By vice.com - Posted to PSI on May 11, 2022

One physicist says he can scientifically prove that two Martian civilizations were annihilated by nuclear explosions.

As far as we can tell, Mars is a desolate-looking desert, with no obvious life. Sure, there may still be microbes there, but I think it’s safe to say that there is not an advanced civilization living on the Red Planet. But was it always that way? Did Mars once host a bustling civilization, one that perhaps was capable of nuclear warfare? Let’s check in with some conspiracy theorists to find out.

I’m going to let Andrew, a guy who runs the UFO Sightings Cape Town YouTube page, set the scene.

“There are literally hundreds of building ruins in a few of NASA’s panoramic images. What has happened on Mars? Was it a Nuclear WAR, or perhaps Asteroid hits? The fact of the matter is, that there are many pockets of living humanoids all over Mars,” he wrote on a YouTube video showcasing some of these “building ruins.”

Let’s just put this out there. This is one of the fringiest of fringe conspiracy theories out there. Andrew is probably just a wee bit off his rocker, but he didn’t randomly make up the idea that there was civilization on Mars and that it could have died in a nuclear WAR.

For that, let’s take a look at an excerpt from Did Spacemen Colonize the Earth?, a book published by Robin Collyns in 1976. Earlier in the following passage, Collyns argues that there certainly were nuclear explosions on Mars.

“It is difficult to imagine a nuclear explosion on Mars that was not deliberately caused,” Collyns writes. “It is very likely that the explosion was made for some constructional purpose. Thus, the [nuclear observations] can serve as one of the proofs in the favor of existence of rational life on mars.”

Pseudoscience and wild conjecture are fun, but John Brandenburg, a plasma physicist who got his degree from UC Davis and who has seemingly had a relatively normal, distinguished career for a scientist, has staked his reputation on his theory that Martian life was, perhaps purposefully, destroyed with nukes.

“Was Mars murdered?” he muses in a book about the theory.

In an oddly disconcerting interview with “Supreme Master Television,” a thoroughly bizarre station run by the Supreme Master Ching Hai International Association cult, Brandenburg notes that Mars had two ancient humanoid civilizations, called Cydonia and Utopia, which had a level of technology similar to that of the ancient Egyptians.

What happened to those Martians? Nukes, he says . . .

[SNIP]