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May 14, 2010 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
26:19
Edition 35 - ESA Response

This is a shortened Edition - Senior European Space Agency man Oliver Witasse replies toRichard Hoaglands statements that Phobos is not natural - and may be some kind of spaceship.

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you for returning to the show and we left almost like a soap opera everything hanging in the air or rather in space in our last edition of The Unexplained, which was a special with Richard Hoagland and his claims about Phobos, the moon of Mars that he says isn't natural and maybe some kind of giant, ancient, perhaps spaceship left there, abandoned there, put there by someone or something.
Now, I would like to thank you very much for the mountain of email traffic I've had about this and I do know that for one reason or another and covering the British general election for radio in London is one of the reasons I haven't been able to get back to you all individually but I have looked at every single email and I've taken every word that you've said on board and I thank you so much for the response.
Even the people who said this is rubbish, I don't believe any of it.
That's the whole idea of this show.
I am not allowed as a journalist to buy into any of the theories, propositions and suppositions of people who appear on this show and I hope that I've never done that.
Yes, I have been intrigued by things that are said and yes, there are some guests that I like and I like Richard Hoagland and I like his thoroughness and rigor of argument and I've seen him in person do a presentation in Liverpool last year and I have never seen anybody put together a scientific argument, deliver it cogently, coherently, at length without a single amone and without losing track in the way that he did.
He put together in his presentation last year and you can hear some of that if you go back through previous editions of this show on the website or via iTunes, that is quite a skill.
So I like the work of Richard Hoagland.
I cannot take a view on anything or any guest because otherwise what would be the point of a show like this?
The idea is to put the ideas out there.
And what I think about all of it really is immaterial, don't you think?
Now, a couple of things to get to.
Before we get the response to what Richard said on the last edition of this show from the European Space Agency directly, I have managed to get an interview with one of the top people at ESA.
You'll be hearing that in just seconds on this shortened edition of The Unexplained.
I will be giving Richard Hoagland right of reply.
That's only fair.
And that will be coming very soon on this website.
So look out for it.
The website address is www.theunexplained.tv.
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It is terribly important.
Don't forget, I always say this.
We are independent media.
I'm not part of any big corporation.
They have resources that you cannot even imagine to deploy on these things.
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They have producers, many producers.
They have assistants.
I don't have that.
I have me, and I have to somehow financially support myself.
And as I've mentioned before, and I won't bore you again with the story, I injured myself quite badly six months ago, so I haven't worked a great deal over these months, but I'm just getting back on air.
But money is very, very tight, but this work has to continue.
And that's why I've done it, despite the pain that I've been in, and despite the lack of money that I have suffered.
Fact is, I love doing this, and I'm so thrilled that you enjoy it.
Now, as I said, let's get back to the point.
This is an independent show.
We don't have the resources of the big shows.
So it is something that you and I are working together on.
Thank you very, very much for your response.
I've had a mountain, as I say, of email, much of that from North America and Canada, and I thank you for that.
And my listeners in the UK, thank you to you for being the core and bedrock of this show, which is growing enormously now.
And I'm so grateful for that.
Now, another key point, and this is the last time on this edition I will say it, donations to the show.
Money's very, very tight for me at the moment.
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I know you would say that, but I love doing this.
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Right.
I will park that there.
Let's get to the guest.
This is the man from the European Space Agency.
His name is Olivier Vitas.
He is one of the senior people involved at ESA directly with Phobos.
So if anybody knows about all of this, he is the man.
It took me two weeks to nail down an interview with him, and a couple of days ago, I did it.
I'm going to let you hear it exactly as it happened, completely unedited.
I hope I did this subject justice.
I'm not a scientist.
I am a journalist.
And like you, I love these subjects.
So I did my best.
Your thoughts on this will be gratefully received.
And as I say, we are independent.
We don't have the great teams of people that, you know, the big shows in North America and other places have.
This is a tiny, tiny little project.
But boy, do I think it's important that we are there and we stay there.
So here he comes, Olivia Vitas, with his response about Phobos, as recorded a couple of days ago, his response to Richard C. Hoagland.
I am what we call the project scientist for Martha Express.
That's fine.
Now, normally when we do interviews as journalists, we tend to work up to the big questions at the end.
I want, if I may, Olivier, to ask you one of the big questions at the very beginning, and that is a question that I asked through a third party of you, through somebody else to ask you, and I got your response back from them.
And the question that I asked, which may even now seem strange to you, is, is Phobos an unnatural object?
In other words, is it something that has been created by some intelligence rather than simply happened through the forces of nature as far as we understand them now?
And the response that I got back from you, and again this was through somebody else, was, I cannot confirm that it's not a natural object.
And the question I want to ask you now is, can you definitively confirm at this stage that Phobos is a natural object.
Can you say that it absolutely, from the research that you've done, from what Mars Express has seen, from the readings that have been taken and the data that you have, Mars is a natural, Phobos rather, is a natural object?
Yeah, it's clear.
I think for us, it's clear.
Same for Mars, same for the other planets.
I think there is no ambiguity there.
I think I remember, I think I replied to this guy during the weekend.
What's the name of the guy again?
Do you remember that?
Well, look, the man I've been speaking with is an American whose name I'm sure you know, Richard Hoagland.
Yes, I think it's probably that person.
No, no, it's clear.
I mean, with Mars Express, we are doing the exploration of many of Mars, but regularly we do some flybys of Phobos because we have a good orbit for that.
And for us, there is no question.
Phobos is a natural satellite of Mars, and we study this body as such.
It's already quite interesting to study that, even if we know it's a natural object.
Okay, well, there are various reasons I want to get into why it may be fascinating, but I wonder if you can answer the point that Richard Hoagland makes, and tell me what your thoughts on this are, that there are people within ESA who know or think that they know, believe that Phobos is not a natural object.
There are quite a few of them.
They have this data on their laptop computers, and they're just waiting for the time when ESA confirms that Phobos is not a natural object.
I'm sorry to labor this point, but it's very, very important to what I'm doing now.
Yeah, no, but there is nobody in ESA who think that Phobos is an artificial object.
We all think, we all believe, we all know that Phobos is a natural object.
I don't know what are the source for this information, but no, no, we are all at ESA on the same line.
But I think I know from where the confusion might come, and this is what I wrote to this American.
I think the main confusion, I think, is because in some of the web stories that we have put on the web, maybe two months ago when we performed some close flyby of Phobos, we wrote that Phobos, some parts of Phobos may be hollow.
Well, that is the crux of it all, really, that apparently Phobos is one-third hollow.
And from your own data, and this is according to Richard Hoagland, Phobos has within things that look like chambers and cannot be, if it is a natural object.
Looks like what?
Sorry?
They look like chambers or rooms or walls or structures within the one-third hollow part of Phobos.
And they simply, by the laws of science as we know them, they cannot be.
Is that the picture that you sent me?
Or it has nothing to do with that?
No, no, that's something else I want to get to.
Okay, that's something else.
Probably we should not have used hollow.
Because I think that's yes, because for some of us, English is not our native language, of course.
So you're saying that the word hollow and that interpretation was simply a loss in translation?
Yes, I think so, because what we wrote is that we said part of Phobos is maybe hollow.
And in fact, what we maybe should have written on the web and said to everybody, and that we know we have the data for that, is that Phobos is porous.
It's not a complete solid body.
We know that from the data that we have, that Phobos might be maybe 30% porous.
In other words, there are 30% of void inside Phobos.
And we should have used the word porous or low density instead of hollow.
Now, you know that there are an awful lot of people who read every word that's put out by ESA and NASA and governments and agencies all around the world, and they study words.
Some of those people who may be suspicious would say, well, ESA is an international agency.
You have members who are English and speak English as their native tongue.
It's very hard.
It tests credulity, as we say here.
It is very difficult to believe that you would make a mistake like that with a word like hollow, getting the word hollow instead of the word porous.
They're very different words and they mean very specific things.
Well, I can understand that.
Yeah, it may be difficult for English or American speakers to understand that, but when you are not English native speakers, I think it's easy to make some mistakes.
And what we wrote is we did not write that Phobos is hollow.
We wrote that parts of Phobos might be hollow and for us.
It simply means that Phobos is porous.
So I think it's just a kind of misinterpretation or misunderstanding.
But just to clarify, Phobos is porous.
And this is what we maybe should have written from the very beginning.
What about the claims that Phobos has an unusual orbit, an orbit that by rights it shouldn't really have, and unusual and anomalous magnetic fields around it?
There is no unusual magnetic field at Phobos, I'm afraid.
I think you got here wrong information.
And also Phobos has no unusual orbit.
I mean, it has the orbit it has.
So there is nothing special there.
It's almost circular orbit and equatorial orbit.
But it's a perfect circle, isn't it?
Yeah, but the planets, they have also almost, at least most of them, a perfect circle around the Sun.
So there is no issue there.
And what do you think?
As a scientist and as somebody who works with ESA, which of course includes the British and all the European nations working together to forward an advance understanding, how do you feel about people who claim that Phobos is not a natural object?
What is your thought about that?
What do you think about them?
Yeah, well, everybody has the right to think and to write what they want, of course.
I completely disagree with these statements, and everybody in Isa will disagree with that.
Besides that, everybody is free to say what they think.
But it's not proved at all.
There is no fact that can prove what they say.
And that's all I have to see.
And claims that there may be data that you are withholding, that's not true.
You're not withholding any data about Phobos.
Is that so?
No, yeah, no, no, not at all.
And the surface of Phobos, I sent you a photograph.
I'm not sure whether you've seen it, but you may have been selling it.
I've seen it.
I've seen it.
Now, that photograph shows what appears to be regular geometry on the surface of Phobos.
Now, regular geometry happens when it is designed by, for example, us or some intelligence.
How can that be?
Yeah, indeed, when you see such a picture, and with the picture of Los Angeles that you put together on this plot, it can be surprising, indeed.
But such a feature, there have been seen on Phobos, this is what we call the grooves.
This is some geological features.
And also there is no clear origin for these features.
There is a lot of hypothesis and a lot of scientific papers and studies that have been done about that.
And I can give you one example.
So such features could have been created by Martian meteorites or ejecta that have been ejected from Mars following a big impact.
So imagine a big impact on Mars, a lot of ejecta, obviously, and some of the ejecta they crossed or they touched Phobos and they have created such a feature that we call grooves.
Indeed, we can think that they might have been by looking at the picture you can think that they are very regular.
But this is the thing that makes them look odd, really, even to my untrained eye, that they are so very square and regular and perfect.
No, they are not perfect, but if you look at surfaces of planets, Mars or other planets, you can always find, if you want to look at regular things, you can always sometimes find these kind of features.
So that does not mean they are real.
And in that case, they are not because they have been already studied and they have several hypotheses as to the come from.
Why are we interested in Phobos, Olivier?
Phobos, yeah, but the main question is that why Phobos and Deimos, the other Martian moons, why they are there?
In fact, the question is we would like to understand their origin because at the moment we don't know.
There are some contradictions and several hypotheses about their origin.
The first hypothesis is that when you look at Phobos and Deimos, they really look like asteroids.
So the first idea was they are asteroids, like the other asteroid that we know in the solar system, and they have been captured by Mars.
That will be one hypothesis.
The only problem with this hypothesis is with such capture, it's difficult to explain the orbit of Phobos.
So this is an hypothesis which is not confirmed yet.
Another hypothesis will be that Phobos and Deimos have been created in situ, as we call, around Mars, with material coming either from the nebula that created Mars or from a giant impact on Mars that and the ejecta have formed Phobos and Deimos later on.
And this material has been compacted together to make Phobos and Deimos.
Is that so?
Yes, both of them.
So at the moment, there are several hypotheses under study, and nobody can say this is this one, that one, or the other one.
And why?
If there is so much that you don't understand about it, why are you ruling out the possibility that it may not be natural?
I'm not trying to make you say, well, yes, there is a small possibility, but I'm just interested that you are, even though you know a fair amount about it, but you don't know everything about Phobos, why rule out the thought that it may not be natural?
I mean, what would be like an artificial object?
I mean, we have all the planets.
We know we explore the solar system from with a robotic exploration for the last 50 years.
We explore all the planets, our moon, the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, the asteroid.
So we have a fairly good idea about the population of the solar system.
And Phobos and Amos, they are just part of the solar system, so we know that.
Can I ask, Olivia, has anybody from the European Space Agency been to Washington recently to take information about Phobos to President Obama?
No, I don't think so.
No, I think I would know that.
But I don't know why Obama would be interested by that, but why not?
All right.
Tell me briefly then.
You said to me that even though it is a natural object, there are many reasons why we should, as Europeans and as citizens of the world, be interested in Phobos.
Tell me some of those reasons why we should be interested.
Why we should be interested in Phobos?
Yes.
Ah, well, the first thing is that.
There are so many unusual things about it.
We've talked about some of them, but I'm just wondering if there are more.
Yeah, but as we said, it's an interesting object because we don't know its origin at the moment.
So that's the first part.
From the scientific point of view, it's quite interesting to study.
But there are other aspects, and it might be linked to the President Obama.
Because in fact, you know, we are talking about the robotic exploration of Mars, but also the human exploration of Mars, maybe in the future.
And Obama, I think, mentioned that in his plans very recently.
But it's very difficult to send some man on Mars, and in general, it's difficult to send a mission to Mars.
And interestingly, Phobos will be an interesting target for another robotic expression or for the mind mission.
Because just from the technical point of view, engineering point of view, it's much more easier to land on Phobos than to land on Mars.
Because of gravity, because there is no atmosphere around Phobos.
So that's why Phobos, in fact, represents an interesting target for the exploration of the system of Mars, either by robots or by humans.
So that's why there have been many proposals for missions at Phobos.
And also that's another reason to be interested by this moon.
I see.
So in other words, we may be able to get people on Phobos and by doing that we could learn about Mars, which is much more difficult to get to as people.
Yes, exactly.
Okay.
And I think it has been proposed and okay, we don't know what will be the future, of course, but there have been some proposals about that.
All right.
Do you believe, just to take you very briefly back, Olivia, and I thank you very much for your time, do you believe that there may be civilizations, beings, creatures, intelligent life forms, I'm sorry if I sound like Star Trek when I talk like this, in other parts of the cosmos?
Or do you believe that we're alone and that there are many natural objects like Phobos out there and not much else?
Yeah, well, it's of course an interesting question.
I think my personal feeling, I think we are alone.
I think we have a...
That's my personal feeling.
But of course, I will be very much interesting to learn that I am wrong.
Would you like to be wrong?
Yes, in fact, I would like to be wrong.
Okay.
Finally, there will be people who will hear your words and will say he is the, In other words, he's denying something that he actually secretly knows but is not allowed to tell.
What words do you have for those people?
I'm not sure I understand the question.
Well, you know, people who say that you know a secret about Phobos that you're telling me isn't there, but they will come back to me, they will email me and say, well, we heard what Olivia Vitas said, and we still don't believe him.
What have you to say to them?
Ah, okay.
Well, what I will say, in fact, with Mass Express, we have some very interesting results about Phobos, scientific results, and we are going to discuss them in a scientific conference in Rome in September.
It is called the EPSC conference, Euro Planetary Science Congress.
And there will be a dedicated session on Phobos.
And I welcome everybody that would like to learn more about Phobos to come at this conference.
This is happening in Italy.
Richard Hoagland says the ESA people, or the people who know more about Phobos than you would say exists.
In other words, the people who say that Phobos is not a natural object, are in Italy.
Is it mere coincidence that this conference is being held in Italy?
No, it's no.
In fact, I don't know exactly the reason for that, but there have been some proposals for such a conference.
Well, we organize it in a rotating manner in Europe.
And it was the turn of Rome because there is a good team of scientists in Rome that we are willing to host this Congress.
So nothing more than that.
And there are no scientists in Rome who have data about Phobos that show it is more than you've told me it is.
No.
All right.
Olivier, you've been very kind to answer my questions.
Thank you very, very much for that.
And I wish you all the very best.
You've been very courteous, and thank you so much.
Okay, thanks to you, Awalt.
Olivia Vitas, senior project scientist at ESA, and I'm grateful to him for the time that he made for us.
I don't know whether that expanded your understanding about all of this, but I think it was important that we gave them the right to reply because a lot of claims and a lot of assertions and a lot of hypotheses were put forward.
So I think it's important that we balance it out, as they say, without sounding too highfaluthiant.
I hope I don't.
But in the interests of journalism, I think it was important that we did that.
And I'm glad that I persevered with Isa and they were very courteous.
They took a little time to organize this, but at last we got there.
And that is the response of the man directly involved.
Now, as I said at the top of this show, only fair that Richard C. Hoagland gets his right of repry.
So please watch this website.
Keep an eye on iTunes.
And wherever you get this show from normally, you will find Richard's reply very soon here.
I'll be talking to him quite soon about it, and we'll put it straight up on the website the moment almost that I do it.
Now, thank you again for your great response.
Thank you to Martin for the theme tune.
To Adam Cornwell, the Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for getting this show out To you, his marvelous work, his wonderful website that you all seem to like so much and quite rightly.
So, thank you very much for listening to the show.
You are, well, you are the reason that I continue with this work.
And again, thank you for the donations, the emails, and the interest.
Keep them all coming.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I will return soon here on The Unexplained.
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