Nick said:

"Seeing this stuff lying wrecked on the Martian surface - a truly alien artefact to the planet - gives one pause to consider some of the UFO myths about finding a wrecked alien craft on Earth and Back-engineering it."

This is one of the reasons why I don't believe UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft. If there was wrecked alien hardware on the Earth then people would be trying to reverse engineer it. Aerospace engineers like to gossip about their work. Staying quiet about a piece of extraterrestrail hardware would be almost impossible. Over the course of my career I have heard people accidently reveal classified information. However I have never heard anyone say anything about alien extraterrestrial hardware. On top of that, I have never seen any spacecraft technology that seemed to appear out of thin air.

Also concerning the wrecked MER heatshield. Imagine if that wreckage was on the surface of the Earth. How long would it take it to weather away to nothing? Certainly it would be unrecognizable as hardware if it was laying exposed on a forest floor for ten thousand years. The only place we have any hope of finding alien hardware is in deep space where the only weathering was due to micrometeors. As I mentioned in earlier posts: We should be monitoring the Cassini images from Saturn with the hope that an old spacecraft deceleration stage might be discovered.

Gary