1. The Controversy
In the Cydonia region of Mars there is a rock one mile
square which looks like a human face. We have only a few photographs, snapped by a robot
spacecraft in 1976. Only two photos reveal the facial features. Even the best image hides
half the landform in afternoon shadow.
Was the facial resemblance carved by random forces of
wind and water and geological upheaval -- or is it the product of intelligent life? It is
either an amusing novelty -- or the most startling discovery of the scientific age.
Most of us would have doubts. The image is fuzzy, and
don't people have a tendency to anthropomorphize? Most scientists think so.
There has been no lack of wishful thinking about Mars.
The planet is one of the most prominent in the night sky, and so was worshiped as a god by
the ancient Greeks and Romans. In the 1600s, when the telescope revealed Mars as a world
like Earth, theologians presumed that a bountiful Creator would naturally populate a world
like ours with beings like ourselves.
By the nineteenth century, religion gave way to secular
evolutionary theory as an explanation for the origin of life -- but thinkers continued to
be optimistic that Mars, the most earthlike of brother planets, might harbor life. And the
relentless evolutionary procession of mutation and natural selection would inevitably lead
to Intelligence.
Though Mars seldom approaches Earth closer than
thirty-five million miles, astronomers of the 1800s marked intricate surface features
which seemed to manifest life. The white polar caps spoke of water, the most vital
compound for life. The clouds moving across the surface testified to an atmosphere, also a
necessity for life. Mars also displayed regional color changes consistent with seasons of
plant life on Earth.
A depiction of Mars made early in this century.
Perhaps Mars even had intelligence and civilization.
Some of the nineteenth century astronomers claimed to see straight lines criss-crossing
the Martian surface for thousands of miles. Using first rate equipment and a qualified
staff, astronomer Percival Lowell argued these were 'canals' -- a global water
distribution network constructed by civilized Martians.[1] Lowell thought the Martians
were millions of years more advanced than us. But if so, where were their rockets and
radio signals? Scientific skepticism grew over Lowell's theories, but many believed that
at least Mars was the abode of primitive plant life.
Percival Lowell draws the canals.
Then came the 1960s, and the Space Age. Beginning with
NASA's Mariner 4 space probe flyby mission in 1964, a new picture of Mars emerged. The
planet's environment was so hostile that scientists rejected evolution and survival of
even the most primitive life. Science writer Willy Ley wrote:
Mariner IV showed a world with an atmosphere that
amounted to one percent of our own, peppered with impact craters like our moon, still
displaying impact craters that must be very old so that one had to conclude that Mars had
never possessed enough water to erase such scars by erosion. The surprise had been
followed by gloom, and some went from gloom to resignation. If that is Mars, why bother
with it?[2]
Mariner 4 photographs moonlike craters on Mars.
The atmosphere was too thin to breathe or protect the
surface from deadly ultraviolet radiation. The magnetic field was too weak to protect the
surface from deadly cosmic rays. It was too cold and air pressure was too low for liquid
water. Howling winds sandblasted the sterile landscape at hundreds of miles per hour,
months every year. Temperatures plunged nightly to depths below Antarctica. Mars had at
least half-a-dozen ways to kill. Space Age telemetry told us Mars could not even host
life, let alone evolve it. Optimism was crushed.
In 1971, the Mariner 9 space probe photographed dried
water channels on Mars, evidence that water had once flowed on the planet, pressurized by
a much-denser atmosphere. But the 'thick peppering' of impact craters beds led back to the
same pessimism. The craters were so numerous that scientists believed they could only have
dated from one period in history -- the very dawn of Martian planetary formation, billions
of years ago. The preservation of the craters meant that little water or wind erosion had
taken place since then; Mars must have been as dead as it was now for most of that time.
Perhaps Mars was once alive, but that age was so brief
and long ago that intelligent life could not evolve and survive.
This is the official scientific consensus. Given that
all of modern science assures us Mars is dead, how can a single rock speak otherwise?
In the summer of 1976, Viking space probes 1 and 2
first orbited the planet Mars. Launched by NASA, the probes carried some of the most
sophisticated electronic equipment of the day. Each probe dispatched a lander vehicle to
the surface, while 'orbiters' remained circling the planet at an altitude of approximately
a thousand miles, photographing the terrain with ten times better resolution than ever
before.
On July 25, 1976, while the drama
of the first lander mission was capturing the majority of media attention, Viking Orbiter
1 photographed the object which is now known as the 'Face on Mars.' This image is shown in
Figure 1.
Figure 1: The Face on Mars
No one took it seriously. Harold Marsursky, one of the
leading scientists on the Viking team, joked, "This is the guy that built all of
Lowell's canals."[3] Gerald Soffen, the Viking scientific team leader, held a mock
press conference for the Face, announcing humorously to a bemused assembly of reporters
that Viking had photographed a Martian. After the chuckling died down, Soffen added,
"When the Orbiter took a picture of the region a few hours later, the resemblance
went away. It was merely a trick of light and shadow."[4]
The picture was never suppressed, but it was never
treated seriously by mainstream scientists, either. Taking their cue from the experts, the
respectable journalistic community shunned it as well. The Face on Mars was fated for the
pseudo- scientific fringe, taking its place in the Pantheon of the Incredulous, alongside
spoon-bending psychics and hypnotically-derived testimonials of UFO abductees. Aren't the
newsstands already stocked with UFO magazines sporting fuzzy 'alien-being-on- homeworld'
snapshots? Well, this was just another -- albeit the contributor was not some con-artist,
and the image really was from another world.
Indeed, the road to skepticism was paved that same year
by George Leonard's crank masterpiece, Somebody Else is On the Moon.[5] Leonard
claimed aliens were reworking the lunar surface with city-sized construction rigs. His
entire 'proof' consisted of tiny squiggles on NASA photographs. Leonard later recanted his
thesis. But the damage was done.
Inevitably, the Face on Mars sank to low repute, with
public discussion limited to sensationalist tabloids[6] and UFO magazines. If the Face on
Mars turned up from time to time in a reputable science book, it was always with a warning
that, " . . . we must be wary of reading too much into photographs."[7]
It might have died there. But in 1977, Vince di Pietro,
an electrical engineer working for NASA, came across the Face-on-Mars photograph while
browsing casually through a UFO magazine at a newsstand. His reaction was originally one
of amused skepticism, he relates:
The quality of the magazine was such that I readily
thought the photo could have been a hoax. And whoever had written the article knew nothing
about interpreting the data being beamed to Earth from Mars. Another photo, for example,
was accompanied by a caption that claimed to show tire tracks across the Martian surface.
As an experienced student of space images, I recognized the tracks as nothing more than
radio-transmission errors, technically known as line losses, streaking across the picture.
I soon forgot about what I had seen.[8]
Two years later, while employed at NASA's Goddard Space
Center in Maryland, Di Pietro was thumbing through the photographic archives of the Viking
mission, and came across the same image. Whether the Face was artificial was still open to
question, but Di Pietro now knew the photograph was genuine.
Di Pietro contacted a colleague, computer scientist
Greg Molenaar, and together they personally researched the Face. After locating the
original digital data tapes that generated the photograph, they utilized
computer-enhancement techniques to improve the overall quality. The results of their
efforts appeared in a monograph entitled, Unusual Martian Surface Features.[9]
Despite ardent searching through the Viking archives,
Di Pietro and Molenaar never found the second photograph which Soffen claimed debunked the
Face as a 'trick of light and shadow.' Not only that, the Viking mission logs revealed
neither probe was in a position to rephotograph the Cydonia region at the time Soffen said
it was rephotographed.
Furthermore, the original pictures show the sun angle
to be low and to the west. The local time is shortly before sunset. If a second picture
had been taken 'a few hours later,' as Soffen claimed, it would have been in darkness.
Neither Soffen or the press corps caught the obvious breach between words and image. The
untruth is so flimsy that it is hard to believe Soffen premeditated the lie. So why did he
make the statement -- and why did everyone accept it without asking to see the second
photograph?
Di Pietro's and Molenaar's computerized enhancement of
the Face proved the image is truly three-dimensional -- not just a 'trick of light and
shadow' dependent on the relative angles of the sun, camera, and subject. Closer analysis
also revealed an apparent eyeball within the shadowed socket -- a level of detail that
seemed out of place in a purely random rock formation.
Their investigation revealed the Face is just one of
several landforms, in the same region, that appeared to them and later to many others as
monument-like. The region is named 'Cydonia' by astronomers, so collectively the landforms
are known as 'The Cydonia Complex.'
Enter Richard Hoagland. A veteran science reporter,
Hoagland covered the Viking and Voyager space missions during the 1970s for various
magazines and also served as a science consultant for CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. In
1981, when the efforts of Molenaar and di Pietro came to his attention, Hoagland began an
energetic crusade to attract public and scientific interest in the Face and the
possibility of an artificial origin. Hoagland's efforts include organizing a computer
conference, writing a book[10], and making presentations before groups of scientists,
engineers, and even Congress.
Hoagland is a central figure in the public debate over
the Face on Mars. Although he now draws bizarre connections between the Cydonia Complex
and crop glyphs, 'hyperdimensional physics,' and other New Age phenomena, he deserves
credit for publicizing the issue in the first place. This book intends him no disrespect;
however, his 'solution' to the mystery of the Cydonia Complex is mutually exclusive to the
one provided here.
Hoagland dates the monuments to an age of half a
million years, coinciding with the theories of New Age writer Zecharia Sitchin, who wrote
several books on the theme of 'ancient astronauts' visiting and teaching scientific
knowledge to our ancestors in the distant past. Sitchin believes these extraterrestrial
beings come from the as-yet-undiscovered tenth planet of the solar system, which he calls
Nibiru; the 'Nibiruians' also visited Mars, stranding humans who built the monuments.[11]
Sitchin's theories are pseudoscientific. His books are bestsellers.
In 1984, the Cydonia Complex was also discussed in the
international propaganda magazine of the former Soviet Union, Soviet Life. The
author of the article suggested the monuments were built by a race of giants who had once
long ago visited the Earth.[12] This was in pre-glasnost days!
The Face on Mars does capture our attention. Perhaps
the mainstream scientists are right, and there is a psychological mechanism that imagines
faces. Or has science gone so astray that our instincts are better at perceiving the
truth?
Since the Face was discovered, reactions from respected
members of the planetary science community have ranged from skepticism to irritation.
Viking mission scientist Harold Marsursky declares: "I cannot say there were no
civilizations on Mars. I just don't think it's very likely there were."[13]
Dr. Michael Carr, the geologist who was the leading
scientist on the Viking Orbiter Imaging Team, takes a much less charitable position:
"It's incredible people are still believing this stuff . . . it's all so
silly."[14]
Carl Sagan, who also worked on the Viking scientific
team, was equally skeptical, but perhaps more gracious; he stated: ". . . This
Martian sphinx looks natural--not artificial, not a dead ringer for a human face--and
probably was sculpted by slow geological process over millions of years."[15]
Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner is more
absolute: "The great stone face can teach a serious lesson. If you search any kind of
chaotic data, it is easy to find combinations that seem remarkable."[16]
David Morrison, a planetary astronomer with the
Institute of Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, comments in a book review, "But
do these represent, as these books claim, one of the most important discoveries in human
history, discoveries destined to alter fundamentally our conceptions not only of Mars but
of the origin and evolution of life and the nature of human consciousness? I seriously
doubt it, and I regret seeing such specious arguments used to justify our space program or
to urge additional missions to Mars."[17]
Another Viking-mission alumni scientist publicly
berated an investment-newsletter writer for discussing the Face: "You should be
ashamed to be associated with such company, as by publishing this nonsense you have
forfeited any faith in your veracity and common sense on the part of all knowledgeable
people."[18]
The official NASA position is best summarized by an
enclosure that went out with each publicly-requested copy of the Face photograph, a 1987
paper by Paul Butterworth, the National Space Flight Center Resident Planetologist, which
states, "Among the huge numbers of mountains on Mars it is not surprising that some
should remind us of more familiar objects, and nothing is more familiar than the human
face. I am still looking for the 'Hand on Mars' and the 'Leg on Mars'!"[19]
In this spirit, NASA has supplied critics with
photographs of the Martian surface which show images of a 'Happy Face' and 'Kermit the
Frog' -- 1970s terrestrial pop-culture icons that intelligent Martians are unlikely to
construct.[20]
Only recently, after facing stiff political pressure,
has NASA come around to allowing that the Face on Mars is worth a second look. That
effort has taken its time. A decade and a half passed from Viking to NASA's next mission
to Mars, known as Mars Observer -- which subsequently failed. And then another half-decade
passed between Mars Observer and the next orbital photographic mission, Mars Global
Surveyor. MGS experienced a year-long delay in its mapping mission after only weeks in
orbit. It is unaccountable that NASA claims there is great value in studying other planets
to learn more about Earth, but has been in no great hurry to send another space mission to
the most earthlike planet in the solar system.
Yet the issue just won't go away.
One reason is because the Face is not alone.
Accompanying it in the Cydonia region are those other landforms that strike the human mind
as also being artificial. Figure 2 shows a strip of Cydonia terrain centered near the
Face. Three other landforms are identified in this picture, and have been assigned names
which will be explained in the next chapter: 'The Centerpoint,' 'The Wedge,' and 'The
Second Face.' Collectively, along with the Face, these objects have come to be known as,
'The Cydonia Complex.'
Figure Two: The Cydonia Complex |
