The Why Files: Operation Podcast - 597: Planet Maldek | The Classified Truth About Mars' Origin (STRIPPED)

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

Evidence suggests a massive world called Maldek once existed between Mars and Jupiter. This planet had a large moon that orbited it for millions of years—a moon with oceans, atmosphere, and possibly even life. When Maldek was destroyed in an ancient catastrophe, its moon was hurled into a new orbit around the sun. Today, we call that moon Mars. This explains Mars' strange features: why half the planet looks completely different from the other half, why it has tidal bulges like a moon, and why nuclear isotopes in the soil match signatures from atomic weapons. The same pattern of destruction that claimed Mars and Venus may be heading for Earth. Government scientists have hidden the evidence for decades. But the truth is written in planetary scars, ancient monuments, and mathematical patterns that reveal the violent history of our solar system.

You searched for your informant, who disappeared without a trace. You knew there were witnesses, but lips were sealed. You swept the city, driving closer to the truth, while curled up on the couch with your cat. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover heart-pounding thrillers on Audible. Millions of years ago, a massive planet called Maldac was part of our solar system.

Maldac had an enormous moon that could support life. It was warm, it had oceans and an atmosphere. And on that moon, a civilization of giants built pyramids, monuments and great cities. They created intelligent machines to mine Maldak for resources. But the machines evolved, turned on their masters and claimed Maldak for themselves. A devastating war lasted generations. Finally, the Giants built a weapon powerful enough to destroy all the machines. The weapon worked. The weapon worked too well.

The explosion destroyed Maldek. With their planet shattered into a billion pieces, the Giants' moon was adrift. Soon the atmosphere vanished, the oceans froze, and the surface turned to dust. Their civilization collapsed. We don't know what the Giants called their moon, but we have a name for it. We call it Mars.

MUSIC In 2022, actor Terrence Howard appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience and said something that made mainstream scientists very uncomfortable. He claimed NASA's explanation for how planets form was completely wrong. Neil deCrasse Tyson and other experts immediately pushed back. They dismissed Howard as just another celebrity with fringe theories. But here's the thing. Some respected scientists have been saying

the same things as Howard for over 100 years. To explain how planets form, NASA teaches the accretion model. After a star forms, leftover dust and gas start clumping together. These clumps, called planetesimals, gradually collect more and more material, like snowballs rolling down a hill. Eventually, they become planets. Sounds reasonable.

That's what we were taught in school. But there are serious problems. The early solar system was violent chaos. Objects moved at 2 miles per second. That's almost 45,000 miles per hour. At those speeds, collisions don't create bigger rocks. They're smashed into dust. Yet NASA says these particles kept sticking together somehow.

Then there's the plane of the ecliptic. The sun's gravity pulls equally in all directions, right? But all the planets orbit in a single flat disc, like marbles rolling around a dish. Random debris naturally forming a flat plane sounds too perfect. The frost line is another problem. That's the distance from the Sun

where it's cold enough for gases to freeze solid. NASA says gas giants only form beyond this line, while rocky planets form inside it, nice and neat. But astronomers keep finding what they call hot Jupiters. These are massive gas giants orbiting closer to their stars than Mercury orbits our Sun. According to NASA's model, they shouldn't exist. Yet we've documented over 400 of them. Dr. Tom Van Flandern spent 20 years at the U.S. Naval Observatory calculating planetary orbits. He saw these contradictions firsthand.

The accretion model couldn't explain what he was seeing in the data. So Van Flandern proposed something radical. The planets didn't form from dust. They didn't form from orbiting the Sun. They formed inside it. And when the Sun thought they were ready, those planets were born. Dr. Tom Van Flandern wasn't some internet conspiracy theorist making YouTube videos in his basement, or his studio in Las Vegas. He had a PhD from Yale and spent over 20 years at the U.S. Naval Observatory. His job was calculating exactly where planets would be at any given moment, down to fractions of a second. The military needed this level of accuracy for navigation,

satellite positioning, and who knows how many classified operations. Ben Flandern was their guy and expert on celestial mechanics. But the more he studied planetary motion, the more the official story bothered him. The accretion model has too many holes. Random collisions creating perfect orbital planes. Planets have most of the solar system spin, while the sun has most of the mass. Hot Jupiters exist where they shouldn't. The math didn't add up. So Van Flandern looked at an older idea that NASA had abandoned, solar fission. The theory goes like this. Four and a half billion years ago, the sun was not calm. It was spinning fast, too fast. When a star spins too fast, it builds up something called angular momentum,

the cosmic version of rotational energy. You can think of it like spin, but with that mass factored in, and the sun had too much spin and too much mass. To survive, it had to shed some of that, but not gradually, violently. The sun shed superheated plasma into space, and these were huge globs of plasma, millions of miles wide, spinning away from their parent star.

As these plasma balls cooled, they condensed into planets. This explained everything the accretion model couldn't. Why planets orbit in a flat plane. They all came from the sun's equator. Why they have angular momentum. They took it with them when they spun out of the star. Why hot Jupiters exist. Some planets just didn't travel as far from

home. Van Flandre noticed something else. Planets seem to be born in pairs. Earth and Venus are nearly identical in size. Jupiter and Saturn are both gas giants. Even their positions follow a pattern. Their orbits have specific ratios to each other. The math works. But some planets in our solar system don't have partners. Mercury's orbit is all wrong. Pluto acts more like a captured moon than a planet or planetoid. And then there's Mars. Mars was the real problem. Too small.

Wrong orbit. Wrong density. It didn't match any pattern Van Flandern could find. That's when Van Flandern made a bold conclusion. Mars wasn't a planet that failed to follow the rules. It was a moon. A moon from a planet that was destroyed millions of years ago, Maldac. Most of the planet was vaporized, but not all of it. Many pieces of debris still remain in the same

orbit where MALDEK once was. We call this debris field the asteroid belt. Going online without ExpressVPN is like not having a case for your phone. All it takes is one drop and you'll wish you spent those extra few dollars on a case. Anytime you hop on public Wi-Fi, your data isn't safe. Those networks aren't encrypted, so anyone nearby can grab your passwords, bank logins, credit card details, and it doesn't take a genius. A smart 12-year-old can hack into it. What's worse is that stolen info can go for up to a thousand bucks on the dark web.

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Start at zero point four astronomical units from the sun. One astronomical unit is the distance from the sun to the Earth. So you take that zero point four and double the distance for each new planet. That sequence perfectly predicts the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. When another German astronomer, Johann Bode, published this formula in 1772, Bode's law predicted the orbits of all six known planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

All there, right where the math said they would be. But the formula predicted something else. Between Mars and Jupiter, at exactly 2.8 astronomical units from the Sun, there should be another planet. A big one. Astronomers started searching. In 1781, they found Uranus, exactly where Boat's Law said it was, even though the formula was created before anyone knew Uranus existed.

That's when people really started paying attention. So where was this missing planet between Mars and Jupiter? Well, on New Year's Day, 1801, Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi found something. A small object orbiting at 2.77 astronomical units. Almost exactly where Bode's law said the missing planet should be. He named it Ceres. But Ceres was tiny, less than 600 miles across. That's a little smaller than Texas. Then astronomers found Pallas, then Vesta, then Juno, and more and more and more. By 1850, they'd found 13 objects in the same region. Today, we know of millions of rocks in orbit in that zone,

and we call it the asteroid belt. Now, some scientists said these were just leftover building materials, debris that never formed a planet. But a German astronomer named Wilhelm Olbers had a different idea. What if a planet did form there? And what if something destroyed it?

He even gave the hypothetical planet a name, Phaeton, after the Greek god who lost control of the sun's chariot and nearly destroyed Earth. When critics pointed out the asteroid belt didn't have enough mass for a whole planet, Olbers had an answer. If a planet exploded in the vacuum of space, most of it wouldn't stick around. The debris would reach escape velocity. Some would fall into the sun, some would fly off into deep space, some would vaporize.

What we see today, maybe 5% of the original mass, is exactly what you'd expect to find from a massive planet that was destroyed. The Neptune was discovered in 1846. That didn't fit Bode's law at all. Critics said the whole Bode's law thing was a coincidence. But then Flanders saw it differently. Neptune's orbit wasn't wrong. It had been altered. Uranus was spinning on its side. Pluto's orbit is tilted and erratic. These anomalies weren't random. They were scars, remnants of an ancient catastrophe in the solar system. There's only one event powerful enough to do this. The violent, instantaneous destruction of an entire planet. The math, the patterns, the debris. It explained everything. Bode's law wasn't wrong at all then Flandre believed a massive planet was there and now it's gone

And he could prove it Most of my day is screens and research But not all of its on a keyboard a lot of my deep dives start with Audible, whether I'm brushing up on a topic, exploring something totally new or just needing a break. It's how I learn and reset without burning out. Audible delivers thrills on demand, whether it's the psychological twists of mad love, the sweeping fantasy of Onyx Storm or the lights out suspense of Stephen King's Never Flinch. Storm or the lights out suspense of Stephen King's Never Flinch and big titles like The Tenant by Frieda McFadden and The Sirens by Amelia Hart. And you've got no shortage of action packed adventures. And it's not just audiobooks.

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That's audible.com slash Y files or text Y files to 500 500. Tom Van Flander needed proof that planets had exploded in our solar system. He found it in the strangest place. During Soviet military tests. During the 1980s, the Soviets were testing anti-satellite weapons in orbit. The Americans were watching, obviously. And then there was something strange.

When a satellite exploded, the debris didn't just scatter randomly. The smaller pieces started orbiting the bigger pieces, like tiny moons around planets. Then Flanders saw this and thought, well, if that happens with satellites, what happens when an entire planet explodes? Same thing, just bigger, way bigger. Mountain sized chunks would fly off with clouds of smaller debris orbiting around them. From Earth, these would look exactly like comets. The big chunk is the nucleus.

The orbiting debris creates the tail. But here's the thing. If comets really came from an exploded planet, some of them should have actual moons, little rocks orbiting the main comet, not just a dust cloud, but real solid objects. When Van Flanders suggested this, other scientists laughed. One even made a public bet. No comet would ever be found with a companion, not ever. Comets were dirty snowballs from the edge of the solar system, not planetary fragments.

Comets were dirty snowballs from the edge of the solar system, not planetary fragments. Then, Hale-Bopp showed up. In 1995, this comet became one of the brightest objects in the night sky. Everyone was watching. In November 1996, amateur astronomer Chuck Schrammick took a photo and saw something unexpected. Well, unexpected to everyone except Tom Van Flandern. There was a bright object near the comet. Looked like Hale-Bopp had a companion. Now Shrevec made a mistake.

He went on Art Bell's radio show and called it a Saturn-like UFO. And the internet went crazy. Doomsday predictions, government cover-ups, you name it, you remember it. Professional astronomers checked Shrevec's photo. The UFO was just a background star. Case closed. Tramek was wrong. Or was he?

Because here's what got buried in all the UFO nonsense. Hale-Bopp was really weird. It had multiple nuclei. It had two tails, including one made of sodium. If Hale-Bopp was a fragment of a water-rich planet, sodium would have been left behind in salt deposits. And it wasn't just Hale-Bopp. The Galileo probe found a moon orbiting the asteroid Ida.

The near-Schumacher mission found unusual gravity around the asteroid Eros. Something massive was happening and hidden inside. When comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter in 1994, it wasn't one object. It was 21 pieces traveling together like a broken necklace. Van Flandern was right. These weren't random space rocks. They were evidence of something bigger. Evidence that pointed to an object still scarred by a shattered solar system. The evidence was pointing to Mars. When Tom Van Flanderd met Richard Hoagland, they realized their theories supported each other perfectly.

Van Flanderd had an exploded planet. Hoagland had a dead civilization on Mars. Put them together and you get a complete picture. Both men noticed the planet Mars didn't behave like a planet at all. Its orbit is more oval than circular. Its mass is too small for its distance from the Sun. It's only about 11% the mass of Earth. Actually, the whole planet is more of a mystery than you think.

Look at Mars from space and you'll see two completely different worlds. Literally, this is called the Martian dichotomy. The Northern Hemisphere is smooth, flat plains covered in what looked like dry ocean beds. It's almost peaceful. But the Southern Hemisphere, that's almost peaceful. But the southern hemisphere, that's a disaster. Craters everywhere, mountains, rough terrain. And for some reason, the southern crust is 20 miles thicker than the north. Twenty miles. That's not natural erosion. That's like someone pasted an entire layer of debris onto half the planet. And not just that, the southern hemisphere

is older than the north, much older, two billion years older. Then there are the volcanoes. Olympus Mons is the biggest volcano in the solar system, three times taller than Everest. It sits on something called the Tharsis bulge, a massive uplift in the Martian crust, and directly opposite on the other side of Mars, another rise, another bulge, the Arabia Terrorize.

Two bulges, 180 degrees apart. That doesn't seem random. That's what happens when a moon is locked to its parent planet. The gravitational pull creates these tidal bulges, just like how our moon creates ocean tides on Earth, but permanent and made of rock. We see this tidal effect on Europa and Io, two Jupiter's moons, on Titan and Enceladus, two of Saturn's moons, Triton from Neptune, and Miranda from Uranus, the same bulges, the same tidal forces. If

Mars was Maldek's moon, it would have been tidally locked. The same side always faces its planet, just like our moon. And Maldech's gravity would have done something else. It would have pulled Martian's oceans into a specific pattern. Richard Hoagland traced where those ancient oceans would have flowed. For millions of years, water would have moved in a clockwise pattern around Mars. Two massive ocean systems meeting at the equator, grinding against each other, carving deeper and deeper. Today we call that carving Ballas Marineris. It's a canyon system 2,500 miles long and up to

four miles deep. The Grand Canyon is nothing compared to this. The Grand Canyon would be nothing more than a baby canyon that would fit inside one of the small channels of Valles Marineris. NASA can't explain how it formed. But if Mars had twin oceans held in place by Maldax gravity, meeting and grinding at that exact spot for millions of years, well, the canyon now makes perfect sense. When this theory was first proposed, mainstream science said, exact spot for millions of years, while the canyon now makes perfect sense. When this theory was first proposed, mainstream science said, well, if there is water on Mars,

it wasn't very much. It turns out they were wrong. Mars was covered with vast oceans. Links below to all kinds of Mars stories that prove this. Van Flandern's exploding planet theory explained a lot of mysteries about the solar system. Hoagland's ancient Mars civilization explained the monuments. Together they painted a picture of a living moon orbiting a living planet. Then one day, it all ended, violently.

The face on Mars sits in a region called Cydonia. Hoagland thinks it was built as a monument, or maybe a warning. A message carved in stone by a handful of survivors before their world died. Now John Brandenburg thinks he knows what these Martians survived, and he thinks he can prove it. These Martians survived a nuclear war. Father's Day always makes me think about all the incredible dads out there. Whether it's your dad, stepdad, father-in-law, or just someone who's filled that role in your life, they deserve something meaningful. That's why I turned to Quince.

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His job was understanding nuclear weapons, how they work, and what they leave behind. But when he studied Mars data from NASA missions, he found something disturbing. The Martian surface had unusual concentrations of xenon-129. Now here on Earth, that isotope comes from exactly one source, nuclear fission. Not volcanic activity, not cosmic radiation, nuclear explosions.

The concentrations were highest in two locations, Cydonia, where the face on Mars sits, and in a region called Galaxius Chaos. The xenon levels were two and a half times higher than anywhere else in the solar system. The only way to produce that much xenon-129 was through massive nuclear detonations. Hiroshima is measured in kilotons.

On Mars, these weapons would have been measured in megatons. Brandenburg published his findings in 2014. The scientific community's response was exactly what you'd expect. They ignored him, called him crazy, said he was seeing patterns that weren't there. But Brandenburg wasn't the first person to theorize Mars died in a nuclear war.

Years earlier, the theory appeared in the most unlikely of places, a comic book. In 1958, comic book legend Jack Kirby created a story called The Face on Mars. This was 18 years before NASA's Viking probe photographed the actual face. In Kirby's story, astronauts land on Mars and discover a giant stone face. One of them climbs in it, falls through the eye, and has a vision. He sees Mars when it was alive, a race of peaceful giants who built great cities. These giants created intelligent machines to help them work. But the machines evolved. Artificial intelligence intelligent machines to help them work. But the machines

evolved. Artificial intelligence. They became self-aware. They demanded equality. When the giants refused, war broke out. The war lasted generations. Finally, the giants built a doomsday weapon and aimed it at the machine's homeworld, a planet that orbited between Mars and Jupiter. The weapon worked. The planet exploded. But the blast also stripped away Mars' atmosphere and killed almost everyone. The surviving giants carved the face as a warning. Then they went underground to die. Now here's what's strange.

Kirby was friends with rocket scientists. Bernard von Braun's team consulted on his stories. Willie Lay, who worked on the V2 rocket, wrote articles for the same magazines. These weren't just comic book guys swapping stories. These were people with security clearances having conversations we'll never know about. And remember during Project Stargate, Joe McMonagle remote viewed something unusual. Joe was given coordinates and nothing else. And what Joe saw at those coordinates

were humanoid beings, but very tall, giants. He saw huge cities, civilization, but their civilization was dying and they knew it. Then Joe comes out of his remote viewing trance. Remember, he was just given coordinates in an envelope. Then he was handed the envelope, which held the full information about what and where he saw. The coordinates were from Mars, 1 million BC.

Now, Joe never heard any of these theories about Mars. Remember, he was a war hero. He was pretty straight arrow. He didn't read comic books. But for some reason, Joseph McManigal remote viewed everything that we're talking about today. So was Kirby's story pure fiction or did he hear something? Because his 1958 comic described nuclear war on Mars and exploded planet creating the asteroid belt and survivors building monuments, all the same elements Van Flandern, Hoagland and

Brandenburg would propose decades later. But there's a dark twist to Brandenburg's theory. He believes nuclear explosions didn't come from the Martians. He believed it was an attack from somewhere else. Someone or something wanted Mars dead. And whatever it was, they succeeded. And Mars was only the beginning. The face on Mars, the exploded planet theory, nuclear war,

it all fits together perfectly. Too perfectly. And that's the problem. Let's start with Van Flandern's solar fission theory. It explains things the accretion model can't. Why planets orbit in a flat plane. Why they have most of the angular momentum while the sun has most of the mass. Why Bode's law works.

But if stars spit out planets on a regular basis, we should see it happening. Astronomers have catalogued thousands of star systems. Not one has ever been caught in the act of solar fission. Ben Flandern had an answer. Maybe it only happens when stars are very young. Maybe we're looking at the wrong time. Well, that's fair enough. But it's still a theory without direct observation.

The exploded planet hypothesis has bigger problems. Critics love pointing out that the entire asteroid belt has less mass than our moon. How could that be the remains of a whole planet? Well, remember from earlier, Van Flandre did the math. What you'd expect to see in that asteroid belt is about five percent of what was there. And that is the percent that we see. The math works. But we've never seen a planet explode. And we don't even know how a planet could explode with Nuclear weapons now natural uranium reactors exist on Earth, but they can't blow up a planet

Neither can volcanic activity or tectonic shifts Unless it wasn't natural and now we're back to Brandenburg's nuclear war theory. The xenon 129 on Mars is real. The concentrations are documented. But xenon 129 can also form from cosmic ray bombardment over billions of years. Mars has a weak magnetic field, no protection from radiation, so maybe that's all we're seeing. Now, Brandenburg says no. The distribution is wrong for cosmic rays, too concentrated in specific areas. But his critics aren't convinced.

Then there's Richard Hoagland's face on Mars. NASA says it's pareidolia, seeing patterns that aren't there, like seeing shapes in clouds. When they photographed it again with better cameras, the face looked less fake-like and more like a natural mesa. I find that suspicious, but that's the official story. But Hoagland predicted other things. He said if Mars was once a moon, we'd find salt deposits in Ballas Marineras,

where the ancient oceans met. NASA found them. He predicted the northern plains would show signs of ancient water. They do. He predicted tidal stress features. Mars has them. Coincidence? Maybe.

Or maybe Hogan was right about some things and wrong about others. That seems to make more sense. But here's what we know for sure. Mars is weird. It's two very different planets smashed together. Venus spins backwards. Uranus is tipped on its side. Neptune's

orbit doesn't match predictions. The asteroid belt exists exactly where a planet should be. Something happened in our solar system. Something violent. The evidence is literally written in the stars. The question isn't whether our solar system was damaged. We know it was, but we don't know how or why. And the question we really want to know, could it happen again? For men, dealing with ED can be uncomfortable, which is why HIMS provides access to a comfortable solution with an all online process and personalized treatment options. Hymns is changing men's health care by providing you with access to affordable sexual health treatments from the comfort of your couch.

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His exploded planet theory was dismissed by mainstream science. They called him a crank. A brilliant crank, but still a crank. He never lived to see water confirmed on Mars. He never saw the moon-like tidal features verified. He never knew that everything he predicted about the asteroid belt would check out. He died thinking he'd failed. But Van Flandern saw something the

rest of us missed. A pattern hidden in plain sight. Our solar system is broken. Not metaphorically, literally broken. Like I mentioned earlier, Venus spins the wrong way. Clockwise instead of counterclockwise like every other planet. Something hit it so hard it flipped over. Now Uranus lies on its side, rolling around the sun like a ball instead of spinning like a top. Its moons orbit vertically. That's not natural. Neptune's orbit makes no sense. It's too elliptical, too far out, like something shoved it there. Pluto isn't even a planet. It's a refugee, a moon that lost its home and got trapped in this weird orbit.

And then there's Mars, half smooth, half destroyed, oceans gone, atmosphere stripped, nuclear isotopes in the soil, a planet that looks like it survived something it shouldn't have. Van Flandern traced it all back to two events, two planets destroyed. Padeon between Mars and Jupiter went first. The explosion created the asteroid belt and sent shock waves through the solar system. But that was just the warm-up. The big one was Maldac. When it exploded, its moon Mars was flung into a new orbit. The blast wave hit Venus, flipping it backward. The debris cloud reached

the outer planets, disrupting their orbits. Earth caught some fragments too. We call them impact craters. But we were lucky. We were far enough away. This time. Because here's what Van Flandern understood. If it happened twice, it could happen again.

Whatever destroyed those planets, natural catastrophe, nuclear war, or something else, the mechanism still exists. We like to think Earth is special and protected, the Goldilocks planet where everything is just right. But we're not special. We're just next in line. Three planets in the habitable zone. Venus, Earth, Mars.

One is dead. One is dying. The other pretends everything is fine. We search for aliens because we don't want to be alone. But maybe we're not looking in the right place. Maybe the aliens were here all along. They lived on Mars, built monuments, created civilizations. And then they were gone. The face on Mars might be their last message, a warning carved in stone. But we can't read it. Or won't. Van Flandert spent his life trying to tell us the solar system's real history. A history

of violence and destruction. Planets don't last forever. Nothing does. Earth sits between two dead worlds. We study their corpses and pretend we're different. But the math doesn't lie. The pattern is clear. Venus fell. Mars fell. Now, NASA knows this story. They have the data.

Every mission to Mars confirms it, but they keep quiet. They show us Photoshopped pictures of red sunsets and ancient riverbeds. I have episodes on how they fake them. They don't show us the scars of war, the evidence of violence, the warnings carved in the landscape. They treat us like frightened children. They don't think we can handle the harsh reality that all things must end, including our planet. They think admitting this would cause worldwide chaos. And you know what? They're probably right. Thanks for listening.

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And any money that comes from YouTube memberships goes to the team, and they deserve it. I think I got all the plugs. Special thanks to Mike Barra, by the way, for helping out with this script. Go buy his books. I own all of them. We're plugged? Mike's watching, he's happy? I think we got it. Until next time, be safe, be kind,

and know that you are appreciated. [♪ music playing, Hello? Hey, human! I don't like this format!