Скачать или смотреть 5 Artifacts of an Ancient Lost Mars Civilization: Pyramids, Nukes & CIA Secrets on the Red Planet

On March 25, 1989, the Soviet probe Phobos II sent back its mysterious final transmission before falling silent forever. The image—blurred, eerie—showed a massive, cylindrical object, seemingly suspended in the void near the Martian moon Phobos.

Moments later, the probe vanished. The official Soviet explanation was that the probe malfunctioned, but others weren’t so sure.

Among them was Soviet Air Force Colonel Marina Popovich, a decorated test pilot and aerospace engineer who set over 100 world aviation records in Soviet fighters and other aircraft, earning her the nickname "Madame MiG." She claimed she had smuggled classified documents out of the USSR detailing what Phobos II really saw.

Speaking at a press conference in 1991, Popovich asserted that the probe had captured a UFO stationed near Mars and later said that Phobos itself was not a natural moon at all but an artificial structure, at least one-third hollow.

This was not an entirely new idea. In the late 1950s, Soviet astrophysicist Iosif Shklovsky studied Phobos’ orbital decay and concluded its movement could not be explained by natural forces alone.

For this to be true, Phobos had to be unnaturally light, perhaps even hollow. Shklovsky speculated it could be a gigantic, metal shell of artificial origin. Even Fred Singer, science advisor to President Eisenhower, briefly entertained the possibility before the theory was dismissed as an error. Yet, it never quite went away.

Decades later, in 2022, new radar scans from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter revealed something just as perplexing. The scans—designed to map the moon’s interior—bounced back in ways scientists could not fully explain. They suggested unknown structures beneath the surface, though their exact nature would require more study.

Adding to the moon’s mysterious reputation is the Phobos Monolith, an 85-meter-tall, stark white boulder standing alone near Stickney Crater. First spotted in 1998, it remains one of Phobos’ most visually striking features.

Buzz Aldrin once drew attention to it, saying: “There’s a monolith there… When people find out about that, they’re going to ask: ‘Who put that there?’”