The aliens were next door, and somebody killed them. That’s the story plasma physicist John Brandenburg, PhD, tells about Mars. His theory suggests that a civilization built monuments on our neighboring planet before nuclear explosions wiped it out. He also argues that humanity must investigate—because we could face the same danger.
In his 2014 Journal of Cosmology paper, Brandenburg presents Martian chemistry and supposed ruins as evidence of a planetary massacre. Both the journal’s editorial standards and Brandenburg’s theory itself have drawn criticism from other scientists. But the decisive question is whether his proposed explanation fits the measurements he provides. Dismissing the alleged attack leaves another question worth asking. If a civilization had flourished somewhere in our solar system and disappeared billions of years before we started looking, what would remain? Could we send a rover across its former home without ever knowing what had been there?
Brandenburg—who did not respond to requests for an interview—argues that we’ve already found evidence of nuclear explosions in Mars’s atmosphere, focusing particularly on the Red Planet’s xenon measurements. Xenon comes in several forms, called isotopes, each with different numbers of neutrons in their atoms. Timothy Swindle, PhD—a professor emeritus and director emeritus at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory—explains that radioactive decay and reactions caused by radiation can add to that mix. If an explosion produced the xenon on Mars, scientists would expect to find those isotopes in certain proportions.
Some of the evidence Brandenburg referenced comes from pieces of Mars that landed here on Earth. NASA’s Curiosity, a car-sized rover that landed on Mars in August 2012, gave scientists a way to check these meteorite findings against the atmosphere of our celestial neighbor itself.
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