NASA May Have Unknowingly Found and Killed Alien Life on Mars 50 Years Ago, Scientist Claims

One researcher hypothesizes that experiments carried out by NASA’s Viking landers in 1976 could have inadvertently killed microbes living in Martian rocks. Other experts are skeptical.

A scientist recently claimed that NASA may have inadvertently discovered life on Mars almost 50 years ago and then accidentally killed it before realizing what it was. But other experts are split on whether the new claims are a far-fetched fantasy or an intriguing possible explanation for some puzzling past experiments.

After landing on the Red Planet in 1976, NASA’s Viking landers may have sampled tiny, dry-resistant life-forms hiding inside Martian rocks.

If these extreme life-forms did and continue to exist, the experiments carried out by the landers may have killed them before they were identified, because the tests would have “overwhelmed these potential microbes.”

This is “a suggestion that some people surely will find provocative,” Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Technical University Berlin, said. But similar microbes do live on Earth and could hypothetically live on the Red Planet, so they can’t be discounted, he added.

This is not the first time that scientists have proposed that the Viking experiments may have inadvertently killed Martian microbes. In 2018, another group of researchers proposed that when soil samples were heated up, an unexpected chemical reaction could have burned and killed any microbes living in the samples. This group claims that this could also explain some of the puzzling results from the experiments.