Claim: the Google Mars Data Center is real (NASA’s base)

It seems this April fools day joke was a good one. Some people claim that Google’s Mars Data Center is actually real. Example: SecureTeam10’s YouTube channel, video titled “DID NASA Forget to Edit this Out on Mars?”

SecureTeam10 is not alone with their claims. Several UFO/conspiracy websites have posted articles with similar claims despite the fact that they have been debunked many times. Debunk example: Google Earth Blog.

Collected claims from the video:

• (April Fools)… was a pretty cruel and unfunny joke and there are few strange things about it…
• …there are no parking lots for cars or anything like that…
• Why would Google choose… to photoshop a base into a single frame on Google Mars and then not tell anybody about it…
• Google months later revealed that it was an April Fool’s Joke…
• …this actually may be a legitimate base that actually did slip through the cracks while they were updating the mapping images on Google Earth… they had to come up with a cover story
• April 1 came and went, nobody even noticed this thing…

The following debunk is silly, but I will provide facts that show this was indeed a joke and not a real base on Mars. Why: because there are still some people who believe in this conspiracy theory.

Part 1: Google didn’t tell anybody about it

They did: on April 1st 2017.

Did anyone notice? Yes – few examples posted on April 1st 2017:

1. Mashable
2. The Verge
3. Network World

Google posted the joke on April 1st, it was noticed by the world during the same day so the claims that they didn’t tell anybody, nobody noticed, or that it was revealed months later are complete nonsense.

Part 2: this could be a real base on Mars

I will just show how the joke was made. The first picture pair shows that Google simply copied buildings from their own data center images and pasted them on Mars. I have highlighted some obvious details, but there are many similarities. In fact, the buildings are exactly the same. The “Mars buildings” have been re-arranged.

Second picture pair: with this building, Google didn’t even re-arrange much. The image has been rotated a bit.

Images of Google’s Pryor, Oklahoma data center were also used. Buildings have been re-arranged. Again, notice that these buildings are exactly the same.

And then there’s the pickup truck. Perhaps Google forgot to remove it or perhaps it’s part of the joke. A normal pickup truck on Mars? No skid marks? It could be a hover car or… just a joke.

Part 3: It would be impossible

First fact: the door. You can walk inside the “data center” Street View-style. The entrance is the door shown below. That is a normal door. That is not a “space station door”. It is a joke.

About the size of things: these buildings are large. One building is about 190m long (623ft), 50m wide (164ft) and several stories high. There are many buildings. How many rockets or other (non-existing) spacecraft NASA would have needed to transport all the material from Earth to Mars? Probably thousands if not more.

Where are all the people who went to Mars to build that base and maintain it – there must have been hundreds. This kind of operation would have been not only impossible but massive. It would have been noticed.

Finally, the base is naturally not present in the real photos of Mars.

Google’s April 1 joke was actually quite funny, well made and not real. End of silly debunk 🙂

Further reading: UFO Tube – a review of SecureTeam10 YouTube channel.