Project Pegasus & Time Travel: Interview with Andrew Basiago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8OImQaxQdM

Andrew Basiago, J.D., is a licensed attorney with the State of Washington who claims to have participated in classified programs involving time travel and space time portals since 1967 when he was 6 years old. He was exposed into these programs by his father who worked for a major engineering corporation that was given contracts to develop these exotic technologies — the Ralph M. Parsons company. From 1969 to 1972, Andrew says he was formally recruited into a time travel project called Pegasus that was funded by the CIA and the forerunner to the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency. In his first interview with Dr. Michael Salla, Andrew discusses his background, his father's work, other key individuals, and events associated with Project Pegasus. This includes his famous August 24, 2015, interview with Art Bell who confirmed key aspects of Andrew's claim of visiting an ITT facility in 1971 in Nutley, New Jersey where he encountered Bell. Art Bell confirmed live on air during his interview with Andrew that he was indeed working at the ITT facility on a classified NATO program in 1971 and that he had never publicly shared such information. This powerful corroborating data made Andrew Basiago's incredible claims plausible for many who had previously been skeptical including Dr. Salla, as explained in the interview. Andrew Basiago's facebook page is: https://www.facebook.com/andrew.d.bas… For a series of exopolitics articles on Basiago see: https://exopolitics.org/alleged-time-traveler-runs-for-u-s-president-real-deal-or-cia-psyop/

>>16682023

'CIA used TIME TRAVEL foreseeing Trump win' Shock claims from ex-Presidential candidate

A FORMER US Presidential candidate has claimed the CIA used time travel to find out that Donald Trump would be President.

Andrew D. Basiago, who entered the race for the White House earlier last year, said the government agency started Project Pegasus in the 1970s.

He says the programme was developed by the CIA and DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) decades ago to study the effects of time travel and teleportation on kids.

It was also allegedly used to bring back important information from the future and give it to the military and intelligence community.

CLAIMS: Andrew Basiago claims he was part of the CIA-DARPA Pegasus Project (Image: ANDREW D BASIAGO/FACEBOOK)

Does time travel exist?

Children were apparently chosen to be involved in the project because of their ability to adapt "to the strains of moving between past, present and future".

But Basiago – who alleges he was one of the children used in the project – says another key function of Project Pegasus was also to identify future presidents and allow the CIA the opportunity to brief the future leaders.

Basiago said that as a child in the early 70s he attended a lunch in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he met future presidents George HW Bush, Bill Clinton and George W Bush.

And comments the "time traveller" made BEFORE the US election seem to back up his extraordinary and unbelievable claim.

FUTURE: Basiago says he went through a vortex and had lunch with Bill Clinton and George W Bush (Image: GETTY)

After being asked about whether firm favourite Hillary Clinton would enter the White House, Basiago reportedly said: "As for Hillary Clinton, I have no data.

"I think it is reasonable to infer that were she a future President there would have been a pre-ID of her.

"As for Trump, I have a vague memory that my father took special note of Trump during an appearance by him on The Phil Donahue Show and might have even commented that he was a future US President."

Most extraordinarily, Basiago says the time travel was made possible by using a teleportation machine that would form a "shimmering curtain" between two elliptical booms.

After people pass through the "vortal tunnel" they would get to their new time period destination.

HISTORY: Basiago claims he is the boy in this photo of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (Image: GETTY/BASIAGO)

Basiago says that as a child he saw some of the most important events in US history, including Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in 1863.

He has even produced picture evidence of himself there, taken when he wandered away from the large crowd.

And Basiago says that like Trump, he has also been foreseen as President at some point between 2016 and 2028 at which point he will declassify all top secret CIA-DARPA information, saying it will allow these technologies to be used to further the human race.

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/trump-time-travel-john-titor-17069770

>>16682281

Andrew Basiago’s 1863 Gettysburg Time Travel Photo

January 30, 2017

Alleged chrononaut Andrew Basiago claims that in 1972 he was sent backwards in time to November 19, 1863. Where to? Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the very day Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address.

I’ve written about this before (see my article on Project Pegasus), but last week I received an email inquiring about Basiago’s photographic evidence, and thought I’d do a little digging into its origin.

Here’s what I found.

Basiago claims he is the boy in the above photograph, and often shares it as proof of his time travel adventures. In this case, he says, he had stepped into a plasma confinement chamber in 1972 New Jersey, and hopped back to 1863 Gettysburg. There, he visited the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery.

Basiago also claims that his original pair of shoes vanished during his voyage, like Dandelo in The Fly. That’s why they appear over-sized in the photo. He was given a new pair when he arrived, and tried his best to avoid drawing attention to himself.

Ultimately, however, he failed, leaving behind a single piece of evidence of his temporal journey — the photograph we see here today.

Now, aside from Basiago’s story, here’s what we know about the picture itself.

According to the Library Of Congress, it was indeed taken at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, likely by photographer Mathew Brady. It’s available in higher quality at the LoC website.

However, as you may notice, this version of the photograph is cleaned up and cropped. You can’t see as much of the man on the bottom right corner, and the other edges are cropped out, as well. Not to worry.

A scan of the original glass plate negative can be found at the National Archives. As you can see, it’s uncropped and about as worn as you’d expect from a photo taken in 1863.

What’s most interesting is that this photo is apparently the first ever discovered of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. Josephine Cobb noticed his face while viewing the glass plate negative at the National Archives in 1952. If you zoom in very closely, you can see who historians believe is Lincoln, standing with his hat off in the crowd.

Of course, none of this proves or disproves Basiago’s strange tale, but I thought it’d be interesting to track down the original photo. It is, in a way, its own kind of time travel.

https://www.strangerdimensions.com/2017/01/30/andrew-basiagos-1863-gettysburg-time-travel-photo/

>>16682362

Seattle Attorney Andrew Basiago Claims U.S. Sent Him On Time Travels (VIDEO)

By

David Moye

Apr 28, 2012, 08:28 AM EDT | Updated Dec 6, 2017

A lot of people have a hard time trusting lawyers as it is, but what about one who claims he was part of a secret government time travel program when he was a kid?

Since 2004, Seattle attorney Andrew Basiago has been publicly claiming that from the time he was 7 to when he was 12, he participated in "Project Pegasus," a secret U.S. government program that he says worked on teleportation and time travel under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

"They trained children along with adults so they could test the mental and physical effects of time travel on kids," Basiago told The Huffington Post. "Also, children had an advantage over adults in terms of adapting to the strains of moving between past, present and future."

Skeptical? You're not alone. Hong Kong physicist Shengwang Du issued a paper last year saying time travel is impossible, because nothing moves faster than the speed of light, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Nevertheless, Basiago's claim gets support from Alfred Webre, a lawyer specializing in "exopolitics," or the political implications surrounding an extraterrestrial presence on Earth. Webre said teleportation and time travel have been around for 40 years, but are hoarded by the Defense Department instead of being used to transfer goods and services faraway distances.

"It's an inexpensive, environmentally friendly means of transportation," Webre told The Huffington Post. "The Defense Department has had it for 40 years and [former Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld used it to transport troops to battle."

Basiago said he experienced eight different time travel technologies during his stint in the program. Mostly, he said, his travel involved a teleporter based on technical papers supposedly found in pioneering mechanical engineer Nikola Tesla's New York City apartment after his death in January 1943.

"The machine consisted of two gray elliptical booms about eight feet tall, separated by about 10 feet, between which a shimmering curtain of what Tesla called 'radiant energy' was broadcast," Basiago said. "Radiant energy is a form of energy that Tesla discovered that is latent and pervasive in the universe and has among its properties the capacity to bend time-space."

Basiago said project participants would jump through this field of radiant energy into a vortal tunnel and "when the tunnel closed, we found ourselves at our destination."

"One felt either as if one was moving at a great rate of speed or moving not at all, as the universe was wrapped around one's location," Basiago said.

Basiago claimed he can be seen in a photograph of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863, which he said he visited in 1972 via a plasma confinement chamber located in East Hanover, N.J.

"I had been dressed in period clothing, as a Union bugle boy," he said. "I attracted so much attention at the Lincoln speech site at Gettysburg wearing over-sized men's street shoes that I left the area around the dais and walked about 100 paces over to where I was photographed in the Josephine Cogg image of Lincoln at Gettysburg." (The boy on the left in the photo below).

In addition, Basiago said he traveled to Ford's Theatre the night of Lincoln's assassination on five or six occasions. "I did not, however, witness the assassination," he said. "Once, I was on the theater level when he was shot and I heard the shot followed by a great commotion that arose from the crowd. It was terrible to hear."

Basiago said each of his visits to the past was different, "like they were sending us to slightly different alternative realities on adjacent timelines. As these visits began to accumulate, I twice ran into myself during two different visits."

Being sent back in time to the same place and moment, but from different starting points in the present, allowed two of himselves to be in Ford's Theatre at the same time in 1865.

"After the first of these two encounters with myself occurred, I was concerned that my cover might be blown," he recalled. "Unlike the jump to Gettysburg, in which I was clutching a letter to Navy Secretary Gideon Welles to offer me aid and assistance in the event I was arrested, I didn't have any explanatory materials when I was sent to Ford's Theatre."

And how did these alleged time travelers return to the present day or their point of origin? According to Basiago, some sort of holographic technology allowed them to travel both physically and virtually.

"If we were in the hologram for 15 minutes or fewer," he explained, "the hologram would collapse, and after about 60 seconds of standing in a field of super-charged particles … we would find ourselves back on the stage … in the present."

>>16682395

Basiago said the technology should only be used for real-time teleportation, not time travel, because, "It would be chaos."

Basiago and Webre recently held a seminar in Vancouver, B.C., focusing on the need to disclose, deploy and declassify the technology, as well as the public policy decisions that would be needed to use it.

Webre, for one, said he wants teleports installed in every major city where people and products would be transported through the time-space continuum. "This would free up a lot of urban space that is currently being used by train yards or airports," Webre said.

Of course, there are risks. Basiago remembered feeling extreme turbulence while going through the vortal time tunnel. Webre said one tragedy occurred in the early days of the technology in which a child in Project Pegasus arrived a few seconds before his legs.

"He was writhing in pain with just stumps where his legs had been," Webre said.

Webre said problems like that have since been solved. Still, he said teleportation needs strict legal controls to prevent it being used for "for political control, economic control or illegal surveillance."

All of this is fascinating stuff – if true. But experts who include retired Army Col. John Alexander, former director for the Advanced System Concepts Office, U.S. Army Laboratory Command, are, to put it mildly, skeptical.

"If this could be done, if anyone could go even one second into the future, we'd own the world," Alexander told The Huffington Post. "There are computer programs on Wall Street that are hundredths of a second faster and provide a tremendous advantage."

Basiago said that as many as 100 people worked on Project Pegasus. Alexander said he doubts that many people could keep the secret for 40 minutes, much less 40 years.

"There's a saying in Washington: If two people know something, it's not a secret," said Alexander, author of "UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities." "If this was used by the Department of Defense, how did we miss the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the fall of the Shah of Iran?"

Basiago said Alexander's rhetorical questions can be explained by the paradoxes of the time-space continuum.

"I only know about how the time travel technology was used during my involvement with Project Pegasus, so this is only speculation," he said. "But it's possible that 'forward intelligence' showed [Iraq leader Saddam] Hussein using the weapons of mass destruction, but our military went in and toppled him before he could use them."

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/andrew-basiago-seattle-attorney-time-travels_n_1438216

>>16682362

Andrew Basiago and the Jump Room To Mars

AngelicView: There’s a saying that goes, “Keep an open mind – but not so open that your brain falls out“. Well, some people might think that this story might involve brains on the floor! But read on anyway!

I have known about this man for a couple of years now and many people know about him. On the other hand, there are many people who have never heard of him. So, here’s the thing: If in 2016 or 2020 this guy becomes President of the United States, I want you to think to yourself that you first learned of him on AngelicView 😉

There’s a man who’s name is Andrew Basiago who claims that when he was a child he was part of a CIA program which went to Mars via a “Jump Room”. This was termed “Project Pegasus”. He says he would literally walk into a building in California, then into what looked like an elevator, and walk out on Mars. Interestingly, there are other people out there who claim that they, too, were part of that same program. Now there is a picture of what appears to be a “head” that has surfaced that he says is a Martian head.

That’s not all. Included in his claims are that Barack Obama, the POTUS, was with him on some of these missions to Mars. As of yet, Andrew has not had any financial gain from these claims (no book out, etc.), although he does have a couple of books coming out soon, he says, because he wants this all out in the open when he runs for president in 2016. By then, he says, hopefully more people will publicly come out and collaborate his story – and potentially even Barack Obama himself.

This is a fascinating interview – even if you (like me) are somewhat skeptical of it. He describes the types of people that are living on Mars, mainly underground – about a million of them. He also talks about the Martian landscape in detail and that Mars was much like Earth a long time ago before a cataclysm hit the planet.

This picture (below) is one I found on Google search, and it looks kind of like what Andrew described the Martians to look like. He said they have pointy ears, a skinny body, and a barrel-like chest (from the low-oxygen atmosphere). I wonder if someone who has been to Mars actually sketched this picture, aye?

(Update: I’m sorry, it seems that picture has been taken off the web. It has disappeared and I haven’t been able to relocate it. It was a very good approximation of how Andrew described them, though. I’ll keep my eye out for it to return. Please enjoy this Mars surface picture instead 😉 )

Interview Description: Andrew D. Basiago, president of the Mars Anomaly Research Society, discussed his teleportation to Mars and breaking news about the discovery of a Martian head. Basiago described his experiences as one of 140 school children selected for DARPA’s Project Pegasus, a secret American teleportation and time travel program. The U.S. intelligence community was going forward in time to retrieve and bring back scientifically and culturally significant artifacts, he said.

An analysis of humanoid and animal forms in NASA photograph PIA 10214 that he published in 2008 was one of the items brought back to his present, Basiago recalled, noting that he read the paper aloud to his father in 1971. “Now they’re slightly blurry, but I deny anyone to claim that the images [in PIA 10214] are not of the basic human form,” he added. Basiago disclosed how his participation in Project Pegasus led him into the CIA’s Mars teleportation program. From 1980 to 1984 he said he would regularly visit a building in El Segundo, California, that was owned and operated by Hughes Aircraft.

According to Basiago, an elevator in that building would morph from a box into a cylinder and then passengers could step out onto the surface of Mars. He claimed to have interacted with Martians and been taken to their underground civilization where he was taught about the various Martian typologies. Basiago identified the figure in the Martian head photo as Homo maris maris, a humanoid species indigenous to the planet with an elongated head, a bulbous crown, pointy ears and a spindly body. He credited photo analyst Patricio Barrancos of Argentina with finding the head and suggested it is corroborative data of the CIA’s Mars jump room program and his claim that Mars is inhabited.

AngelicView:

If any are interested, NBC News just put out an article (seven hours ago) called, “‘We are All Martians’: Chemist’s Otherworldly Claim Stirs Debate“, which would corroborate parts of Andrew’s story.

https://angelicview.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/andrew-basiago-and-the-jump-room-to-mars/

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/we-are-all-martians-chemists-otherworldly-claim-stirs-debate-8C11026339

>>16682435

'We are all Martians': Chemist's otherworldly claim stirs debate

This graphic shows how Mars might have looked billions of years ago, when scientists believe the planet had a large northern ocean.NASA / GSFC

Aug. 28, 2013, 4:32 PM MST

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor

Are we all Martians? A controversial hypothesis contends that life on our planet had to get its start somewhere else — most likely on Mars — because the chemistry on early Earth couldn't have provided the required molecular machinery.

"The evidence seems to be building that we are actually all Martians; that life started on Mars and came to Earth on a rock," Steven Benner, a chemist at the Florida-based Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, said in a news release. What's more, recent studies suggest that the conditions suitable for the origin of life "may still exist on Mars," he said.

Scientists have long debated the idea that life got its start elsewhere in the universe, and then was transported to Earth on meteorites or comets — an idea known as panspermia. In a presentation to the annual Goldschmidt Conference in Florence, Italy, Benner lays out an unusually detailed case for panspermia involving early Mars and Earth.

Livable Mars, deadly Earth?

For years, scientists have been saying that although present-day Mars is an inhospitable place, it was much more habitable billions of years ago. The findings from NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars have added fresh support to such claims.

The early environment on Earth, however, was challenging to the rise of life as we know it, at least in Benner's view. One of the biggest challenges has to do with the process by which organic molecules gave rise to life's chemical building blocks: RNA, DNA and proteins.

If left to themselves, adding energy to organic molecules just tends to turn them into tar or an oily substance. That's what Benner calls the "tar paradox": How could organic materials ever give rise to biopolymers like DNA?

"Certain elements seem able to control the propensity of organic materials to turn into tar, particularly boron and molybdenum, so we believe that minerals containing both were fundamental to life first starting," Benner said. Such minerals can't form easily in the presence of water, but the early Earth was thought to have been covered with water.

So where could those minerals come from?

"Analysis of a Martian meteorite recently showed that there was boron on Mars; we now believe that the oxidized form of molybdenum was there too," Benner said. During the time when life got its start, Earth was too young and too wet to produce the borates and molybdates that he believes were essential. He says the best place to find such minerals would have been on Mars.

"Mars has always been more oxidizing and drier than Earth," Benner told NBC News in an email. "True, being too small to have a magnetic field, it has lost most of its atmosphere and its water. However, 3.5 billion years ago, all of the chemistry that we propose could have happened on Mars. As Mars became less and less habitable over time, the life that originated on Mars (and, in this view, could not have originated on Earth), escaped to Earth, which has remained habitable until this day."

Benner said his scenario illustrates the difference "between a locale where life can survive and a locale where life can emerge."

Too kooky?

Is Benner's story too kooky to believe? One thing's for sure: Benner is not a kook. He was one of the first chemists to voice skepticism about the claims for arsenic-based life, which stirred up such a fuss in 2010. "I'm the guy they bring in to throw a wet blanket over all the enthusiasm," he told NBC News at the time.

This time, the wet-blanket role is filled by David Grinspoon, an astrobiologist from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Grinspoon, who's spending a year doing research at the Library of Congress, says that he's a "huge fan" of Benner's, but that his extraordinary claim isn't sufficiently supported by the evidence.

"This isn't really evidence that life came from Mars, but it is evidence that Steven Benner is very clever," Grinspoon told NBC News.

>>16682450

He said Benner's scenario is a "plausible story," but for now, it's at least as plausible to stick with the view that life found a way to emerge from prebiotic chemistry on Earth.

"I think chemists always think they know more than they know, because nature has a lot of possible pathways it can try," Grinspoon said.

What do you think? Is it more likely that life came to Earth from Mars, or that earthly life is entirely home-grown? Feel free to register your opinion in our unscientific survey, or in the comment section.

More about Martian life:

Life on Mars: Unless it's E.T., no one cares

Finding life on Mars is likely to be a job for humans

Looking for Martian life: Been there, done that?

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/we-are-all-martians-chemists-otherworldly-claim-stirs-debate-8C11026339

>>16682450

NEWS RELEASE 28-AUG-2013

We may all be Martians – new research supports theory that life started on Mars

Peer-Reviewed Publication

EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION OF GEOCHEMISTRY

New evidence has emerged which supports the long-debated theory that life on Earth may have started on Mars.

Professor Steven Benner will tell geochemists gathering today (Thursday 29 Aug) at the annual Goldschmidt conference that an oxidized mineral form of the element molybdenum, which may have been crucial to the origin of life, could only have been available on the surface of Mars and not on Earth. "In addition", said Professor Benner "recent studies show that these conditions, suitable for the origin of life, may still exist on Mars."

"It's only when molybdenum becomes highly oxidized that it is able to influence how early life formed," explains Professor Benner, from The Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology in the USA. "This form of molybdenum couldn't have been available on Earth at the time life first began, because three billion years ago the surface of the Earth had very little oxygen, but Mars did. It's yet another piece of evidence which makes it more likely life came to Earth on a Martian meteorite, rather than starting on this planet."

The research Professor Benner will present at the Goldschmidt conference tackles two of the paradoxes which make it difficult for scientists to understand how life could have started on Earth.

The first is dubbed by Professor Benner as the 'tar paradox'. All living things are made of organic matter, but if you add energy such as heat or light to organic molecules and leave them to themselves, they don't create life. Instead, they turn into something more like tar, oil or asphalt.

"Certain elements seem able to control the propensity of organic materials to turn into tar, particularly boron and molybdenum, so we believe that minerals containing both were fundamental to life first starting," says Professor Benner. "Analysis of a Martian meteorite recently showed that there was boron on Mars; we now believe that the oxidized form of molybdenum was there too."

The second paradox is that life would have struggled to start on the early Earth because it was likely to have been totally covered by water. Not only would this have prevented sufficient concentrations of boron forming – it's currently only found in very dry places like Death Valley – but water is corrosive to RNA, which scientists believe was the first genetic molecule to appear. Although there was water on Mars, it covered much smaller areas than on early Earth.

"The evidence seems to be building that we are actually all Martians; that life started on Mars and came to Earth on a rock," says Professor Benner. "It's lucky that we ended up here nevertheless, as certainly Earth has been the better of the two planets for sustaining life. If our hypothetical Martian ancestors had remained on Mars, there might not have been a story to tell."

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/882119

>>16682450

Curiosity rover sees life-friendly conditions in ancient Mars rock

Powder drilled out of a rock on Mars contains the best evidence yet that the Red Planet could have supported living microbes billions of years ago, the team behind NASA's Curiosity rover said Tuesday."I think this is probably the only definitively habitable environment that we have described and recorded," said David Blake, a scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center who is the principal investigat[sic]

Powder drilled out of a rock on Mars contains the best evidence yet that the Red Planet could have supported living microbes billions of years ago, the team behind NASA's Curiosity rover said Tuesday.

"I think this is probably the only definitively habitable environment that we have described and recorded," said David Blake, a scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center who is the principal investigator for Curiosity's CheMin lab.

The findings are in line with what the scientists hoped to find when they sent the 1-ton, six-wheeled laboratory to Mars' Gale Crater. "It wasn't serendipity that got us here. It was the result of planning," Caltech's John Grotzinger, the $2.5 billion mission's project scientist, told reporters at NASA Headquarters in Washington on Tuesday.

Serendipity did, however, play a part in being able to find the evidence so soon, he said. Curiosity's handlers had planned to have the rover head for a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mountain in the middle of the crater. But when the rover landed, the science team decided to send Curiosity on a detour to a geologically interesting area in the opposite direction, nicknamed Yellowknife Bay. Preliminary readings showed that the area had been a riverbed or lake bed in ancient times.

Last month, the rover finally got a chance to drill into a Martian rock that was named John Klein, after a member of the mission team who died in 2011. Curiosity fed tablespoons of the ground-up gray powder into its two onboard chemical labs: CheMin (Chemistry and Mineralogy) and SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars). The results were announced at Tuesday's news briefing.

Scientists said the powder contained the elemental ingredients of life — including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon. More significantly, they found that clay minerals made up at least 20 percent of the sample. On Earth, these clays are produced when relatively fresh water reacts with igneous minerals such as olivine. The scientists also found calcium sulfate, which suggested that the water had a neutral or mildly alkaline balance.

Earlier NASA missions had found evidence that salty, acidic water was once present on Mars, but that extreme environment would have been challenging for today's Earth-type organisms. Curiosity's chemical analysis produced a different result: The water that was available during the formation of the rock at Yellowknife Bay, billions of years ago, could have supported the kind of life commonly found on Earth.

>>16682489

"We have found a habitable environment which is so benign and supportive of life that probably if this water was around, and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it," Grotzinger said.

The scientists said they were surprised to find a mixture of oxidized and non-oxidized chemicals, allowing for the type of chemistry that earthly microbes use to generate the energy they need for survival. This partial oxidation was first hinted at when the drill cuttings were revealed to be gray rather than red.

"The range of chemical ingredients we have identified in the sample is impressive, and it suggests pairings such as sulfates and sulfides that indicate a possible chemical energy source for microorganisms," SAM principal investigator Paul Mahaffy said in a NASA news release.

NASA said another drilled sample would be used to help confirm the chemical findings for several of the trace gases that were analyzed by the SAM instrument.

The current plan calls for Curiosity to conduct experiments in the Yellowknife Bay for weeks or months longer, and then begin a roughly 6-mile (10-kilometer) drive to the big mountain, known as Mount Sharp or Aeolis Mons. Scientists will look for further evidence of ancient organic chemistry hidden in the mountain's many layers of rock.

The primary aim of Curiosity's two-year primary mission is to find evidence of past habitability — in particular, organic carbon compounds that could have played a role in the chemistry of life billions of years ago. Grotzinger said Curiosity's scientists will focus on the systematic search for organic carbon now that they had "the issue of habitability in the bag."

NASA intends to follow up on Curiosity's findings with future Mars missions, including the $500 million MAVEN orbiter (due for launch this year), the $425 million InSight drill-equipped lander (set for 2016 launch) and another Curiosity-like rover that's scheduled to be sent out in 2020.

More about Mars:

Organics found, but are they from Mars?

Radar reveals traces of huge Martian flood

Cosmic Log archive on Mars

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/curiosity-rover-sees-life-friendly-conditions-ancient-mars-rock-1C8828231