Was there a Nuclear War on Mars?

"And then the great Rishis, approaching the gods, spake unto them, 'Lo, in the middle of the night springeth a great heat striking terror into every heart, and destructive of the three worlds.'" -- Mahabharata, Book I: Adi Parva, Section XXIV, 8th century B.C.

Fox News: Was There a Natural Nuclear Blast on Mars?

"The Martian surface is covered with a thin layer of radioactive substances including uranium, thorium and radioactive potassium -- and this pattern radiates from a hot spot [on Mars],” Brandenburg told FoxNews.com.

“A nuclear explosion could have sent debris all around the planet," he said. "Maps of gamma rays on Mars show a big red spot that seems like a radiating debris pattern ... on the opposite side of the planet there is another red spot." ...

The radioactivity also explains why the planet looks red.

Brandenburg said gamma ray spectrometry taken over the past few years shows spiking radiation from Xenon 129 -- an increase also seen on Earth after a nuclear reaction or a nuclear meltdown, including the one at Chernobyl in 1986 and the disaster in Japan earlier this month.

Dr. David Beaty, Mars program science manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told FoxNews.com that he finds the idea intriguing and fascinating. But to prove the science, the agency would need to plan a mission to explore Mare Acidalium on Mars. ...

“This massive nuclear explosion on Mars seems to defy natural explanation,” said Brandenburg.

Also see "What Causes Planets to Explode?" and "The Destroyed World."

The Destroyed World

"And then the great Rishis, approaching the gods, spake unto them, 'Lo, in the middle of the night springeth a great heat striking terror into every heart, and destructive of the three worlds.'" -- Mahabharata, Book I: Adi Parva, Section XXIV, 8th century B.C.

"Between the celestials [angels] and the Asuras [fallen angels], there happened, of yore, frequent encounters for the sovereignty of the three worlds with everything in them." -- Mahabharata, Book I: Adi Parva, Section LXXVI, 8th century B.C.

The late astronomer Tom Van Flandern of the United States Naval Observatory was not the first in modern times to realize that the asteroids which orbit between Mars and Jupiter are the remnants of a world destroyed by extraterrestrial intelligence and interplanetary warfare. In 1992, the British astronomer Nigel Henbest also wrote on the subject in a book called Mysteries of Mind, Space, and Time: The Unexplained Volume 18.

Circling the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter are thousands of broken fragments of rock and metal - the asteroids. The largest is Ceres, 620 miles (1000 kilometers) in diameter, roughly one twelfth of Earth's size and less than a thousandth its weight. The others range down to the size of mere grains of sand.

Ever since the asteroids were discovered, one thought has haunted astronomers: could they be the remnants of an exploded world?

The asteroid story starts many years before their discovery. In the year 1766, the German mathematician Johann Titius noticed a certain numerical relationship between the distances of the planets from the Sun. Shortly afterwards his discovery was popularised by the astronomer Johann Bode, and it became what is known as the Titius-Bode law.

The law goes as follows. Take the series of numbers 0, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96 - where each number (except the first and second) is twice the preceding number. Add 4 to each, and the result is the series 4, 7, 10, 16, 28, 52, 100. Taking the Earth's distance from the Sun as 10 units, this series gives, to a great degree of accuracy, the distances of the planets to the Sun. The planets Mercury and Venus fall at 4 and 7 respectively; Mars is at 15 (very close to the 16 predicted by the Titius-Bode law), Jupiter at 52 and Saturn at 95 (close to the predicted 100).

But there is no planet between Mars and Jupiter, at the value 28 predicted by the Titius-Bode law.

In 1800, a group of astronomers met at Lilienthal in northern Germany and agreed to watch the sky for traces of the missing planet. Each of them agreed to search a certain area, but before this self-styled 'celestial police' had managed to track down its subject, it was announced that the Sicilian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi had discovered it by accident, on 1 January 1801. Piazzi named the new 'planet' Ceres; it was far smaller than any other planet, so tiny that it was invisible to the naked eye. Its motion through the heavens from night to night was the only thing that revealed it was not a star, and showed that Ceres's orbit was indeed that of the predicted planet. It began to seem as if the mystery had been solved.

A year later a founding member of the celestial police was attempting to relocate Ceres when he stumbled on another point of light, a second tiny planet orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. The discoverer, Heinrich Olbers, named the new body Pallas. He at once concluded that there could only be one reason why the solar system had two small bodies where Titius and Bode had predicted a planet: the planet had once existed, but at some time in the past exploded into fragments.

The celestial police took to the beat once more. Within five years they found another two asteroids - the name, meaning 'starlike', given them by the great British astronomer William Herschel (1738-1822) because they appear only as points of light. Almost 40 years elapsed before a fifth asteroid was found; but when, at the close of the last century, astronomers began to photograph the sky, they immediately started picking up dozens of asteroids. Their technique was to use very long exposures; the asteroids then showed up as blurs, moving in their orbits, while the fixed stars were recorded as point sources of light.

Today the orbits of over 2000 asteroids are known; and astronomers estimate that there must be at least 100,000 altogether in the region of space between Mars and Jupiter that is known as the asteroid belt.

It is true that, as Heinrich Olbers predicted, astronomers have found countless fragments of rubble where the Titius-Bode law suggests there should be a planet. But was his theory correct? Are the asteroids the remains of an exploded planet? Controversy on this point raged throughout the 19th century. Rather than believe the asteroids are merely the unused building blocks of a planet that never formed, many astronomers argued that they must be the remains of an Earthlike world that had been overtaken by a catastrophe of immense proportions. ...

Only man-like humanoids, argue [Aleksandr] Kazantsev and [Felix] Zigel, could have triggered such a catastrophe, for it could only have come about as the result of an ... explosion of nuclear weapons. ...

Kazantsev and Zigel are convinced that their evidence is conclusive. ... planet Phaeton once orbited the Sun beyond Mars; its civilisation, more advanced than ours, invented thermonuclear weapons a million years ago. ...

Whatever anthropologists may say, Kazantsev and Zigel insist that it was survivors from the catastrophe that befell Phaethon, astronauts stranded in space, who descended to Earth as gods and led Man on his rise to civilisation.

What Causes Planets to Explode?

"... we are lead to ask 'Do planets explode?!'" -- Thomas C. Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993

"Our story continues when man has advanced to the point where he begins to rediscover evidence of the explosion -- the year 1772. ... The astronomer Daniel Titius notices a curious fact about the spacing of the planets: each of the six planets is roughly twice the distance of the previous one from the Sun, with only one exception, a gap between Mars and Jupiter. The gap is just the right size to hold exactly one additional planet." -- Thomas C. Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993

"Is there other evidence that comets and minor planets originated in the 'recent' explosion of a planet? Yes, a great deal. We can study the orbits of comets, and by using the laws of gravitation we can do what amounts to tracing these orbits back in time. We find a statistical tendency to emanate from a common point between Mars and Jupiter about three million years ago...." -- Thomas C. Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993

"... we know enough now to want to ask two very important questions: What caused the explosion? And why did it happen only three million years ago?" -- Thomas C. Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993

"It is intrinsically unsettling to conclude that planets explode because, after all, we live on a planet ourselves and are totally dependent upon it for survival. Nevertheless, we wish to know the truth." -- Thomas C. Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993

"Additional evidence for a recent and nearby nova or supernova (or planetary explosion) event exists in the form of excess Aluminum-26 in the local interstellar medium. The half life of this radioactive isotope is only about a million years, requiring a recent source to inject the abundant quantities we see today." -- Thomas C. Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993

"... the most natural way to produce the isotopic anomalies observed in meteorites, and supply abundant energy, is by a matter-antimatter explosion. This speculative possibility might result from magnetic separation and storage of the antimatter in a planet over billions of years before the explosion; or from some sort of chain-reaction high-energy antimatter generation process; or from the intervention of intelligent beings. In my opinion, the last possibility should not be dismissed out of hand." -- Thomas C. Van Flandern, astronomer, 1993

"'Intervention by intelligent beings' implies the existence of such beings in the first place, and secondly, implies their knowledge of a physics capable of blowing up a planet, and their possession of the technological means to do so. This is a consequently breathtaking statement for someone of Van Flandern's stature to make! Van Flandern is gingerly and delicately implying that his exploded planets might have been blown up in deliberate acts of war. Yet ... it is precisely this model that the abundance of ancient texts actually supports!" -- Joseph P. Farrell, author, 2007