A top NASA scientist claims she was fired after sounding alarms on her alien mission.
The government has long been secretive about extraterrestrial life, and we typically only receive glimpses of what's really happening through leaked interviews and declassified files.
Former Area 51 staff members have described 'life-threatening' health conditions while working at the top-secret base. Meanwhile, Joe Rogan has spoken to former CIA scientists about crashed UFOs across America, and shared his 'genuine concern' on the New Jersey drone saga late last year.
So it's understandable that many conspiracy theorists believe there's clearly more going on behind the scenes than we're being told.
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Now, a top scientist claims she was sacked by the space agency after raising concerns about alien life on Mars.
Catharine Conley served as NASA's Planetary Protection Officer from 2006 to 2017.
Her role was to ensure that Earth doesn't contaminate other planets with its microbes, and vice versa.
In February 2020, NASA's Perseverance rover was launched to Mars to collect samples from the Martian surface that could contain evidence of past or present alien life. These samples are intended to be returned to Earth by a future mission for detailed analysis.
However, Conley spotted a problem and accused officials at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in California of failing to properly clean the Mars 2020 rover before launch.
"The Mars 2020 rover was cleaned in a way that was not compatible with prior levels of cleanliness, in particular regarding the amount of contamination that was getting introduced into the samples that were being collected for return," Conley explained.
“I pointed out that having a 0.1% chance of contaminating any individual sample, when you have 40 samples in total, comes out to a 4 per cent chance of having Earth contamination in the samples you're looking at."
These might seem like minor issues, but when you're dealing with a mission to detect alien life, even tiny amounts of Earth contamination could ruin everything.
“That makes it fairly difficult to be confident that you can distinguish between Earth life and Mars life," Conley argued.
As a result of voicing the issues, Conley claims she was suddenly removed from the position to silence her concerns about the mission's contamination protocols.
“NASA decided they didn't want to do the kind of work that I had been doing," Conley added. “They didn't want to continue with the kinds of implementation that they had been doing historically.
“That was not something I thought was a good idea, so they decided they needed someone else for the job. This was basic planetary protection as it had been done for the prior 50 years or so."
She also reported staff being careless with gloves and protective equipment whilst being sloppy with basic contamination prevention protocols.
Conley, who is now a researcher, said that management didn't want to hear her out and instead 'took the steps that they thought were appropriate.'