Well it's really the third now... Sorry for the modicum of delay, but the ground breaking nature of this month's calendar possibly justifies it... Yes, too amazing to be true, Classified photos leaked from NASA reveal the actual nature of their Rover troubles..!

You remember, no doubt, that we've had a lot of inexplicable problems with Mars probes in the last few years.... The lab-coat guys tell us it's because of the enormous distances, the solar radiation storms, stupid math mistakes, computer glitches, wind gusts, whatever... The truth is, they just don't want to tell us...

Like last month, when our brand-new Mars rover Spirit suddenly went gunnybag in the middle of a transmission, the NASA types hemmed and hawed awhile, then came up with the explanation of a computer memory overload... Like c'mon, fellas, you had years to design this critter, surely a little dry run or two would have revealed something so obvious..!

Meanwhile Hoagland... remember him, the Face on Mars guy?--- he rushed onto the airwaves with the announcement that NASA had just pulled the plug because Spirit's cameras had revealed architectural building fragments, and the knowledge of a Martian civilization, even in ruins, would cause "a Panic!" (Well, maybe at the airline ticket offices, while eager mobs tried to get a one-way ticket to Mars to get outa this crazy place)...
And some Spanish biology student rushed onto the Web with the news the Spirit had actually landed in the middle of a pile of fossil bones, displaying as evidence some Spirit pictures with little arrows pointing to various rockish-looking rocks, and labels identifying them as various bits from the bony scaffolding of some Earthly-type quadruped... Including, for some odd reason, the skull of a turtle... Presumably, if news of Life on Mars were released, the Christian Fundamentalist Loon types would have started a revolution.... (Hell, they already have... and they won).

But the truth is, NASA really DID pull the plug... Because the real truth was so much more incredible than either of those scenarios... Like when the controller looks into the hazard camera monitor and sees a tight close-up of a pair of bounteous green mounds in Spandex jiggling busily while the Rover careens crazily around a Martian Motocross... Who the hell's going to believe THAT? Release anything that wild, and you could just kiss the NASA budget bye-bye! So, sensibly, the NASA boys just pulled the plug on the live feed and made excuses until the two alien green bunny girls got bored and went away... although you can still find some of their impromptu pinups tucked away in various NASA desks and lockers...

Write to your Senator today - or better yet, save a stamp and just use this Pix for your Computer Desktop and then tell a friend..!! JQ