A 'missile' and a 'gun' on Mars: Did the Red Planet witness an ancient alien war?

NASA’s Curiosity rover has taken countless images of Mars ever since it landed in the Gale Crater in 2012. Quite a few of those images have featured objects odd enough to spark extraordinary theories about alien life on the planet. One such image resurfaced late last month, with the claim that Mars was the site of an ancient war.

The image (on the left) taken by Curiosity’s Mastcam back in 2022 features a long, narrow object lying on the ground. While it certainly stands out from the rest of the features in the image, Scott C. Waring, who runs the UFO Daily Sightings website, believes it is an unexploded missile from a war that was fought on the planet.

“Guys, this is a unexploded missile laying on the surface of Mars just meter from the NASA rover,” he wrote on his blog, referring to the image. “This is undeniable proof that there was a huge war on Mars long ago that killed not only the enemy, but most living things on the surface of Mars.” He claims that the object is a little over two and a half meters in length, and NASA deliberately stayed silent on it as it’s “a matter of US national security and might be dangerous if some other nation gets hold of it.”

The “missile” isn’t the only proof of conflict that Warren claims to have come across on Mars. In 2020, he circulated an image of a gun-shaped object on the surface of the planet, while crediting the YouTube channel Streetcap1 with the discovery. “This gun is about 1 foot long, he wrote on his blog. “I guess this is why NASA built the rovers, to find alien technology and scan it and possibly retrieve it at a latter date.” 

The image in question was taken by the Opportunity rover in 2014. It landed on Mars in 2004 and fell silent in 2018 after a planet-wide dust storm blanketed its location.

As confident as Waring sounds in his claims, NASA reportedly has given no indication that the objects point towards life on the planet, let alone a full-scale war. Also, scientists have long attributed oddly shaped Martian rocks to volcanic activity, meteorite impacts, and wind erosion. Many such claims about artificial objects on Mars have, in fact, been dismissed as pareidolia, which is the human tendency to look for similar patterns where there are none.