This story reminds me of when I was duped into making a last-minute addition to the 1990 Worldcon program that turned out to be a lecture about the “Face on Mars”:

Space.com reports a self-described “armchair astronaut” claims to have identified a human (or alien) base on Mars.

David Martines noticed a mysterious rectangular structure that appears to be on the Red Planet’s surface while trolling the planetary surface using Google Mars, a new map program created from compiled satellite images of the planet.

“This is a video of something I discovered on Google Mars quite by accident,” said Martines, the armchair astronaut, in a now-viral YouTube video. “I call it Bio Station Alpha, because I’m just assuming that something lives in it or has lived in it.”

What he’s seeing — a long, pixelated, white object — is located at 49’19.73″N 29 33’06.53″W. “It’s over 700 feet long and 150 feet wide. It looks like it’s a cylinder or made up of cylinders,” says Martines.

However, that intergalactic party pooper, Alfred McEwen, the principal investigator of the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), a powerful telescope currently orbiting Mars, says what Martines sees is not on Mars, only on the photo. It’s nothing more than a flaw in the image, a linear streak produced by a cosmic ray interfering with the camera.

The truth is out there – but this time, it’s not that far out.