Death on Mars: The Discovery of a Planetary Nuclear Massacre

First off, I would like to thank Dr. Brandenburg for writing this book. I found fascinating and more than plausible his scientific explanations/extrapolations of the evidence suggesting that ancient Martian civilization was destroyed in some kind of thermonuclear blast, and was also delighted by his willingness to share this information in the context of the narrative of his own personal/professional development. He is not only highly intelligent but seems a very honest and trustworthy person. I would easily rate the fascinating content of this book as 5 stars but, because the book was so badly edited and egregiously proofread, I am compelled to officially rate the book as 4 stars.I do not know if Dr. Brandenburg is aware of other spiritual/psychic sources that directly support his conclusions regarding the annihilation of an ancient Martian civilization (or even if he cares about such sources). In any case, I would like to briefly reference some of the corroboration for his thesis coming from, for instance, the ongoing efforts at instrumental transcommunication implemented by Mark Macy and his group, who have attempted to create a radio means of communicating with scientists in the spiritual world, which is presented in Macy's book, "Miracles in the Storm". [The following summary is mostly excerpted from an endnote in a paper I recently published (2014).]Mark Macy is one of the original pioneers of the work done to establish instrumental transcommunication (ITC) or, that is, to technologically facilitate communication between the physical world and the spirit world. In his book Miracles in the Storm, Macy shares that their experimental group on earth spent an extended period communicating with a group of ancient, ethereal beings in the spirit world, known as The Seven, who were later basically understood to be angels, and who demonstrated themselves to be beings of great love and wisdom. Macy explains that his group of researchers received many profound messages from The Seven, but among those messages, some of the most fascinating had to do with man's distant past and with the most ancient history of human civilization. The story of the origins of the human race that Macy was given through ITC is one that begins on a different planet than Earth in our solar system, and it is a story that is quite similar to those told by such researchers as Zechariah Sitchin and Erich von Daniken. The main reason, however, why this story is relevant here is because it illustrates how ancient beings established a technologically advanced civilization on Mars, and how that civilization was suddenly wiped out by cataclysmic astronomical events.In brief, Macy shares that millions of years ago a planet called Marduk existed in our solar system, whose orbit was between that of Mars and Jupiter. Marduk was a beautiful, lush planet and human civilization there was highly advanced scientifically and technologically. Through using crystals to manipulate subtle energies, the people of Marduk developed extraordinary antigravity devices, facilitated telepathic communication with each other as well as with intelligent minds from distant worlds, and pioneered great advances in genetic engineering and energy production. Utilization of such subtle energies allowed all people to know and accept the reality of life after death, and to clearly realize that all animate and inanimate things in the universe have a form of subtle body--with human beings, this was the spirit-self/spirit body, and with rocks, trees, planets, etc., it was a type of incorporeal astral body. The in-depth understanding of subtle energies and subtle bodies eventually led to the full-scale grasp of subtle dimensions, as Macy explains here:"The people realized that their very own planet Marduk had spiritual counterparts--parallel worlds existing in subtler dimensions. <One branch of science on Marduk involved a space-time doorway through which people could travel between dimensions.> They could enter the portal on the physical planet Marduk and emerge in astral worlds. <The natural laws and the physics of the two realities were quite different from each other. For example, in the astral worlds there were no gravity, no time, and no space as there were in the physical world.> Scientists studied these differences as part of the natural sciences of multidimensional living." [Mark H. Macy, Miracles in the Storm (New York, NY: New American Library division of Penguin Putnam, Inc., 2001), p. 141. Text between the open and closed angle brackets is information explicitly received from The Seven; the rest of the quoted text is Mark Macy's interpretive elaboration of the angle-bracketed text.]Thus, Marduk had apparently developed a kind of spiritual technology in the form of a dimensional portal that allowed Marduk’s inhabitants to travel and research interdimensionally, i.e., that enabled them to experience a form of dimensional translation through which they could easily explore parts of the spiritual universe, and no doubt commune with its inhabitants. This fascinating story does not end here, however. Macy further shares that Marduk's dimensional portal technology was also discovered to be useful for space travel in the physical universe:"One small branch of <the complex Marduk scientific establishment involved itself with space travel.> It was not travel by propulsion as we know it today. Rather, the travelers would leave the physical world to enter the subtler realms of spacelessness and timelessness, then simply reenter the physical realm in a new location." [Mark H. Macy, Miracles in the Storm, p. 141.]In short, as revealed by The Seven, the portal technology enabled many scientists--geologists, biologists, physicists, etc.--to carefully investigate, and eventually colonize other planets in our solar system, especially Mars and the Earth. When these scientists first visited Earth, they discovered a lush planet with only primitive life, and a few species of primates. Eventually, however, both Mars and Earth became home to a substantial remnant from Marduk, replete with all their scientific advancements.Scientists on Marduk continued to expand their investigations into energy production and had achieved a highly advanced civilization--a kind of paradise. Yet, for all of their lofty development, they could and did make mistakes. One day, all of a sudden, very unexpectedly, the planet Marduk exploded as a result of a serious misjudgment in their high-energy physics experimentation. This catastrophic event completely obliterated Marduk, transforming in an instant this edenic planet into what today we know as the Asteroid Belt lying between Mars and Jupiter. This explosion also rained huge amounts of planetary debris upon Mars, destroying all life and settlements there. Personally, it does not seem at all impossible to me that such a cataclysmic event/explosion could have reached the level of one billion megatons (as Dr. Brandenburg mentions in his book) and beyond, the greatest brunt of which would have clearly hammered Mars. Thus, such a scenario in which Martian civilization was wiped out through a planet-level accident of some sort seems a quite reasonable and plausible alternative to otherwise supposing that a hostile, spacefaring entity deliberately extirpated the civilization.(Meanwhile, those contingents colonizing the Earth, now bereft of their home planet, responded by mobilizing their native technology to create the civilization of Atlantis over a period of several thousand years. In the end, however, Atlantis failed to learn from the mistakes of its ancestors and destroyed itself and its continent 25,000 years ago in a way similar to how Marduk was destroyed. A fascinating story--perhaps someday we will all be able to know definitively the truth of this story. [Mark H. Macy, Miracles in the Storm, summary of pp. 140-142.])Finally, I am employed professionally as an editor and a proofreader, and need to mention that there were literally hundreds of proofreading/editing snafus in this book--which was very disappointing to me, because the information in the book and Dr. Brandenburg’s overall conclusions and final message are so important and profound. Punctuation was often missing, inconsistent, irrelevant/unnecessary, or just plain incorrect--and in many instances, close-quotes are shown as open-quotes, or vice versa, plus in dozens of locations, there appears an anomalous space between the text and the following comma. Important words were dropped in numerous sentences (e.g., “World War I” appears as “World I” on p. 159, etc.), and in other sentences, extra words were inadvertently retained, making the sentences incoherent. Names of well-known persons were misspelled--Louis Friedman appears as “Louis Freidman” on pp. 156 and 157, and Whitley Strieber appears as “Whitely Stieber” on p. 357. There were many inconsistencies in capitalization of terms, hyphenation, line-spacing and presentation in the Reference sections, and word-spacing in many text paragraphs, as well as many missing apostrophes, etc. Hyphens were used to take the place of em-dashes, etc. There were numerous instances of the misusage of English words, e.g., “There” should be “Their” (p. 171, 3 lines from top of page), “their” should be “there” (p. 198, 5 lines from top of page), “it’s” should be “its” (p. 234, 7 lines from top of page). Any competent proofreader would have fixed/corrected most of these problems and, if the spacing snafus were actually printing problems, then the author should demand that the book be reprinted correctly. Again, overall, the book suffers from sloppy production.However, despite the foregoing problems, the pictures (both color and black/white), graphs, and explanatory content in the book are fascinating and thought-provoking. On this basis, I would highly recommend the book to anyone who is interested in considering that a thriving, humanoid, ancient Martian civilization most probably existed millions of years ago, and that we are destined to learn extraordinary lessons from it once we can actually travel to Mars. Again, many thanks to Dr. Brandenburg for writing this book to capture our imagination, as the human race moves out into a cosmic frontier.

Overall, I am glad that I read this book. It made me think deeply about our future and few books can actually do that. This book is an entertaining read. This is NOT only about Mars. This is partly an autobiographic recount of the work that the author did on plasma beams in the 80s and then how he slowly became more and more involved in the Mars research. I found it very interesting that he chronologigally tells the story about the Mars research which had a big moment with the viking expedition and first photos from Mars. On these photos were faces on the surface and pyramids. The author got more and more involved and makes (in my view) a very good case that there should be investigated more (the great Carl Sagan finally agreed as well on his deathbed). The author makes the case that the conditions on Mars mirror how Earth would look like after a devastating nuclear attack. The geological and chemical conditions on Mars are explained in detail and how specific X129 ratio on Mars is so high as if nuclear weapons have been exploded. I am not a nuclear expert and cannot confirm that his arguments are correct, but his arguments sound conclusive to me (apart of a few unanswered questions). This comes to the conclusion that there was at some point a civilization out there in our neighborhood which was able to destroy Mars and therefore they could also destroy us. If that is true, what should we do? Do we as humanity a bigger task as our mission to colonize Mars, research what happened there and then colonize space to protect us from potentially hostile alien civilizations?The authore by himself has great credibility. He has worked on the great unified theory (GUT) and also on plasma weapons. He also appears also very knowledgable in regards to chemistry, geology and nuclear weapons. What does not help his credibility is that he keeps mixing his religion into this book. In my view science and facts should be kept completely seperate from religion, faith and believes. In my view it undermines the credibility of a scientist if religion is mixed with it. E.g. at one point in his book, he explains that it is possible that there is life outside of Earth and confirms that with a sentence from the bible. That did not help the author. I liked though that the author was very open about his own doubts as Christian and then believing that there are other life forms out there. I found that interesting as conflicting as it was.Regardless if his theory is correct or not, just the possibility that it could be right, made me think what we as humanity need to do to survive. Very stimulating theory. But there are some aspects which did not make much sense to me:(1) If the nuclear armaggedon on Mars really happened 500 million years ago, would we really still see faces of civilizations before that time? Would they not have been destroyed by time (e.g. incoming objects from the asteroid belt)?(2) If Mars' civilization was destroyed 500 million years ago, can we assume that that civilization still exists? Maybe. But they might have destroyed themselves by now and are no longer a threat. And if not, and if that civilization had the ability to destroy a civilization with nuclear weapons 500 million years ago, this civilization would be so far ahead of us, that we would barely have a chance to defend ourself. Not saying that we should not try, but 500 million years sounds like a very long time for a civilization to exist after they had nuclear weapons.(3) I do not necessarily agree to his conclusion that this must have come from a third civilization and not from Mars itself. We were close to nuking Earth in 1983 and this could also have happened on Mars without a third civilization from outside the solar system.(4) The author uses some strong language by using the words "we must do " this and that. No, we don't have to do it that way. We could do it in a different way. In my view his case would have been stronger if he had used more suggestive or recommendative language instead of using MUST so often.(5) He clearly crashed with JPL during his work but how much he insists that they must be removed from any future Mars research is not convincing. A good scientists would work on convincing other people which have other views but this was a little bit too much for me.(6) He describes too often, that he felt chosen by God to make these discoveries. Sorry, but that goes way over the top for me. Great that he worked on the Mars research and that he contributed with his intelligence, but I doubt that he was actually chosen by God.(7) The author describes by himself, that he has a reason why he wants this theory to be true. He wants us to learn from it and prepare us for potential future external attacks. Great. But if somebody has a preference what the outcome of a scientific research project is, then I see the final result of that research with sceptisism (did he want the clues to end up this way?)Nevertheless and in spite of these few flaws (which has cost the 5th star), I absolutely recommend this book. It is an entertaining, inspiring read.

The book was not made to read by a layman. It was too technical and repetitive to have an easy flow of reading. I got the gist but sadly it could have been written as a Tec Manual.

A truly chilling scenario, but researched thoroughly and backed up by facts. If our governments ignore this warning we are all doomed.

Good book.

Good read.

Most of the book is him patting himself on the back, and his evidence is intended for a physicist to understand. Thankfully this guy is not in a position of power.