Vanishing Martian Moons? Huh?

I’m wondering if anyone can tell me what this bizarre website is talking about.

It seems to be about some comet passing by the moons of Mars and making them vanish, and there’s also something about a massive dust storm on Mars. Later on it talks about a conspiracy to hide the face on Mars, so I’m more than a little skeptical of the claims made on that site.

Does what they’re writing about have any basis in fact? What’s really going on up there?

Eep.

Other headlines on the Home Page.

Can you say “conspiracy theorist”? :smiley:

A quick check of Google shows that the only people out there who seem to have received the message that Deimos and Phobos are missing is yowusa.com. However, these folks predicted that on May 28-29, 2000, the comet Kohoutek would pass close by Mars, and might actually destroy it, or its moons, or maybe kick up a big dust storm, or something really really bad, except that Mars was going to be on the opposite side of the Sun from us, so we won’t be able to see what happens, but WHAT IF it destroyed the moons of Mars…? yada yada yada…
Now, there are a couple of probes missing.

http://www.fas.org/mars/991206-MARS06.htm

But as far as I can tell, Deimos and Phobos are alive and well and in orbit.

Comet 76P/West-Kohoutek-Ikemura had a close approach to Jupiter back in the 70’s. This shortened its orbital period from ~30 years to 5 or 6 years. At the last close approach, in 2000, it came within less than 4,000,000 miles of Mars. The encounter, such as it was, was invisible from earth as mars was located within 6 degrees of the sun. There does not seem to be any actual evidence that anything strange happened as a result of the encounter.