Resurfaced photo of unusual 'detail' on Mars sparks bizarre conspiracy theory

Even though the human race is once again shooting for the Moon and hopes to put mankind back on its surface for the first time since 1972 with Artemis IV in (hopefully) 2028, others are looking much further away for the future of space exploration.

As the world's richest man, Elon Musk has spoken a lot about potentially colonizing the Red Planet. He's somewhat dialled back his plans, although there's still plenty of theorizing about how Mars could become an eventual home of the human race.

Even getting to Mars is proving to be a massive headache for those who want to call it home, but after that, we still need to survive the planet's harsh conditions.

You might not even want to land on Mars, because what if some bloodthirsty race of Martians is lurking beneath its surface and getting ready to attack us as foreign invaders? As the criminally underrated Mars Attacks! taught us, messing with Martians from space probably isn't a good idea.

Away from the idea that Martians were nuked out of existence by a nuclear attack from their enemies, or declassified CIA files referring to a dying elder race some one million years ago, a resurfaced image from NASA's Opportunity rover has again stirred the pot of conspiracy theories.

Shared on X by UFO fanatic Scott C. Waring, he suggests that NASA sent the ill-fated rover to Mars to acquire alien tech. According to the OP, the image shows a Martian gun, but in reality, it's probably just a rock that looks a bit like a gun...if you squint.

Although Waring claims his friend was 'killed' by the Russians for pointing this out, and NASA has deleted all evidence of the 'gun' existing, Grok reiterates that these are baseless accusations and that the raw image is still public in NASA/JPL archives.

We're sure that conspiracy theories are further perpetuated by the fate of the Opportunity rover. Initially touching down on January 25, 2004, the rover beamed images back until it was hit by a planetary dust storm in 2018 and entered hibernation on June 12. Ultimately, NASA declared the Opportunity mission dead in February 2019.

On Waring's UFO Sightings Daily site, he shares numerous conspiracy theories and similar images to the one above. This includes apparent alien doorways, the supposed heads of Martian kings, and other phenomena like ancient alien bases that he claims are lurking beneath our own ocean between Japan and Taiwan.

As you can imagine, Waring's posts come with a lot of skepticism.

Replying to the alien gun, one person wrote: "I'm not an expert, but I believe this is a rock...."

Another chuckled: "Why would aliens have guns designed for human hands and fingers? lol."

A third simply asked: "What exactly does the image show?"

We'll likely need a little more convincing before we're confident that Waring is able to prove the existence of Martian invaders through a blurry image of a rock from 2014. Then again, we won’t be laughing when we're being blasted to smithereens by alien overlords.