It’s crazy town, don’t think about it too much. Look up Carl Sagan’s essay on Velikosky instead.

Another interesting fact: The Baltis Vallis “rille” (which is basically a canyon) on Venus rises and falls DOZENS of times, with some TWO KILOMETERS separating its high and low points along its 6,800 kilometer length. It’s as if the rille was created by something which ignored gravity.

Tectonic forces warp, fold, pile, and stack continental plates onto themselves in a fabulous display that one might think “ignored gravity”.

I also have to point out that a planetary isolate traveling through interplanetary space will by definition be under the influence of gravity. It’s made out of matter. It has it’s own gravitational field, and that will function just fine and dandy in interstellar space as it does in orbit.

Venus’ orbit is also incredibly regular – unlike, say, Pluto… :)

Very few scientists — bordering close to zero — are actually tuned into the details of mythological stories.  That, in itself, is rather enigmatic, considering that we are talking about 5,000 years of oral tradition here.  These are arguably the stories through which mankind developed consciousness.  What is most perplexing is the degree to which the stories corroborate one another, from cultures across the entire planet.  One possible, largely unexplored, idea is that they are based upon events which occurred in the sky.Yet another important detail is that simulations of the collapse of protoplanetary discs into planets have never actually worked.Another interesting fact: The Baltis Vallis “rille” (which is basically a canyon) on Venus rises and falls DOZENS of times, with some TWO KILOMETERS separating its high and low points along its 6,800 kilometer length.  It’s as if the rille was created by something which ignored gravity.  When considered alongside the fact that the Grand Canyon’s Colorado River punches straight through the Kaibab Upwarp plateau (instead of going around it), there is reason to believe that all is not as it seems in the planetary sciences — or science in general.Taken individually, each fact can be easily dismissed as meaningful.  The interesting things happen once these (and many other) facts are combined into a single story.People might want to keep an open mind on Venus’ story long enough to learn about the stranger facts associated with it.  David Talbott and Wal Thornhill offer a fascinating modern-day rebuttal to conventional theory on Venus, which points to these enigmas (thunderbolts.info), but few seem interested in questioning the textbooks on these points.  For those of us who have invested time into it, it’s become apparent that the critics have not tried very hard to understand what is being argued here.

As for why the surface might be hotter than the atmosphere, maybe they were landing at night to give the probes a few extra minutes of operation before they overheated?

I don’t have time to watch a 5 part youtube video right now, but I’m keeping this in my crazy theories drawer for now. 

It’s also worth mentioning that many cultures of the world tell mythological stories about Venus arriving in human historical times as a comet.  These stories generally agree that the cometary display was initially beautiful, but eventually became monstrous.

Honestly, though, no-one remembers ever seeing these pictures before?

-abs can’t alas recall that ep where Steve fought a Venus lander, but it sounds great in a cheesey-70′s sort of way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4st0a0gWp0

I think the cable lasso is the best weapon.