What Really Happened to the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is Not What the News is Telling You

It is absolutely imperative that the truth about what happened to Oppy and what followed be relayed to the public. To hell with laws and protocol. I was apart of the team designated within NASA to track the movements of the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity (MER-1) or more aptly named Oppy.
I am here to tell you that you have been lied to. Oppy did not simply expire due to some ill-conceived dust storm like you have been told. Although, I would much rather that be the case, but once again, that is a farce.
Our mission was dedicated to the exploration of our neighbor, the Red Planet. To say the least, I was honored to be apart of humanity's ascension to the Last Frontier. I felt elated and even God-like. How many people could honestly say they were doing something bigger than their mundane lives? At the end of my day, the answer to that question did not matter to me. The only thing that mattered was what lay beyond our atmosphere, but being apart of that meant uncovering things we had no business meddling in.
I remember standing over Maria's shoulder. I was her team leader. Her long brown hair was draped behind her ears which were with expensive looking black headphones. She was staring intensely at the computer screen in front of her.
"We started picking this up around 0958 ZULU. I have no idea what this is. Oppy was located there..." She nodded toward the giant screens at the front of the watch floor. "It seems to get louder as Oppy moves south. This doesn't sound like any sort of weather anomaly to me. We've been analyzing it."
Maria gestured to her own computer screen at the audio waves. "There seems to be a source." Her voice shook slightly.
She passed me her headphones and I precariously put them over my ears. Maybe I would hear the rumblings of tectonic plates shifting, but I was not sure what to expect. Maria pressed play.
Low, echoing octaves were traveling around Oppy. It sounded like a deep voice humming eerily, almost like some sort of chant, but no, that was ridiculous. This was not a voice. Mars was dead so what silly type of conclusion was that?
Maria was staring me with her wide, almond shaped eyes, attempting to anticipate my thoughts.
I passed back her headphones and straightened my back.
"It sounds creepy, right?" She inquired, a little too loudly.
I cleared my throat. "It is certainly unusual." It suddenly occurred to me that I had the entire watch floor's attention. Had I been the last person to listen to this?"
I instructed Maria to forward to an acoustical engineer team we had stationed in an effort to provide us with a rash and logical explanation. I have taken the liberty to upload what I was able to get my hands on here.
"How long has Oppy been picking up this Anomaly?" The Anomaly is what we had come to address it as.
"For the past five hours," Maria answered promptly. "...it's been getting louder."
"Pull up Oppy's path." I gestured tot the screen up front.
Immediately, a gray scale satellite map of Mars filled the display. Small blue tick marks annotated Oppy's travels along the terrain. Oppy was currently located in the Kronos-15 quadrant, an area of rocky land.
"We've been leading Oppy on that eastward path toward the cliffs on the far side of K-15." One of the terrain analyst explained. I had already been aware. My superiors had give me that directive to pass to our team.
I debriefed my chief within the hour on the Anomaly. If was being honest with myself, Maria was right: it did sound...creepy.
"Follow the sound." I relayed the order. It had been what my superiors wanted. An intense bout of curiosity overwhelmed me, mixed with a barely contained veil of excitement.
I received several looks of satisfaction and wonder when I passed down the order. The only one who appeared as though they wanted to protest was Maria. She was a quiet little mouse, always kept to herself, dutifully listening to any sounds or signals that might be of interest to the agency. She opened her mouth to say something, but abruptly shut it.
Now, it took longer than we would have liked to find the source of the mysterious sound. It's common knowledge that MER-1 has a speed of less than a quarter of a mile. In the 15 years that Oppy had been active, our little explorer had traveled about 28 miles - an incredible feat! The mission was only supposed to last 90 days but went far beyond than expected.
The Anomaly was captured on the rim of the Endeavor Crater, right along Marathon Valley. It was a few days later that we received a distant video of the source.
There had been dust and sand particles - what we assumed to be the dust storm, but it was not a natural occurrence as we had originally thought.
"W-What is that?" My voice shook with wonder as the entire watch floor stared at the screen, attempting to make out what Oppy had sent back.
The video was grainy. Red swirls of sand pervaded the screen making it a bit difficult to make out at first glance, but as my eyes adjusted, my mind began to comprehend what it was looking at.
A single source of green light emanated powerfully through the dust from some sort of structure hundreds of feet from Oppy. The light seemed to be pulsating, kicking up the sand, essentially creating its own isolated dust storm.
We directed Oppy to move forward. We wanted a closer look. Excitement tingled through the air as Oppy steadily approached at a much slower rate than normal. The wind was becoming powerful.
Were we on the verge of encountering alien life for the first time? I stared at the screen with my arms crossed tightly over my chest.
"It looks like some sort of obelisk." I said slowly before I could stop the words from tumbling out, but I was right.
The Obelisk in question appeared slightly taller than the average man. It was as wider though and had to made of some sort of greyish metallic material. It slowly became clear that the green light glowed from some sort of sandscript or cuneiform writing etched onto the Obelisk.
Oppy came to a halt, angling its camera up towards the monument. It was just a few feet away with a much clearer view now. The writing was written in some sort of language that none of us obviously recognized. There was something else though. To the left was some sort of picture carving. It could only be described as some writhing mass of tentacles.
I have not been able to acquire Oppy's visual logs anymore. Their classification level was elevated far above mine before I had a chance to take them.
It was fascinating. Never had any human discovered the markings of an ancient civilization on a completely different planet! We were staring at the screen, awestruck by our discovery. Theories ran through my head at rapid speed. Was this tentacled creature some sort of God to the Martians of old?
The Anomaly was booming through our loudspeakers and now we had proof it was coming from this strange Obelisk on Mars. All of the team leads gathered in an office to explain what was happening to our superiors. Snapshots were sent of the ancient language to world-renowned linguists, and we waited with bated breath on what information we would get back.
I was standing on the watch floor, smiling and laughing with my teammates about how we would be heroes and rich people because of this. I was sipping a hot cup of green tea when the directive came down to attempt to extract a sample from the Obelisk.
Maria's eyebrows were deeply furrowed.
"Is something wrong?" I asked her hesitantly, glancing between her and the screen. I was hoping she would not answer. I did not want to miss a thing. I was feeling giddy, like some school kid finding out that school was canceled and we had a snow day. I was right where I wanted to be.
"It's just that I was speaking to one of the linguists that we brought in," She began to explain. "and he said that marking on the Obelisk were actually ancient Sumerian."
The room was crowded now, full of scientists, engineers, among many others, all of us watching as someone guided Oppy to touch the Obelisk.
I snorted. "That's not possible. He was probably making it up to mess with you. Gullible people are easily susceptible to conspiracies."
She glared at me. "I thought the same thing!" She hissed, lowering her voice. "Let me show you!"
I rolled my eyes, preparing to move away, but she grabbed my forearm and dragged me to her workstation. She unlocked her computer and Googled ancient Sumerian. My hands were on my hips, with a no doubt contemptuous expression.
"Look!" Maria swung her computer screen.
"I don't know...it looks similar at a glance, I suppose. It seems far-fetched, don't you think?"
Before Maria had a chance to form a rebuttal, someone in the crowd gasped. My head snapped up just in time to see Oppy's visuals blacked back from a cloud of green plasma energy just as the claw touched the Obelisk. It landed several feet away on its side. The camera was now angled horribly. The tip of the Obelisk could be seen in Oppy's bottom right hand corner, the frequency of its glowing pulses accelerated. Oppy's camera was moving in and out of focus, making everything far more hazy than they already were.
A violent tremor vibrated underneath the little rover as a seemingly final pulse blasted from the Obelisk. Oppy's screens went black on June 10th 2018.
There was a great panic, of course. Everything was done to resuscitate Oppy, but nothing worked. We tried for months, but we never got it back online. Everyone was scrambling over each other trying to understand what happened. Everyone was questioned by an outside agency, I had no idea who. Those in the room that had the clearance necessary were either shut out or brought in further into the fold.
This was clearly something alien. The Obelisk had not been built by humans, but by Martians! I was dying to know what was going on, but I had been shut out and Maria had been brought in.
When Maria pulled me aside in the middle of the hallway, she double checked to make sure no one was in the vicinity.
"Another obelisk was found on Earth. In Guatemala."
My stomach dropped. More questions than answers now and it was driving me crazy.
"What?"
She waited until a few people passed us, darting nervous looks to the back of their heads. "There was an earthquake a few months ago...on the same day Oppy touched the Obelisk. Some locals found a cave opening that I guess opened up due to the shake. We sent people to the area a couple months ago to investigate. A contact of mine said that an American agency moved into the excavation site I tried to reach out to them and the locals but I've heard nothing for weeks."
"Who told you this?" The words stumbled out. It all sounded crazy.
Maria hesitated. "He was at the excavation site. He would send me updates as they dug deeper...but like I said, I haven't heard anything in weeks." The worry in her voice was apparent.
Maria gave me a final look before taking down the hallway and leaving me dumbstruck. The shock was quickly wearing off and this intense need to know what exactly was happening overcame me. I had seen the same feeling the depths of Maria's eyes.
It felt like every cell of mine was on fire. The pit of my stomach felt like it was constantly on the loop of a roller coaster. This terrible, aching curiosity followed me home. My palms had not stopped sweating with anticipation.
I was sitting at my desk in the living room, gazing at my computer screen at the one-way tickets to Guatemala, while contemplating wild theories more ridiculous than the next.
What if our creators had come from Mars and passed on the gift of writing to the Sumerians thousands of years ago? What if they left behind ways for us to contact them? If so, they wanted us to find them! Maybe we had forerunners from another planet and our home planet was not actually Earth? Were we just a forgotten colony or some sort of experiment?
I called Maria. She had already booked a ticket for tomorrow morning. I did the same, packed a bag full of essentials, and met Maria at the airport the following day. We were both filled with that burning, unnatural need to just know and we did not look back once we boarded that plane.


Source.