I am convinced that the possibility that life could exist on Mars was obviously completely overlooked at NASA: they expected to find only a moon-like desert, and no plan was ready to conceal anything.
The appearance of Mars came as a total surprise, NASA was unprepared but quickly realized that as no study on the impact of a discovery of life on Mars could have on the public, they hastily and clumsily decided to suppress any clue. They needed some time and direction, the decision to release any information could not be made.
When the first color images from the Viking Lander were received, a crowd surrounded the monitor, the colors of the Martian landscape displayed themselves like an Arizona picture postcard: Bright sunlight, blue sky flecked with hints of high clouds, reddish-brown soil and gray rocks.
In the celebration, a very perplexed, newly graduated high school student named Ron Levin sat at a console at JPL. For over two hours Ron watched with the other as color images came in. Ron, the son of Dr. Gilbert Levin, the scientist responsible for the life detection tests aboard the lander, was fascinated.
Like the rest of us, Ron saw the "blue sky" of Mars in the first color image. Unlike us, Ron also saw subsequent images of rocks with greenish patches on them.
While he watched, a Viking imaging team technician adjusted the colour control on every monitor in the laboratory, increasing the red channel so that the sky lost its blue tint and the color of all the rocks shifted from an earthly reddish-brown to an unearthly, deep rusty-red hue. When Ron attempted to adjust the monitors back to the original settings, he was told he'd be ejected from JPL if he persisted. To this day, Ron, now Dr. Ron Levin, physicist, makes it clear that, in his considerable estimation, "there was no scientific justification for the adjustment in color."
I already explained this in the previous page, but I cannot resist to add this example, based on one of the very first images sent by the Viking lander in 1976 to the JPL.
You can reproduce this with ANY OTHER picture from the Viking Lander of from Pathfinder... except on those picture which NASA forgot to colorize! You do not need to blindly trust my pictures, you can use the original pictures published on various NASA web sites.
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This is what the people in the conference room have seen on the color monitors when the first pictures were received: |
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This is the colorized picture, after the video engineer in the conference room changed the tuning of the RGB balance: |
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The surface color of the Viking lander BEFORE the colorization. |
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The surface color of the Viking lander AFTER the colorization. |
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What was there to hide? Ron Levin mentions "rocks with greenish patches on them."
Do you think I found pictures of rocks with greenish patches on them?
