The thick veil of Venus has been for years a barrier between inquiring minds and the surface of this planet hostile to human life. And even as eyes turned to scrutinize the surface of Mars, Venus has been seen as a planet far too inhospitable to ever host life – or at least life as we would understand it. But this shocking image retrieved from Russia’s 1982 Venus mission suggests that the probe encountered something while on the surface that may give validity to recent claims that Venus may host life.
Twenty years ago a Soviet probe breached the atmosphere of Venus and landed on the planet’s surface. Between 1961 and 1984 the Soviet exploration of Venus was seen as one of the many triumphs of the ambitious remote surveillance and exploration program the Soviet space program had enacted. The launching and use of the probes was known as the Venera project. By the time the 1982 probe finally made landfall on the mysterious planet, already nine had landed successfully among the 15 that were launched. The probe that took the above photographs survived for less than two hours before it was destroyed by the hostile conditions of the planet’s surface. After Venera 13, two others were launched but to date no photographs sent back by them gave any indication of the perplexing artifact seen in the Venera 13 photos.
The Times of India reported that one biologist, Leonid Ksanfomaliti, has analyzed the images and come to the conclusion that the objects are nothing less than the legendary evidence the Soviet Union actively sought at the time for evidence of alien life. But contrary to many contemporary opinions on the matter, by all appearances the creature appears to be low to the ground and insect-like, looking more like a living trilobyte fossil than the bipedal creatures witnesses have described in UFO reports.
Unlike western space agencies such as NASA, there have been multiple indicators from the Russian Space Agency to suggest that there may be more than we think to our neighboring planets. For example, in 1989 the “Phobos 2 Incident” was met with skepticism in the west despite evidence suggesting the probe had photographed a moving disk quickly flying toward it immediately prior to the device’s destruction with the last photograph sent back to Earth being of an odd looking disc shaped object quickly approaching seemingly from out of nowhere and another massive shadow on the ground of Phobos. Only recently with the destruction of the Phobos Grunt as Russia attempts once again to gain access to the red planet’s most mysterious moon did the event spring back to memory as the circumstances seemed to have an odd similarity to them – only this time the probe got nowhere near Mars or Phobos before it was destroyed.
Is this a photo of a mysterious creature that somehow managed to either evolve from or adapt to the extremely hostile conditions of Venus? Skeptics have pointed out that the object may be a lens cap that was removed from the Venera 13 probe, but photographs of the probe prior to launch clearly show the camera – the lens cap of which looks nothing like what appears to be a many legged creature venturing closer to the disturbance caused by the landing probe.