there, for us "Easter Egg" hunters to later find. That still wouldn't mean that all of the artificial features found on Mars would necessarily be fakes. Some may be real and some not. This may take a long time sorting itself out. I just didn't want to be some fool who never suspected the fake. Remember the "Piltdown Man." That was a "prehistoric" fossil, a "missing link" that was believed by mainstream for over thirty years. Finally, when scientific dating techniques were developed, it was discovered to be the jaw of a babboon attached to a modern human skull. So we have precedents here.

Believe me, I very much hope this is no hoax. It would be the discovery of a lifetime that we and several other reasearchers have made, braving the scorn of the sceptics, and the academicians in their "dogmatic slumber." But we have to guard against all eventualities.

We need proof.

Neil

Let me give you another example of a simple way the Hoaxter could cover his tracks, assuming he had access to the raw data, and a way to "check out" and "replace" the original image swath.

He wouldn't have to replace a whole rectangle worth of pixels. Really all he would have to do, is first reduce his phony feature to something that was pretty much just the equivalent of a charcoal outline, like this rendition of Zorba:

{Image deleted temporarily} M0304877Zorba3.gif

{Image deleted temporarily} M0304877Zorba3key.gif

Then he modifies only those pixels that correspond to the charcoal outline, not the whole rectangle of new data. That way he gets around the problem of having to mix and match the border pixels. He simply maps the Zorba outline to some area in a strip that looks halfway like it might look natural there. Piece of cake.

This type of technique could easily have been used in the Nefertiti and Family region. There's really not all that many greyscales involved. Maybe those bad images that we were complaining about are the real ones, with just a hint of an outline and the Hoaxter took the ball and ran with it.

rd

What we need is some kind of proof.

Remember the 3 separate Profile Image strips each confirming the one before it. And the scores of Cydonia face images, (some were even taken at night). It would be extremely dificult, and take hundreds or thousands of co-conspirators to stay on top of such a hoax. I agree with Tom that that is almost out of the question, because if true, eventually somone would get caught and go to jail.

Also the T or E with 20+ context images have lots of confirmation. Rich's wife's theory that it would only take two, is true only if the problem is sporadic hackers, and that would mean that most of the famous stuff is still real.

My guess is that some of the ones I'm now finding may be fakes, but not all. I'll probably look for confirming images for the ones I've found recently. If real, there should be some.

On the notion that a hoax is something that "we shouldn't go there". This is a scientific website, getting confirmation is part of science, so is falsifying hypotheses.

Neil