Strange light on Mars

With such a thin atmosphere, why would a light shining upwards be visible from the side? For a light to be visible laterally like this, you'd need atmosphere for a scattering effect and a very bright light. A light pointing upwards from the surface of Mars should only be visible to something looking downwards.

Concluding that it's intelligent life "using lights as we do" is just a wild claim with no backing. From the evidence it's pretty obvious that it's a holographic projection sent backwards in time from humans in the future.

Seeing as how the other camera on the rover did not capture this "light" (as seen clearly in this GIF: http://i.imgur.com/LQa9PLU.gif) it seems pretty safe to assume that this is just an artifact caused by a temporary glitch on one of the cameras.

Here are the two source images taken at the same time by the rover's two cameras:

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/proj/msl/redops/ods/...

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/proj/msl/redops/ods/...

But of course disreputable "news" sites bring in a UFO enthusiast as their source for a quote about the possibility that there is intelligent life below the surface.

This is most likely because I know absolutely nothing about space exploration but I found the line below to be the most interesting piece in the article. (because as posted already, I'll just chalk this "strange light" up as a photographic anomaly.)

> "Arrival at this location means Curiosity has driven 3.8 miles since August 2012, when it landed inside Mars' Gale Crater."

It's crazy for me to think about this in comparison to Earth. Imagine somebody dropping a robot on Earth before any known life and trying to make sensible conclusions about what the entire planet was like by only exploring 3.8 miles...

The guy the article quotes is quite a character.

From his post:

"Sure NASA could go and investigate it, but hey, they are not on Mars to discovery life, but there to stall its discovery."

On a related note, I recently discovered that YouTube is a hotbed of dedicated quackery.

The amount of effort put into some of the "updates" and the odd intersections of religion, pseudoscience and misinterpretations of actual science are fascinating.

One of my favorite podcasts "The Skeptics Guide to the Universe" [0] does a good job of keeping abreast of and debunking some of the popular trends in wackiness.

0: https://www.theskepticsguide.org/

Why are the 8 photos they show just zooms/crops/edits of the first? Until there's another photo from a different viewpoint or some sort of official statement, I'm chalking it up to a photographic artifact. Occam's razor, people.

I misread "This could indicate there there is intelligent life below the ground and uses light as we do," Waring wrote on his website. "This is not a glare from the sun, nor is it an artifact of the photo process." as being a statement from NASA and not from some random UFO web site.

Motel 6 really is everywhere.

clearly the tardis.