We love a good mystery. But apparently, we don’t love solving them enough to pay for it. Decades ago, scientists eyed a bizarre, 300-foot-tall slab sticking out of Phobos, one of Mars’ battered little moons. It looks suspiciously like the alien alarm clock from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Theoretical physicist Maaneli “Max” Derakhshani still wishes we had the guts to go look. Instead, the proposal gathered dust.
NASA, ever the party pooper, officially calls the giant structure a boulder. Sure. Just a rock. Yet, back in the early 2000s, both NASA and the SETI Institute quietly backed a plan to send a robotic lander to chip off a piece of this “boulder.” Why the sudden interest in space gravel? Derakhshani isn’t buying the official line. He recently told “Reality Check with Ross Coulthart” that proponents tried to mask the mission as a boring geological study.
“I don’t think SETI would be interested in this,” Derakhshani said, pointing out the obvious. They don’t hunt for rocks. They hunt for aliens. You don’t single out a massive, geometric anomaly on a tiny Martian moon just to study dirt. There was a bigger question lurking.
Even Buzz Aldrin got hyped. The Apollo legend went on C-SPAN in 2009 to pitch the Phobos mystery to the public. He knew the reaction it would get. “Who put that there?” Aldrin asked. His answer was a bit more philosophical—blaming the universe or God—but the hook was set.
It didn’t matter. The bean counters won. The mission never got its funding, leaving the giant slab alone in the dark. It remains a ghost of a proposal. Just another cosmic question mark we decided was too expensive to answer.
