News & Views
Is the Rosetta Mission Another Roswell?
Dec 05 2014
In mid-November, scientists from the European Space Agency (ESA) made history by successfully landing the first spacecraft onto a comet. The project had been 12 years in the making and involved an unprecedented amount of complexity – in order to succeed, the team had to launch the lander from the Rosetta satellite at a height of 22km, controlling it remotely from a distance of half a billion kilometres and at a time delay of 28 minutes. If you’d like to read more about this topic, take a look at: 4 Incredible Facts about the Rosetta Mission.
No mean feat, by any stretch of the imagination. However, such a stretch is not quite big enough for some conspiracy theorists, who even before the lander made history with its 22km free-fall were clamouring for attention with allegations that the comet 67P is not a comet at all.
An ESA Insider?
According to UFO enthusiasts’ website UFO Sightings Daily, an anonymous email sent from an individual currently working inside the ESA confirms that the targeted comet is in actual fact an alien spaceship in disguise. Back in September, the website announced that it had received such an email, publishing it in full on their website and citing it as definitive proof that the Rosetta mission – impressive though it is – was in fact an elaborate cover-up.
The email’s author warns the reader to “not think for ONE MOMENT that a space agency would suddenly decide to spend billions of dollars to build and send a spacecraft on a 12 year journey to simply take some close-up images of a randomly picked-out comet floating through space.”
Instead, they claim that NASA had been receiving radio signals from an unknown source as long as 20 years ago and eventually pinpointed comet 67P as the origin, thus sparking the desire to investigate it. The ESA’s recent admission that a radio signal – transmitted at a frequency of 40-50 millihertz (as opposed to our range of 20 to 20 kilohertz) had been discovered was seen as proof of this earlier assertion by UFO Sightings Daily.
Conspiracy or Cover-up?
While the confirmation of the signal is intriguing, it in no way confirms that NASA had been receiving such transmissions for 20 years. Nor does it explain why they would hand off the project to the ESA in light of such information. Nor why, if such transmissions were available here on Earth for two decades, no one else has stumbled across them.
Furthermore, the integrity of the author of the email is somewhat compromised by the fact that he or she chose to send their information to a renowned conspiracy theory site rather than any number of respected media outlets. Indeed, for an industry insider, their lack of inside knowledge is startling – all photos which allegedly contain the proof of satellite dishes and hovering alien spacecraft are the high res photographs available to all members of the public from the ESA official website.
The confused blurs found in the photo could possibly represent communication towers or artificial buildings – but really only if you squint. In other words, Rosetta has certainly become another Roswell thanks to the snowballing conspiracy theories surrounding it. Whether or not there is any truth to the rumour remains incredibly unlikely and unsubstantiated … and certainly should not overshadow the incredible feat of human engineering and science that has been achieved by the ESA team.
What do you think? Is it a cover-up or not? Tell us what you think in the comments section.
Digital Edition
Lab Asia 31.4 August 2024
August 2024
Chromatography Articles - HPLC gradient validation using non-invasive flowmeters Mass Spectrometry & Spectroscopy Articles - MS detection of Alzheimer’s blood-based biomarkers Labo...
View all digital editions
Events
Sep 04 2024 Chiba, Tokyo, Japan
Sep 04 2024 University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Sep 11 2024 Bangkok, Thailand
Sep 11 2024 Singapore
Sep 11 2024 Bangkok, Thailand