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Aug. 5, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:12:21
Edition 563 - Barry Di Gregorio
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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.
I hope that you're bearing up and reasonably happy wherever you happen to be in this world of ours.
Strange weather here in the United Kingdom, loads and loads and loads and loads of rain.
I was watching a video before I came to record this of something that happened, I think, within this day that I'm recording it, on the Isle of Wight, which, if you don't know the geography of the United Kingdom, is an island at the very bottom base of England, literally between us here and France.
Now, it's a lovely place to live.
It's had so much rain.
This video showed how the carriageway, the road surface of a road on a slight incline was being burst upwards, rather like the incredible Hulk, burst upwards by the volume of water coming from underneath.
I've never seen a road carriageway be peeled back in that way from underneath.
I've seen flood water appear and, you know, collapse a road from on top.
But to watch this bubble and burst up from underneath was just astonishing.
So who knows what's going to happen next year?
As I record these words, there is a yellow weather alert for the area that I live in for tonight.
So, you know, I'm looking at the sky now.
It's fairly grey, but it can change like that here.
So it's been a bit weird.
Thank you for your email.
I was going to mention a couple of people.
The guest on this edition of The Unexplained is astrobiologist Barry de Gregorio, who appeared briefly on my radio show a couple of months ago.
And I wanted to get him on here to talk about his view that there has been ancient life on Mars and that there are evidence of it, or there is evidence of it, actually there that we have uncovered and he has actually seen and located.
So we'll talk with Barry de Gregorio here coming very soon.
Just a couple of people to mention.
First of all, I got an email today, actually, from Rachel, who lives in the north of England.
Rachel, I'm not going to give your precise location because you asked me not to give too many details, so I'm not going to.
But you wrote in support of something that I've said on the radio and on the podcast a couple of times.
Something weird that happened to me when I was about 11.
My grandmother, who was wonderful, took me for a day out to the fair in South Port, which is kind of 20 miles north of Liverpool, and it's a seaside resort.
My parents lived there later years, very close to South Port.
And it was always a treat.
This was an August day from what I can remember, probably a bank holiday.
And we had had a wonderful day.
And like people who'd been to the fair in those days, most people tended to go home around about the same time because for a lot of people it would be work the next day.
So they'd have to get themselves home on this day, pretty smartish after the day of fun at the fair.
So we were walking back, and you may have heard me tell this story before, but there was a man next to us, walking back to the train station, and my grandmother said, don't look.
Of course, being 11 years of age, what did I do?
I looked.
The man had an overcoat on and he had cloven hooves and legs that looked like they could have come from a goat or maybe a deer.
I've never seen anything like it.
I wasn't frightened.
I was just shocked.
And I've taken that image with me all of my life.
So I got this from Rachel.
Rachel said, I've been listening to your show for some years now.
Thank you, Rachel.
I've been meaning to write for some time about this.
This is a family story that occurred, thinks Rachel, in the 1940s.
The sighting occurred to my grandmother's brother.
It happened in the English Midlands where they used to live.
The story goes that he'd been out playing cards.
They were a strict church family.
This would have been seen as ungodly.
I dare say he would have had a drink as well.
But apparently he wasn't drunk when this happened.
He finished playing cards, started to walk home.
He was aware of somebody following him, again wearing a long coat, kept getting faster with his walking, but what could be heard was a clip-clop noise on the cobblestones.
He looked around and saw a man with just as you said, that's me, the lower half like a goat with legs and hooves.
He was a grown man, terrified, ran home as fast as he could.
He was convinced it was the devil because he'd been playing cards.
I've never heard anyone describe such a sighting before.
I heard your account, that's my account, in Southport.
So I found it interesting.
Rachel, thank you for that.
I've never heard anybody else with an account of that kind.
And I've been trying for most of my life to work out what it was that my grandmother and I saw on that day.
You know, whether we saw some kind of human mutation or something else, I don't know.
And, you know, I'm hoping that one day I find out.
Just a couple of other people to say hello to.
John, thank you for your message about my podcast with Bart Costco.
Said some very nice things about it.
Thank you.
And Gemma, listening in Spain, nice to have you there.
And nice to have you there wherever in the world you are.
If you have any thoughts about the show, if you have guest suggestions to give me, all you've got to do is go to the website theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam.
And you can follow the link and send me an email from there.
If you'd like to make a donation towards the running of the show, that would be gratefully received.
You can do that too through the website theunexplained.tv.
And if you have done that recently, thank you very much from the bottom of my heart.
It's very, very kind of you, especially in these days.
Okay, I think that's about it, really.
The guest on this edition, Barry de Gregorio, astrobiologist, we're going to be talking about some deeply scientific stuff, but also some stuff that goes to the core of Mars exploration and the idea that there may have been, there may be life there.
Some of this ties to the work of Patricia Ann Stratt and Gil Levin, who did work on the so-called labeled release experiment in the Viking 2 mission back in the 1970s, that it was claimed, proved, that there was or there could be life on Mars.
That's been hotly disputed for all of these decades since the 1970s.
But Barry de Gregorio's work ties into this.
Let me tell you a little bit about him.
This is his biography, a short version.
American astrobiologist.
He spent 10 years as a research associate for the Cardiff Centre of Astrobiology at Cardiff University in Wales, where I study journalism.
In 2010, de Gregorio was made an honorary research fellow for the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology in the UK.
His scientific interests include the study of the geology, geobiology, and history of the Great Lakes region in the United States and Canada, but that's only part of it.
And he has a long and distinguished record of research papers and books as well.
So I think we ought to be getting to him now, the United States.
This conversation is by telephone, the way we used to do things.
I hope you understand that.
I'm hoping that the line is good.
But let's say hello now to Barry de Gregorio in the United States.
Barry, thank you for coming on my show.
You're welcome.
So, Barry, you are a fascinating man who's been involved in so much research and some of that research at my old university, Cardiff, which is interesting to see.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Yeah, no, I studied journalism then, though.
I was no scientist.
But you've done an awful lot of research.
How would you describe yourself?
What would you describe the area of your research as being?
A scientific investigator.
Okay.
In the field of astrobiology, in the field of geology?
Both.
Both.
Astrobiology came later, of course.
If you're growing up near Niagara Falls and Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, you get a rich history, if you're a curious person, of what it was like during the periods of time when life went from being microbial to being life that was multicellular.
And it applies to Mars directly.
And so all those things that I learned while studying the history of this area, the rocks, the ice ages, led to my being in a particular well-suited place to look at the possibility of maybe Mars going through similar stages.
And was there a time, was there a light bulb moment for you as a young man where you thought, if I am seeing these formations, I can remember I studied geology to a very low level at school, and they used to take us on geology trips where we would take a look at the rock strata.
We would look at what fossils were found within the rock strata.
We'd chip some of them out.
But was there a moment for you when you thought, if I am seeing this here, then there is a chance that if I went to another planet like Mars, I would see something similar?
Yeah, it was during the period that I was writing the book Mars Living Planet.
And, you know, of course, that book was with Gill writing a chapter, and Patricia Stratt also wrote a chapter for that book.
I wanted to include both of them because they were the first people to really get to examine the surface of Mars to look for life.
So my exploration, my light bulb moment, Eureka moment, if you will, happened when I was studying the rocks out at the Cornell Spacecraft Imaging Facility in Cornell, New York.
And I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
You know, these were rocks that I had looked at for years along the shores of Lake Ontario, just finding them even in drumlins that are along the shore.
A drumlin is left over from the ice age.
Basically, the great glaciations that carved through the Canadian Shield brought down all kinds of sediments and rocks from the ancient ocean that existed here, you know, back to the Ediacaran period, 600 million years ago.
So you had rocks from that period all the way to, you know, the Ordovetian for me, which was really a revealing period.
And I saw rocks there that looked very similar, if not exact, to the rocks I was finding along the shores of Lake Ontario.
And the amazing things about that was that the rocks that I was finding along the shores of Lake Ontario that looked like the Martian rocks had very similar vugs or vesicles, you know, created through the actions of not microbial activity, but multicellular life.
Of course, there are many facets to the creation of a landscape and a biosphere and an ecosphere.
They include not only the activities of microbial life, but in order to have that, you've got to have some kind of atmosphere, you have to have water, and on top of that, you overlay the possible action of volcanic activity and that kind of thing.
That's a particular combination that happens here on Earth.
Is it not a big stretch to say, well, if those things have happened on Earth in this particular measure, in this particular combination, then they will also have happened on Mars, on the red planet?
Absolutely.
You know, that question has been asked in many different ways in the past, but unlike the Earth, Mars lacks plate tectonics.
That really is the big difference.
And the interest that astrobiologists have for looking at the Mars geology is that the sedimentary layers on that planet would be more stable than on Earth because it lacks plate tectonics.
So, does that mean that you would, theoretically, you would find the signs of life in more abundance in a place where there was less upheaval?
Well, that's an interesting question because, of course, Mars since the atmosphere dissipated, you know, there's many theories about that,
but it seems like Mars lacked an iron core, you know, a robust iron core like the Earth, and that generated the field around Earth that protects it from solar bombardment and other cosmic radiation.
And over time, the scientists have theory proposed theories that the atmosphere was eaten away by the solar wind.
And when that occurred, of course, Mars became a drier planet, a desert-like planet, and then the winds would have scoured the landscape, and any evidence of fossils and other interesting geology would have been changed over time by Martian winds.
Right.
Do you think that the researches that we're doing on Mars at the moment, you know, we've got this impressive helicopter drone flying around?
We're going to be, I think we've started drilling into the surface of Mars to try and see what lies beneath.
It's not just the Americans doing this.
Of course, the Chinese are doing this as well, and other nations plan Martian experiments.
Are we doing the right things in the right places, do you think?
Yeah, I think, first of all, perseverance is in the right spot.
There's no question about it.
I thought Gale Crater, Curiosity's findings in Gale Crater are simply astounding.
And I feel that they directly lead to the idea that Mars was inhabited by life at some point.
And, you know, the potassium-argon dating of the crater, which is the first time that was ever done in situ by a spacecraft on the surface of Mars, shows that, you know, the sheepbed mudstone that they examined in Gale Crater showed an age of approximately 3.86 billion years ago.
And that has a fascinating implication.
And that is if you found mudstones on Mars that are that ancient, and then you correlate that to what has occurred from the Hespurian,
from 35 million years ago to the origin of life on Earth.
You come up with some fascinating concepts and theories.
And what I'm looking at is, okay, you have the situation where you have this sheepbed mudstone sample that has a date of 3.86 billion years ago.
And since that is a mudstone and it was a freshwater lake, that's what we found out as well with Curiosity, a freshwater lake 3.86 billion years ago that the lead scientist on the mission early on said you would be able to drink it.
That's how fresh the water was on Mars.
So you can extrapolate from that, well, if there was microbial life there, maybe there was also multicellular life at one point or not.
So that's where I'm at now.
Of course, the big question is, and I want to get into the work of Gil Levin and Patricia Ann Stratt, who I spoke to a couple of years ago.
And of course, we've lost in the last couple of years.
Gil Levin, most recently, only weeks ago, you know, I want to talk about the labeled release experiment and your involvement with them soon.
But just to stay on this for a moment, if there are those prerequisites for life that seem to be indicated here, I suppose the fascinating question, isn't it, Barry?
How far could that life have evolved?
We used to dig out crinoids and other fossils of that kind.
They were ten a penny.
There were loads of them there.
You just had to, with a little rock hammer, chip them, and they'd fall into your hand and you'd take them back and say, look at that.
There's ancient life for you.
But the big question is, if those sorts of things existed on Mars, how far could life have evolved, do you think?
Well, scientists have written about it.
I'm sure you know who Christopher McKay is.
He works as an astrobiologist out at the NASA Ames Research Facility.
He's written a couple of interesting papers about that possibility.
And I am extremely interested in some of the things he had to say.
And one of the things he says is indeed all architectural development in the organization of multicellular life occurred some 600 million years ago, beginning in the Ediacardia.
Now, this was followed by the Cambrian explosion, during which in a span of only five million years, all modern phyla Developed except the possibility for, he says, bryozoa, which are sun-sile marine organisms, not germane to the evolution of human intelligence.
So Chris really takes it to the point where he's looking at: was there enough time for Mars to go through this period where you had microorganisms leading to multicellular life and then moving on to intelligence?
And he just explored that as an exercise to examine intelligent life in the universe.
But I thought his examples there were eye-opening to me because if Mars really did develop microbial life and it went on to go to multicellular life, then we're talking a revelation that I'm sure any scientist would love to know.
Now, I'm not a science guy particularly.
I'm a journalist guy.
So the dumb question that occurs to me, and maybe it isn't a dumb, I don't know, is our cameras on Mars now are so good, and they're capable, it takes a little time for the pictures to get back here, but they're capable of sending back color, high-res pictures.
We can even show moving pictures now.
How come, and can it only be accounted for by, say, Martian storms, how come we don't see evidence of any kind of life on the surface of Mars?
What we see is a barren red surface, apparently.
Oh, no.
There's evidence there, and that's the evidence that I've been looking at.
Okay, since my initial discovery with the Viking Lander II images that I studied proficiously during the time I was writing the book, you know, I just laid into it big time, as he would say.
And I shared this with Gil Levin, and he thought it was astounding, too, because if you look at the photographs from the Viking 1 lander mission and the Viking 2 lander mission, you see that the rocks are almost completely different.
You have to ask yourself why.
Why do the rocks at the Cryse landing site differ from Utopia Planitia?
And the one thing that stares right back at you is that all these rocks around the Viking Lander II have these holes or vugs or visicles, call them what you will.
But you have to ask yourself, what could have caused it?
And, you know, I did an interesting little experiment at the University of Buffalo, and they hosted some scientists from NASA for one of the missions to Mars.
And I'm trying to think of the year.
This was around 2008, I think it was.
Or no, maybe it was 2005.
Anyways, geologists, NASA geologists, Jack Farmer was there.
Michael Carr was there, very well-known NASA geologist.
And also Matt Gollenbeck, who was with the famous mission that went to Mars in 1997, the Pathfinder.
And I had brought some of my Lake Ontario samples with me that I thought looked very much like the rocks at the Viking 2 landing site.
And I just wanted to ask their various opinions.
So while at this conference, I took each of them aside and I asked them to describe to me, you know, what was happening with the vugs or the holes.
You know, if they could accurately describe to me what had caused them.
And I was shocked at each of their answers, okay.
I think the first guy I went to was Michael Carr, who, you know, wrote a book about Mars.
He has many scientific papers out there.
And he told me that it was volcanic processes that created the vugs and the holes in the rocks.
And, of course, this is a sedimentary rock, okay.
We're talking a sandstone here.
So I'm showing him the rock.
And it's obviously a coarse-grained sandstone.
And how can you, you know, mislabel that as a, you know, volcanic source?
And so I thought it was interesting.
So I took it to Matt Gollenbeck, who was, you know, Pathfinder lead scientist.
And he said basically the same thing.
He said, oh, those holes, you know, basically volcanic in origin, you know, gases going up through the sediments, creating holes.
And then I got to Jack Farmer, who was also there, another famous former NASA scientist.
And he said that, hmm, volcanic activity might be the explanation.
But he goes, you know, I've seen these type of holes along the coastline of California.
And created by, you know, organisms like bivalves that burrow into the rock.
They actually bore.
That's the correct term, boring into the rock.
And he said, yeah, I think that could be a possibility.
And I said, you know what, you're right.
And he looked at me, and he goes, right?
And I said, you know what these are?
And I brought the other half of the rock with me that I had split open.
And inside were these bryozoan fossils still in the rock and partially dissolved.
And, you know, it surprised everybody.
And I actually wrote a small story about it that got published in, I don't know, a paper from Australia called Mars Daily.
I don't know if you've ever heard of it.
it but it it's an informational science publication you know online and I called the title of this article The Need for Mars Mission Astrobiologists.
And what I meant by that was that here you had three of NASA's finest geologists there looking at a rock from Lake Ontario with holes in it.
And just looking at the holes immediately brought them to the conclusion that it must have been volcanic gases or possibly even a volcanic rock.
And when I showed them the interior of these fossils still intact inside the rock, they were astounded.
So how that happened was, you see, the ancient ocean, inland sea that was here during the Ordovician, was located about three degrees from the equator.
So, you know, where I live now, you know, was once three degrees south of the equator, excuse me.
And it was during this time that the bryozoans in the Ordovician were often broken by storm surges and buried in the sand, the sediments.
And of course, as time went on, you know, the sand got compressed into rock.
And then later on, during the Ice Ages, you know, the Ice Ages would gouge out this ancient ocean area that existed here where I lived 400 and some million years ago,
and scattered that ancient ocean debris as the ice, you know, two miles thick in some places, came down to about mid-New York,
and then as the ice started to melt again, left all those rocks, those ancient rocks from the ocean that existed here 400 million years ago, and left it in drumlands,
you know, which are basically giant deposits of debris of rock And sand, and you could find them all over New York, really, if you knew where to look.
And the amazing thing was that these rocks were once just filled with fossils.
You know, all the places that you saw, the holes, were completely filled with fossils.
But as acid rain and humic acids in the soil began eating away at the carbonate fossils, you know, you were left with these holes.
And that's what struck me about the Viking Lander II rocks.
And so that went on to pique my interest in that area.
And I'll be doggone if I didn't see the same thing happen with the Perseverance lander.
Or rover, excuse me.
Yeah, the rover.
So, you know, the rocks, as the lander was descending on the Skycrane, I noticed that the retro rockets had blown aside all this dust and fine soil on the surface.
And right there where the rover sat down, I was astonished.
You use whatever word you want, to see that those same type of rocks that I saw at the Viking II landing site were right there.
And the connection is, of course, that Utopia Planitia was regarded by many planetary scientists as an ancient ocean basin.
And of course, with Perseverance, being in Jezero crater, is on the cusp of Isidus Planitia, which was another site believed to be an ancient ocean.
So here we have two sets of rocks looking very much the same, both near an ocean, potentially.
And you have this set of information from Earth with rocks that look just like that.
And you're saying that this evidence would have screamed itself out to somebody who was an astrobiologist.
But if your background is a different discipline, if you're more of a geologist, you may not have seen this.
You may have assumed that these things were volcanic in nature.
That's right.
I think just being, you know, well-versed in geology, you know, you tend not to want to look for life because, I don't know,
the attitude that I seem to get out of it is that, you know, unless it measures up to just a geological standard, that even if things look like they could have been made by life, you shouldn't go to that.
You shouldn't go to that right away until you've somehow eliminated the possibility.
And that attitude still goes on with NASA today.
I mean, when I looked at the images returned from Curiosity when it was up on Vararubin Ridge, it went into this little unnamed crater.
And there, I saw the most astonishing things yet.
And that is because of my background knowledge of econology, which is the study of trace fossils.
Now, you want me to continue, Howard?
I do.
And then I want to get to Gil Levin and Patricia and Strat, because they're a very important part of your life and an important part of this story.
But the Vera Rubin Ridge is interesting, and you think that that's a key plank that adds to what you were telling me earlier, don't you?
You say that this is further proof of something that is just waiting to be...
Yes.
I feel that the fossils, I'm going to call them fossils, NASA called them sticks, found on Verarubin Ridge in this small, unnamed crater, they had never been seen on Mars before.
And I looked at them, and again, it's one of those things that just me living around in this area, like I live very close to the Erie Barge Canal, and one of the boons of living here is that during the construction of the Erie Barge Canal, rocks were blasted out on either side of the canal to use as an erosion barrier on the inside of the canal.
And if you walk from where I live here in Middleport and you head toward Rochester along the canal, you can find rocks hundreds of millions of years old with these trace fossils in them.
And it's like a paradise for astrobiologists.
And I tried many times to interest some NASA people about it.
And they just ignored it.
Like, well, we're the top in our field.
So how can a guy out there living along the shores of Lake Ontario provide any additional evidence to life on Mars?
And that's when it hit me.
I saw these little burrows.
That's what you would call them.
They're burrows, and those are the things that life left behind before life became hard-shelled.
In other words, there were soft-bodied organisms in the Ediocharan period.
So were these things the physical signs of something slithering through the landscape?
Yes, sir.
Absolutely.
And, you know, of course, I got all kinds of comments.
But that information went viral on the Internet all over the world.
It even made National Geographic and Newsweek.
And, you know, then NASA came out with their official comments saying that my diagnosis was horribly premature.
But the astonishing thing was, here they were.
They had the rover right there with its microscopic imager looking right at these things.
And they took, like, 84 high-resolution detailed images.
And, I mean, there's no mistaking it.
It wasn't just on one rock.
There was one rock they called Harold Swick.
But there were a group of five or six rocks around Harold Swick that had similar features in them, which were tubes.
You could see these little tubes, which, to me, looked exactly like trace fossil features, burrows, that I had seen all along the Erie Barge Canal.
I mean, I have thousands of pictures of these things.
And so, you know, I made some headlines with it, but that's not what I wanted.
And NASA was giving me some blowback on it, you know, saying it was horribly premature.
We wouldn't jump to that conclusion.
Of course you wouldn't.
You wouldn't jump to the conclusion when I showed some of your people the dissolution cavities in the Lake Ontario rocks.
You thought they were volcanic.
So you don't jump to conclusions.
Well, what's wrong with astrobiologists speaking out?
So, Barry, by the sounds of it then, and maybe again, being a non-science guy, I'm being too simplistic about it, but your hypothesis can be proved correct or not, simply if the current mission and future missions do a bit more digging.
Is that right?
Yes.
Yes.
And like I mentioned earlier, the Perseverance mission, I've been, every day I look at the website to look at the rocks to see what, if anything, that I observed at the Viking Lander 2 rocks.
And now I'm looking at the images returned from China as well, and I'm seeing some amazing things there.
And so, you know, basically the book that I wrote, you know, I figured I would never get a scientific paper published on this because of NASA's heavy downplaying of what I was trying to say and show.
So I loaded the book with all sorts of images from Curiosity showing these features at different resolutions.
I used a photometry program, you know, that you can commercially buy that turns it into a 3D image, so you can turn these things around and look at them at different angles.
there's no doubt about it these they said that they were NASA said they were crystals formed in an evaporating lake and I thought wow that that's horribly pretty mature to say that considering that the lead scientist on Curiosity just said it was a freshwater lake that they formed in.
So wow, you know, what a story.
So I loaded the book up with the story of my discovery of these things and what I thought they were and put in many, many illustrations of illustrations and photographs that I've taken through the years showing things on Earth that look just like that.
And how can you say that these little burrows, they look cylindrical and they go down through the rock, you know, and the burrows have little openings for organisms that lived beneath the sediment.
And they would, they call them escape structures.
People who study econology know that, you know, burrows lead to escape structures.
And there's, you know, areas where they would, you know, feed under the sediment.
And, you know, it's all there.
It's all there.
So, like you said, you know, a little more evidence.
And, you know, we're looking at a Mars that not only had microscopic life, but had multicellular life develop at one point, too, and then disappeared.
But that wouldn't necessarily mean the doom of the microscopic life, which brings us to Gil Levin's experiments.
Well, indeed.
But let me just ask you this, and then we will get to Gil Levin and Patricia Hanskrat.
You know, you said that it all ended.
You know, can you, what is your understanding of how it all ended?
I know that Mars was stripped of its atmosphere, so there's not a whole lot you can do when you lose your atmosphere.
But I'm wondering why, if there are signs of primitive life of that kind, it didn't evolve much further than that.
Well, you know, they did the age dating in Gale Crater, which showed an age of 3.86 billion years.
And they figure the sediments from that period are only good to the Hesperian, you know, which on Mars lasted from 3.5 billion years ago to 2 billion years ago.
Okay, and I mean, if you look at a chart for the timeline of life on Earth, you look at 3.5 billion years ago, which is the origin of single-celled life, and then you move up the chart until you get to about 600 million years ago, which is the first evidence you see of multicellular life.
So, well, we don't see anything walking around on Mars.
We don't see any Freshwater lakes right now.
I mean, we may find some underground.
But as far as we know, whatever happened there, a series probably of a series of impacts, you know, the one in the region of Mars known as Hellas was so powerful that it uplifted the other side of the planet, which created the Tharsis bulge, you know, of volcanoes.
And, I mean, with something that powerful, you know, it would probably be a global killer, except for microbial life, which, you know, it's very hard to kill off microbial life.
So you think that the big surprise that might come soon from some of the work that's being done on Mars is that this microbial life still exists, perhaps beneath the surface.
We know that extremophiles on this Earth are remarkably far hardier than we thought they might be.
They live in all sorts of extreme places, places of fire and places of ice.
So if they can survive on Earth in that way, then they might be underneath the surface of Mars and having been there for millions upon millions of years.
Absolutely.
And I think that's Gil Levin.
That's what he found.
That takes us now.
Gil Levin, working with Patricia Anstrad.
Let's just explain who he was.
I know that he was an American engineer, and he was basically, I think this was in the 1970s, long time ago for a lot of people hearing this, but I, like you, I remember the 70s.
I don't remember, though, as a kid in the 70s much being said about this.
Now, I don't know whether I've just kind of forgotten, but he came out with the notion that the Viking land had discovered essentially microorganisms on Mars, life on Mars, which for the time should have been the biggest news there'd ever been, but wasn't because a lot of people said, no, no, no, that can't be the case.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
And Gil Levin was a civilian waste management engineer, believe it or not, who invented a unique device.
And what it did was he found a very rapid way to detect microbial metabolism.
And how he did that was he would use like radio-labeled, which means he would get some solution, like a nutrient solution, and add a little bit of radioactivity.
And what you would do is put a drop on an area that you wanted to examine, whether in water or on soil, and you would get a very quick reaction, which could be measured by a Geiger counter, of CO2 gas, radioactive CO2 gas coming out of the soil as microbes ate the food, if you will, that he was feeding them.
And it became such a success that he eventually was invited to a Washington cocktail party.
And it was during the early, very early beginnings of NASA, as NASA became NASA from the organization that it was earlier about just aeronautics.
So once NASA was interested in flying rockets to the moon and maybe going out to Mars, the administrator at the time, I'm trying to think of his name now.
It's been such a long time.
It's in my book.
But I think his name was, well, whatever his name was, I'm sure.
He should get some credit for this because he was talking to Gil at the cocktail party and said, you know, Gil, NASA is getting ready to maybe look for life on other planets pretty soon.
And he mentioned Mars and Gil said, you know, this experiment that I have just might be something to look for in the soil of another planet.
And he put a proposal together.
He and a few other astrobiologists, or in those days they called them exobiologists.
And they were successful at getting their experiments put on the Viking Lander 1 and Viking Lander 2 spacecraft, which would be sent to two different parts of Mars.
And in both instances, when the data was coming in in 1976, it was, to their astonishment that he was getting positive reactions out of the soil.
And as a control, you know, which all scientists, when they find something new, or if they're using an instrument, they have to have some sort of control so that you don't make a claim without it being verified somehow.
So the control that Gil had in his experiment, which, by the way, was run seven times at each site, and the control was to heat a sample of soil up to 160 degrees Celsius, which is sterilization control known by virologists and bacteriologists.
The CDC uses that same protocol to sterilize, you know, dangerous microorganisms.
So to prove whether his result was true or not, you know, what he did was he took a small sample of Martian soil, put it in his experiment on Mars, heated it up to 160 degrees Celsius for three hours, and then put a drop of his radioactive nutrient solution on it and to see if there was any radioactive CO2 gas to come out.
And lo and behold, looking at the graph coming back from Mars, it had diminished almost to the point of, you know, not being there.
Then, of course, he got the fresh sample and didn't sterilize it and put the nutrients solution on it.
And lo and behold, again, we get this burst of gas coming out of the soil, like something's eating and giving off the gas.
And did that happen in every case?
You said that there were a number of these experiments done separately.
Yeah, yes, at both landing sites.
That's the amazing thing.
Okay, so, I mean, you could argue, I suppose, as most of the NASA geologists want, that, you know, okay, well, what did you prove?
You know, you know, it could have been a number of things.
The leading contender was hydrogen peroxide formed in the atmosphere of Mars from the action of sunlight and water vapor formed hydrogen peroxide rain that gently came down and obliterated the soil of all organic activity and caused his experiment to react like that.
That was the leading contender for their explanation of why he didn't find life.
Oh, all that is is hydrogen peroxide, you know, in the soil, mimicking life, which Gill later went to town with, with his own company and laboratory, and showed that it couldn't possibly be that.
And of course, today we know that that is completely false.
So why did this research kind of go away?
Why did it all go quiet for so long?
Surely if there was an area of doubt and if the official explanation offered up was questionable, then why in the process of science didn't we, you know, why didn't we gnaw away at this over subsequent decades and try and see what is the truth of this, whether indeed Gil Levin was right?
It's astonishing, isn't it, to think that so many decades were allowed to pass without that happening?
It is.
It is astonishing.
And it is the reason, the number one reason I wrote the book, Mars the Living Planet.
I wrote it as a scientific investigator, a detective who wanted to find out the truth.
I read every single Viking paper published in scientific journals.
I mean, I studied everything that they did to get this thing to Mars, and especially with the biology experiments.
Okay, I wanted to know.
You know, not only for me, but I thought it would be, you know, an injustice if you had a person, a team, Gil and his co-experimenter, Pat Stratt, if they really were the discoverers of life on Mars and you just let it go without going back to find out.
And that is astonishing to me.
Are we trying to find out now?
That's debatable.
Okay?
And, you know, that's where people will say, well, Barry DeGregorio, he's a controversial scientist.
Okay, well, controversial or not.
I want to know the truth.
And the only way you get at the truth is by sending additional life detection experiments to find the truth.
And have they done it in 45 years?
No.
They have not.
They're looking for life now, but it's only they're looking for evidence of ancient life, like ancient microfossils or some organic material that they could say once existed on Mars as a result of microorganisms.
They did not send a microscope capable of resolving microorganisms, nor have they sent any sort of life detection instrument like Guild invented to look.
And, you know, I have my own ideas about that.
Uh-huh.
And, of course.
But do you think it's a policy not to send that equipment?
I think it has been because, you know, I know Gil.
I followed his work after Viking, and I knew that he had proposed other life detection experiments to go on other missions to Mars, and they were all rejected by NASA.
In fact, there was one point that Michael Meyer, who's in charge of the NASA Mars exploration program, told him outright that no life detection experiments are going to be solicitated until further notice.
And he thought that was incredible.
And so there's a story in my book where the Russians were putting together a spacecraft called Mars 96.
And they were very interested in Gil's work.
And they thought, you know, it was probably more likely than not that he discovered life on the surface of Mars.
So they said, well, you know, if NASA's not interested in it, then why don't you send your labeled release experiment to us?
You can update it with anything new you want to do with it, and we'll fly it to Mars.
And that story in my book, True Story, when NASA found out he was working with the Russians to develop his labeled release experiment to fly on Mars 96, they told him he couldn't do it.
He goes, what?
And they told him that's, you know, that's technology against the rules of.
So you couldn't be handing that technology even in the interests of science and space research.
You couldn't be handing it over effectively to the other side.
Well, that's interesting.
So are you saying that perhaps there is a truth there that somebody knows?
This goes into sort of conspiracy territory.
Okay.
Well, so what happens then if the perseverance device that we have there now and future devices that we send up there and what happens if traces of past life are found and possibly traces of current life?
Do you think that we will be told in a timely way that those things have been discovered?
I mean, we, the population of Earth?
I don't.
And I'll tell you one of the reasons I think that's true.
And it has to do with a recent 2021 Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics conference that was held in Washington with,
I mean, it had Dr. Michael Meyer there, it had Bethany Ellman, it had, you know, Luther Beagle, all the people that are working on the Perseverance mission.
And this conference, incredibly to me, you can still download this conference on YouTube and watch the whole thing.
And it is mind-blowing to me because what they are saying, let me give you the name of the conference first.
It was What Do Scientists Hope to Learn with NASA's Mars Perseverance Rover?
Well, if you watch that video, very interesting.
There's all this talk with the Perseverance science team and Dr. Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program, about how wonderful it's going to be when we finally pick up the samples that Perseverance has been drilling into the core of some rocks.
So in order to find life, absolutely, we're going to have to drill into the rocks with these little cylinders that they have to be picked up by a later mission and return them directly to Earth.
Now if you go to about nine minutes in on this video, they show a very nice map of Mars where all these spacecraft have landed.
Missing is Viking Lander 1 and 2.
And I'm thinking to myself, why would you not even discuss what Viking landers found?
Whether it's just not known yet, but I mean, the gravity of the situation with finding something that reacts like a microbial, you know, like microbial metabolism is such a huge finding in itself that you'd want to go back to make sure you before you brought anything back to Earth.
And I think therein lies the problem.
But therein also lies a bit of a dichotomy, a bit of a problem with this, because if you're going there looking for traces of past life by drilling into the surface and doing other experiments, you know, if you didn't want the news of that to get out necessarily, then you wouldn't be going there.
Would you?
Well, it depends.
What if you bring something back that is alive?
See, and that's what Gil actually said way back in the 80s when there was a conference or two that discussed the labeled release findings as well as other findings in the Viking program.
And, you know, Gil always felt it would be in error to bring life from Mars back to the Earth because you don't know what the heck it's going to do.
And in fact, that's something that you're campaigning about.
That's what we spoke about on the radio a couple of months ago, isn't it, Barry, that you're very concerned that, you know, when we bring these things back, we don't know what we're bringing back here.
Exactly.
And Carl Sagan, you know, he was one of the most rigorous defender of the Article 9 of the Outer Space Treaty, which, you know, basically forbids bringing any kind of contaminant back to the Earth or sending them to Mars.
And he was so outspoken in those days that when he heard that they wanted to, when he heard that JPL had planned on returning Martian samples to the Earth, he said, well, in order for that to be considered safe, you're going to have to send up anthrax and return the capsule in the same trajectory as it would be coming back from Mars.
And if it survived entry, you might be able to call it a safe project.
And of course, you know, Sagan was, you know, pronounced correct in his ideas when the Genesis went out, a Genesis capsule probe went out to grab particles of solar wind and it returned the sample back to Earth much in the same way that they had envisioned to return a Martian soil sample.
And what happened?
Well, it crashed in the Utah desert, opened up, and spilled the samples in the area that it crashed.
Okay, so you think we're taking a bit of a risk here, but surely if you're transferring these samples over a vast expanse of frozen, icy-cold space, if you subject these samples to the kind of radiation that you would probably encounter on the way back here, certainly encounter, then anything that might be there would surely be neutralized anyway, wouldn't it?
Well, these specially designed containers that Perseverance is putting on the surface of Mars look like they just might be impervious to who knows, maybe they're lead-lined.
I don't know.
So what do you advise we should do then?
Do you think we should be doing our experimentation there, not here?
Absolutely.
And that's what Gil has said all along.
It was Gil that inspired me to get the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return going.
It was his work and his ideas that were used as a cornerstone of what the site was going to be all about.
A lot of people don't know this, but the first Martian samples were due to arrive in 2003 and 2005.
And the things that happened in between time, things like sending a spacecraft, what was the Mars Climate Observer, and then there was another spacecraft sent after that time that was given metric coordinates and was supposed to use the U.S. system of coordinates.
And the spacecraft crashed into the surface of Mars.
All during the time that NASA has portrayed itself as this organization that is concerned with planetary contamination, back contamination, forward contamination, it has not.
And that's why I started ICAMSER and started writing about it.
I mean, even with the Apollo 11 mission from the moon, okay, this is probably the greatest example of a planetary protection protocol breach that you've ever heard.
And that was they were worried about possible organisms from the moon being deposited there by meteorites or whatnot.
And Carl Sagan, again, was one of the biggest names out there saying, we have to be really careful about this.
This has to be well thought out because once you bring it here and there's something alive and it gets out, starts, you know, ruining the biosphere.
But we did bring it back, and we've exhibited some of this stuff and everything's been okay.
Yeah, it's been okay, but what if it wasn't okay?
And that situation was realized when the Apollo 11 capsule entered the ocean.
The protocol was, a lot of people don't know this, okay, that NASA had planned to pick up the capsule with the astronauts inside and bring it aboard Hornet, the aircraft carrier.
And it was to be washed down with a very good germicide before the capsule door was open.
And then, of course, the astronauts would be led to their quarantine trailer, which they would be in for a number of weeks.
But unfortunately, we decided to break planetary quarantine because our astronauts are heroes now.
NASA is going to be the most famous space-firing agency in the world.
And so let's get those astronauts out of the capsule now.
And they opened the door in the ocean.
And, of course, their suits and everything were covered with dust.
And so whatever would be on the moon, if there was life, was now in a nice, warm Pacific Ocean.
Okay.
So bringing it up to date, we are going to bring samples back from Mars.
That's the plan.
It's going to take some time to do this.
We're going to gather the samples.
It'll be a long time before we can collect and bring them here.
You have a campaign going to say, please don't do that.
What kind of traction has that campaign got?
Well, mixed.
A lot of people, like, for instance, Carl Woosi, the microbiologist who discovered the third domain of life on Earth, the extremophiles, said it was a very dangerous and foolish thing to do.
And that is in the new book as well.
I share all his comments with me about that.
He thought that it could be done a different way, including on the surface of Mars itself.
But they don't want to send life detection experiments or microscopes.
So let's bring it back in a capsule, which may or may not reach Earth.
I mean, just think of the problems that the International Space Station has had with it being moved because space debris was going to encounter it.
What happens if this capsule is breached and it comes spiraling into Earth, lands in the ocean?
Okay?
I mean, there's a lot of things to consider.
Why bring it directly here?
You can do it another way.
And that's what ICAMSA recommends.
So what do you think we might bring back?
Do you think we might bring back the cosmic equivalent, God forbid, of a sort of coronavirus or something like that?
Well, we don't know.
But as Carl Lucy told me, he said, you know, all it would take is for Martian life to like a few amino acids and, you know, a few of the other organic compounds, and it could set off a worldwide plague, you know, which may not even affect humans, but what if it, you know, destroyed the food chain?
There's so many unknowns.
Why would you want to risk it?
And of course, that not only goes for exploring Mars, I guess that Goes for bringing stuff back from asteroids we might intercept or going to other planets or other places.
You know, we've got to be really careful.
And if we try to take ice samples from places that might have ice, then I guess the same thing goes there.
So how long have we got to debate this?
When are these samples due to be brought back here?
Well, we have new competition, Howard.
Excuse me.
We have the Chinese now, which they are incredibly intent to probably bring it back before we do.
So the moral of the story here is nobody really right now is concerned with bringing back samples of Mars because, number one, it's not really talked about in the media too often.
And NASA, I'm sure, really likes that idea.
Like I told you about that conference that they had recently, there is no mention of the possibility of any living thing being in there.
They completely avoid talking about the Viking results, which to me sets off a light bulb thinking, why are you avoiding talking about it?
Why avoid the Viking results?
They're scientific results.
Well, I can presume, I mean, only to put the other side of this, I can only presume that they've done their calculations, done their experimentation, and they believe that this is not a risk to the rest of us, but you're saying it is.
So what will you be doing as a campaign next to try and get this in front of people's eyes?
How will you be trying to get this story out there?
Well, talking to people curious like yourself, I mean, that's about all you can do, and writing about it, which is what I do.
And my latest book, Discovery on Ruben Ridge, Trace Fossils on Mars, question mark, has a very, very powerful last chapter in which I have that conversation with the microbiologist Carl Wussy.
And I think his comments, if they don't wake people up, then, you know, I'm sorry, you know, if you're going to let this thing happen, folks, you know, you're going to share in the responsibility.
So people need to be aware.
And I think what you're doing with your program here, allowing this subject to even be aired is vitally important to what may happen in the future or not.
Well, it's an interesting perspective.
I'm glad that we talked, and I'm sure we'll talk again.
If my listener wants to check out your work online, where would they go?
My work?
Yeah, if they want to find out more about you, would they just put your name into a search engine?
Well, if they want to find out about my work with ICAMSAR, you know, the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return, they just go to the website, which is www.icamsuri.org, O-R-G.
Or you can just simply put in my name in your Google search engine, Barry deGregorio, and you will come up with all kinds of things that I've written over the years.
Barry, a pleasure to talk with you.
I'm glad we got the chance to speak for longer than the five minutes or so we got on radio recently.
Thank you very much.
Howard, thank you.
Okay, have a great day there.
As ever, your thoughts.
Welcome on Barry deGregorio and what you heard there.
All you have to do is go to my website, theunexplained.tv, follow the link, and you can send me an email message, you know, like we used to, from there.
Thank you very much for your support and your kindness.
If there's anything that you would like to hear on this show, any questions you'd like to ask, just get in contact and I will see all the emails as they come in.
More fantastic guests in the pipeline here at the home of The Unexplained Online.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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