The man who saw water

A Mars researcher asserted many years ago that evidence showed flowing liquid

He didn’t believe in little green men — but he also didn’t shy away from theories about Mars that some people thought were just as preposterous.

Theories like: The Red Planet was once one of two moons orbiting a much larger planet, a gaseous giant that exploded millions of years ago.

Or: The famous “Face on Mars,” a shadowy, gape-mouthed visage first observed by the Viking I spacecraft in 1976, is not a natural phenomenon but an artificial creation made by intelligent life.

But the late Thomas Van Flandern, a Yale-trained astronomer who spent 20 years in his field at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., also started his own nonprofit research organization, Meta Research, which focused on alternative astronomical ideas.

That’s what prompted Van Flandern to claim many years ago that, based on analysis of NASA imagery, there was flowing water on Mars.

Just as NASA officials announced on Monday.

“This was an important part of his life’s work — and finding water on Mars was one of these things that was related to his ‘exploded planet’ theory,” says his daughter, Constance Van Flandern, a Eugene artist and graphic designer whose father’s research is so integral to the family dynamic that her 9-year-old son is named Marston.

Thomas Van Flandern: A man of sheer lunacy, or a man ahead of his time?

A closer look reveals that Van Flandern, who died of colon cancer at age 68 in 2009 in Sequim, Wash., led a fascinating life, even having a “main-belt minor planet” — 52266 Van Flandern — posthumously named for him. He was well respected in some circles, if not in mainstream science.

“What they’ve done is open the doors to validate Tom’s work,” said Richard Hoagland, co-author of the 2007 New York Times best-seller, “Dark Mission: A Secret History of NASA,” and a former NASA consultant. “And the truth of what that means is going to be staggering to everybody.”

Van Flandern, who became interested in astronomy as a child growing up in Cleveland, later led “moonwatch” teams that tracked satellites in the age of Sputnik as a high school student and later as a college student at Xavier University. He was quoted in The New York Times on astronomical matters no less than a half-dozen times.

In 1976, while he was chief of the Celestial Mechanics Branch of the Nautical Almanac Office at the U.S. Naval Observatory, The Times reported Van Flandern’s theory that the orbits of 60 comets indicated that they originated from an explosion of a giant planet that once existed between Mars and Jupiter.

“At that time, the planet exploded — accounting for most, if not all comets, the asteroid belt and many meteorites,” Van Flandern is quoted as saying.

On his Wikipedia page, Van Flandern lists possible reasons for a planet’s explosion: Either “a runaway nuclear reaction in uranium in the core, or a change of state as the planet cools down, creating density phase change (like water to ice), causing it to implode or explode.”

A Meta Research video found on YouTube, titled “The Violent History of Mars,” refers to “Planet V,” said to have exploded up to 65 million years ago, possibly causing the extinction of the dinosaurs on Earth and eviscerating the surface of Mars.

Planet V had two moons, Mars and Body C. For the next 62 million years, they revolved around each other until tidal forces caused the explosion of Body C some 3.2 million years ago, leaving just Mars, the theory asserts.

NASA research suggests that Mars most likely had lots of water a few billion years ago, with rivers and lakes and maybe even an ocean.

In 2008, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander confirmed frozen water on the planet, but it wasn’t until Monday that the space agency first confirmed the appearance of liquid water flowing on the surface today.

James Green, the director of NASA’s planetary science division, said the finding provides “great opportunities in the right locations on Mars to thoroughly investigate” whether life has ever existed there.

Hoagland, who now runs a New Mexico-based NASA watchdog group called The Enterprise Mission, told The Register-Guard on Wednesday that he and Van Flandern knew about the flowing water 15 years ago.

Hoagland is quoted, in an online article Tuesday by Newsweek, as saying this in 2000:

“It’s pretty unambiguous. We can see the crack in the crater wall where the liquid started to flow from, and follow a clear flow path down the slope of the crater mound. The flow patch is dark and wet, indicating it may have been only hours old when (the Mars Global Surveyor) photographed it.”

Hoagland contends that NASA also has known about the water for years — and that it has imagery showing remnants of ancient civilizations on Mars, but is slowly releasing information leading up to that revelation so as not to cause panic.

“They sit on (information) until the appropriate political time,” Hoagland said.

The water now flowing on Mars is from ancient oceans seeping up from underground, he said, which vindicates Van Flandern’s model.

“Someday, Tom is going to be recognized as the guy who found it first,” he said of Van Flandern’s exploded planet theory.

Constance Van Flandern is perhaps best known locally as winner of the 2008 SLUG queen contest, an honor that landed her on the cover of The Wall Street Journal in a story about Eugene’s quirky annual pageant.

She said that Monday’s announcement by NASA conjured all sorts of frustrating feelings for her and her three brothers — Michael and Kevin both work for Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., and Brian is a “master mixologist” with Creative Cocktail Consultants in New York City.

“It was really upsetting for me,” Constance Van Flandern said. “It’s always upsetting when NASA releases something that has to do with my dad’s research.

“He had such a passion for everything about astronomy, since he was a little boy. But his passion was the truth. And he came up against the static nature of institutional science quite a bit over his career.”

Thomas Van Flandern, the author of the 1993 book “Dark Matters: Missing Planets and New Comets,” had nearly completed a second book, “Mirror on Mars,” when he died.

His daughter has the manuscript and hopes to get it published.

“It’s all about Mars,” she says.