American plasma physicist who worked at Sandia National Laboratories and elsewhere on fusion and propulsion concepts, and who since 2011 has argued that a nuclear event destroyed a civilisation on Mars.
The argument
It rests on an isotope anomaly: an excess of Xenon-129 in the Martian atmosphere, concentrated, on his reading, over Cydonia and Utopia, which he takes as the signature of two airburst detonations rather than of the ordinary outgassing history planetary scientists attribute it to. He published the case in conference papers and in Death on Mars (2015).
Where it stands
Mainstream planetary science rejects it: there are no craters or physical remnants of the kind the scale would require, and the isotope ratio has an accepted explanation in the planet’s atmospheric evolution. The site’s Mars xenon bench prices the isotope claim directly. Brandenburg’s real function in the literature is as a credentialled source of record for the deep-time layer of the ancient-astronaut argument, which is the use Closer Encounters and the Jorjani - Danny Jones Podcast 2025 interview both make of him.
Connections
Cydonia · Mars Nuclear War Hypothesis · Closer Encounters · Jorjani - Danny Jones Podcast 2025 · Jason Reza Jorjani · Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis