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anyone heard of the "phobos 2 incident."




Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars, has itself always been considered a rather mysterious object, as has its smaller twin, Deimos.

In July 1988, the Russians launched two unmanned satellite probes - Phobos 1 and Phobos 2 - in the direction of Mars, and with the primary intention of investigating the planet's mysterious moon, Phobos. Phobos 1 was unfortunately lost en route two months later, reportedly because of a radio command error. Phobos 2 was also ultimately lost in the most intriguing circumstances, but not before it had beamed back certain images and information from the planet Mars itself.

Phobos 2 arrived safely at Mars in January 1989 and entered into an orbit around Mars as the first step at its destination towards its ultimate goal: to transfer to an orbit that the would make it fly almost in tandem with the Martian moonlet called Phobos (hence the spacecrafts name) and explore the moonlet with highly sophisticated equipment that included two packages of instruments to be placed on the moonlet's surface.

All went well until Phobos 2 aligned itself with Phobos, the Martian moonlet.



Then, on 28th March, the Soviet mission control center acknowledged sudden communication "problems" with the spacecraft; and Tass, the official Soviet news agency, reported that,

    "Phobos 2 had failed to communicate with Earth as scheduled after completing an operation yesterday around the Martian moon Phobos. Scientists at mission control have been unable to establish stable radio contact."

What had caused the Phobos 2 spacecraft to be lost?

According to Boris Bolitsky, science correspondent for Radio Moscow, just before radio contact was lost with Phobos 2, several unusual images were radioed back to Earth, described by the Russian as "Quite remarkable features".

    "The features are either on the Martian surface or in the lower atmosphere. The features are between 20 and 25 kilometers wide and do not resemble any known geological formation. They are spindle - shaped and proving to be intriguing and puzzling."

An unusual photo of a thin shadow across mars (below) was shown on the Russian television segment.

  

While the image was held on the screen, Dr. Becklake explained that it was taken as the spacecraft was aligning itself with Phobos (the moonlet).

    "As the last picture was halfway through," he said, "they [Soviets] saw something that should not be there."

So what was it that collided or crashed into Phobos 2? Was the space probe shot out of space for "seeing too much"? What does the last secret frame show? Well... Cosmic Conspiracies have managed to track down this elusive last picture.





In his careful words to 'Aviation Week and Space Technology', the chairman of the Soviet equivalent of NASA, referred to the last frame, saying,

    "One image appears to include an odd-shaped object between the spacecraft and Mars."

This "highly secret" photo was later given to the Western press by Colonel Dr. Marina Popovich, a Russian astronaut and pilot who has long been interested in UFO's. At a UFO conference in 1991, Popovich gave to certain investigators some interesting information that she "smuggled" out of the now ex-Soviet Union. Part of the information was what has been called "the first ever leaked accounts of an alien mother ship in the solar system".

The last transmission from Phobos 2 was a photograph of a gigantic cylindrical spaceship - a huge, approx, 20km long, 1.5km diameter cigar-shaped 'mother ship', that was photographed on 25 March 1989 hanging or parked next to the Martian moon Phobos by the Soviet unmanned probe Phobos 2.



After that last frame was radio-transmitted back to Earth, the probe mysteriously disappeared; according to the Russians it was destroyed - possibly knocked out with an energy pulse beam.

The cigar shaped craft in the penultimate frame taken by Phobos 2 is apparently the object casting the oblong shadow on the surface of Mars in the earlier photo.


   now obviously there is no way to verify any of this, and the article i pasted on here has a fair amount of conjecture, but it's intriguing nonetheless.

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Interesting.  But nothing to really grab onto here.  The images could be any number of things, including glitches, "noise", or outright fakery.  Malfunctions are common with these uncrewed  spacecraft that have to cross the incredible gulfs between planets without any regular maintenance, in an extremely hostile environment.  I find it amazing that so many get so far as Mars, and farther, without more catastrophic malfunctions.

I would put this in my interesting, but need more information file.  I'm not ready to assume hostile intent by space aliens at the moment.  To little hard data for that.

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put it in the "what if" file.

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Originally Posted by Russell Jones:
I find it amazing that so many get so far as Mars, and farther, without more catastrophic malfunctions.

You mean like those mars missions in the late 90s which succeeded only in creating new craters on the planet after one team of engineers was  measuring using feet and inches while the other was using centimeters and meters? :-P

http://articles.cnn.com/1999-09-30/tech/9909_30_mars.metric_1_mars-orbiter-climate-orbiter-spacecraft-team?_s=PM:TECH

On the article itself, I'd mark this in the "people looking for something that isn't there" category, like the "face on mars". Given how many missions have been back to Mars since, you'd think something else would have been found? Although of course that just counts as more evidence for the conspiracy theorists: "They" are hiding the evidence! After all, the best evidence of a conspiracy is no evidence at all.....

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you guys should look into the phobos monolith, the mars monolith, and the europa monolith. apparently there is some suggestion that a probe intercepted encoded radio transmissions from the monolith on phobos, to the monolith on europa. of course there is even less evidence of this, than there is of this spacecraft.

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Maybe its a bug...on the lens!  

Are they implying that another country shot their probe down because it saw too much?  Or that an alien craft shot it down?

I cant imagine the US shooting it down now that we no longer have a shuttle program and have to rely on Russian technology to carry us into space.

Re:  the cigar shape.  I'm sure you guys all know there are many references over the decades of cigar shaped craft.  Now the object I personally saw (some 36 years ago) wasnt cigar shaped.  But that design has been mentioned frequently.

I dont yet know what to think about UFOs.  For many years I felt like the UFO's we hear of are merely military secrets.  (KEneth Arnold was an American Aviator who claimed he saw something crescent shaped flying around.  Today I look at his picture and immediately recognize the old Nazi Batwing design.  Its probably that what he saw was early US attempts at out Stealth Bomber).

Then I saw how sometimes laser pens can be used to shine on a plate glass window and photographed in such a way to appear (on film) as space craft...lights int he sky, etc.

But then some of the so-called eye witness testimony seems...well...credible.  NASA astronaut Gordon Cooper for example.  Astronauts Neal Armstrong and John Young (no relation) as well.

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well, dennis, i think that as with anything in the paranormal field, about 10% of reports are "credible" and worthy of intrigue. personally, i don't think this is one such case, though it is interesting nonetheless, in a "what if" capacity. and they were saying this thing had to be a hundred kilometers long, so i don't see it being an american spacecraft. i think the thing that gets me with UFOs is knowing that the government wouldn't tell us about them even if they were real. so obviously this just leads us to wonder, what do they really know?

anyway, what did you see all those years ago?