Opinion: Planet of the dopes

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Last week’s Bigfoot on Mars story demonstrates two important truths: 1. This wonderful age of human discovery and achievement is too good for many if not all of the humans lucky enough to live in it; and 2. the evil MSM can’t win.

First point: When you see a picture like the one at right, a panorama of a valley in the Gusev Crater on a planet five-to-ten light-minutes away from us (see the picture in its full-sized glory here), is your first reaction: a) to get misty thinking of the intellects vast and cool and partially sympathetic who managed to send robot envoys on this magnificent journey; b) to consider the barren, nearly airless, geologically inert rustscape and consider what it has to teach us about our own prehistory and ecology; or c) scan the picture carefully looking for evidence of a boring old hoax by a bunch of rustics?

C was the choice of observers who found evidence of Bigfoot taking a load off out on the surface of the Red Planet. Here’s the detail, an optical illusion that was treated to some deadpan news coverage, a few revealing enhancements and a (clearly unnecessary) debunking. I’m not sure anybody actually believed the humanoid-form-on-Mars story, and at least this news cycle wrapped up more quickly than the Face-On-Mars fad that endured through most of the nineties and even inspired an expensive NASA-assisted Hollywood movie. But really, there’s something off about this need to find the most banal, people-sized mysteries, whatizzits lifted from old Six Million Dollar Man episodes, in a field that doesn’t lack for real, interesting mysteries. Accept the verdict of science, earthlings: You ain’t all that.

On the second point, one Bigfoot buff uses this story to generate (what else?) a bloglashing of the mainstream media, which not only refuse to accord this story the respect it deserves, but allegedly used the same deride-and-conquer strategy to dismiss the 2006 O’Hare airport UFO sighting. As it happens, the O’Hare story is precisely the wrong example to pick if you’re looking to reprimand the MSM in this way: The tale got a fresh wind and much wider distribution thanks to some FAA shenanigans that were revealed thanks to a FOIA request from that obscure blog The Chicago Tribune.

Images courtesy of NASA.