textfiles/ufo/UFOBBS/2000/2210.ufo

SUBJECT: CASTING A NEW LIGHT ON THE MARS FACE



BY ROBERT C. KIVIAT for OMNI


When the Viking 1 spacecraft arrived at Mars in July 1976, it fell into orbit
around the Red Planet. Sending its lander down to inspect the surface below, 
the orbiter concentrated on picking out possible landing sites for the Viking
2 spacecraft, due to arrive in a few weeks. Its cameras shot thousands of pic-
tures as it circled within 1,000 miles of the planet's rugged features.

On the morning of July 26, 1976, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasad-
ena, California, received a set of images taken during Viking 1's thirtyfifth
orbit of Mars. One of those frames, from the northern desert region called 
Cydonia, showed a mesa - roughly a mile long and 1,500 feet high - that resem-
bled a humanoid face.

At a press conference at JPL, Viking project scientist Dr. Gerald Soffen popp-
ed up a slide showing this very quirky image in the Martian desert, recalls
Richard C. Hoagland, then a member of the JPL press corps. As reporters were
poised with pens ready, Soffen said a picture taken a few hours later showed
that it was just a trick, just the way the light fell on it. But according to
Hoagland, that simple explanation for what has become known as "the face on 
Mars" has proven to be "flatly, demonstrably, in gross error.

NASA's planetary scientists have maintained over the years that the face is a
natural rock formation produced by wind erosion and that the particular light-
ing angle at which it was photographed crated its resemblance to a human face.
Hoagland, however, remains unconvinced, and he has led a ten-year independent 
investigation of the Viking data. After analyzing specific frames, taken with
different sun angles during orbits weeks apart, he contends, his interdiscipl-
inary team of researchers has found substantial evidence that the face, some
adjacent pyramid structures, and other objects on Mars surface were created
by intelligent beings.

On August 21, 1993, the Mars Observer spacecraft was preparing to settle into
orbit around Mars to begin a two-year mission to photograph and analyze the 
surface of the Red Planet when it abruptly fell silent. As the world watched,
NASA tried frantically for days to re-establish radio contact with its precio-
us orbiter but failed. An independent NASA review board concluded that the
breakdown resulted from a rupture of a propulsion system line as the probe
began pressurizing its fuel tanks. Whatever the cause, the loss of the Obser-
ver meant the loss, too, of our chance to learn the truth behind Cydonia and 
its mysterious face.

But perhaps only temporarily: NASA has already dusted itself off after the
Observer's ignominious failure and begun work on substitute probes, the first
of which may be launched as early as 1996. With public and congressional enth-
usiasm for the space program waning while interest in the Mars face mounts,
will NASA make special provisions for the new spacecraft to examine Cydonia?
Perhaps. Should it? In Hoagland's opinion, most definitely. While NASA was
designing the Mars Observer, he urged it to photograph the face and other so-
called anomalous structures in detail, and he continues to call for the agency
to do everything within its power to resolve this otherworldly mystery.

For all his unorthodox claims, Hoagland, author of The Monuments of Mars, has
had considerable experience working with the space community. He was a consul-
tant to CBS News, where he designed space simulations and advised Walter Cron-
kite on the network's coverage of the Apollo lunar missions. In 1972, eminent
planetary scientist Carl Sagan credited Hoagland, as well as British space
pioneer Eric Burgess, for the initial suggestion to include a recorded message
aboard Pioneer 10. And at the time of the Viking mission, Hoagland was under
contract as an author/consultant to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Hoagland's involvement with the Cydonia controversy began in 1981 when, after
seeing the work of Vincent DiPietro and Gregory Molennar at a science confere-
nce, he first wondered if the face amounted to more than a natural landform or
a trick of lighting. These two computer imaging experts had obtained data tape
s of the face and had enhanced it, Hoagland says. Their photographs showed
some remarkable, stunning detail that was not at all evident on the raw image.

DiPietro and Molennar had searched through the entire Viking data file and 
had found a second picture - taken 35 days later - that reveals more of the
right side of the face due to the sun's slightly higher position in the Marti-
an sky. Still, Hoagland wasn't convinced that the face was an artificial const-
untill 1983, when DiPietro sent him photographic blowups of the face along
with prints of original Viking frames for comparison. As I sat there looking
at the photographs, Hoagland says, I began to wonder why no one had taken this
seriously, and what if it wasn't just a trick of lighting?

Hoagland soon agreed with DiPietro and Molennar that the face appeared bilate-
rally symmetric. It had features which were humanoid, he remembers, and it 
seemed above chance that it also had the right proportion. He then speculated
that if sentient life forms had indeed constructed the face, they might have
built it to be seen from the ground rather than from the air.

He then attempted to determine where one would have had to stand on the planet-
's surface to see the face. That's when my eyes were forced to look to the  
left and the right, he says, and I noticed a separate collection of very geo-
metric pyramid shapes, where one would have had a perfect view of the face. He
reasoned that these pyramids could be the ruins of an ancient city of some 
sort.

In a previously published report titled "Unusual Martian Surface Features,"
DiPietro and Molennar had also described a monstrous, rectangular pyramid,
located ten miles southwest of the face. They noted that its dimensions were
roughly 1 mile long by 1.6 miles across, it appeared to have four sides that
descended straight down to the surface at sharp angles, and its corners seemed
buttressed by symmetrical material. Hoagland believed it's unlikely that two
very unnatural looking objects like the face and the pyramid would exist on 
Mars in such close proximity.

Erol Torun, a physical scientist with the Defense Mapping Agency who has on 
his own time studied the large pyramid, corroborates DiPietro's and Molennar's
findings. The pyramid's position and orientation - in respect to other suspic-
ious objects in the immediate vicinity - are perfectly aligned, he says. The
pyramid's main axis aligns with the face, he explains, and an extension of the 
left arm of the pyramid intersects the center of the city, while an extension 
of its right arm intersects a peculiar object that Hoagland calls the "tholus.
" The pyramid displays geometric regularity, Torun concludes, that doesn't occ-
ur in nature.

Hoagland, too, notice during the early part of his 11-year study that the face 
and the city appear to be aligned rectilinearly; a series of right angles
contributes to an overall impression that the city's main avenue leads toward
the face. Yet Hoagland recognizes that earthquakes or faulting will give you
rectilinearity, and so the phenomenon isn't conclusive proof of the structure-
s artificiality. But what is conclusive, he explains, are the much more subtle
angles - measured between these and other objects arrayed at Cydonia - that 
are replicated with such geometric regularity that they seem to be the product
of intelligent design. It's a repeating of the same pattern of angles between
the specific objects, and within the large pyramid itself.

The patterns he has found in Cydonia, Hoagland believes, are similar to the
sort of constructions that well known planetary scientist Carl Sagan considers
indicative of intelligent life. Sagan has attempted to identify patterns of
intelligent activity on Earth - and Mars - via satellite images, and although
his studies found no signs of intelligent life on the Red Planet, they did es-
tablish criteria for identifying such intelligence in satellite photos. In
an episode of the Cosmos television series called "blues for a Red Planet,"
Sagan demonstrated that "intelligent life on Earth first reveals itself throu-
gh the geometric regularity of its constructions - an intricate pattern of 
straight lines, squares, rectangles, and circles. Canals, roads, and circular 
irrigation patterns, he explained, all suggest intelligent life with a passion
for Euclidean geometry. But the Viking spacecraft, Sagan concluded, didn't
detect any such manufactured structures. Nevertheless, Hoagland maintains that
the Viking photos of Cydonia do show intelligently constructed objects - not
just random hills and mountains - because there is geometric regularity - but 
not exactly the kind for which Sagan had searched.

The large Cydonian pyramid is a geometric figure on Mars that has internal 
angles which are identical to those that can be measured between the face, the
city, and other key surface features nearby, Hoagland says. The meaning in 
this is that if you find a specific geometry in the pyramid and then you find
a bigger example of the same geometry spread out over many more square miles,
it's telling you something - that it's not natural.

Some others who have studied the photos Viking sent back, however, have failed
to arrive at the same conclusion. I don't know any people of any consequence
who give any credence to this whatsoever, declares Michael Carr, who headed
the Viking orbiter imaging team. Not one person of scientific credibility
believes this. In addition, Carr, presently a geologist with the U.S. Geologi-
cal Survey, says he doesn't know of a single Viking image that has pyramids on
it. Although some members of the JPL staff did note the mesa's resemblance to
a face when Viking sent back that particular image, he admits, the lab publis-
hed it only for laughs.

But still other members of the scientific community - even some at NASA - be-
lieve the face and nearby objects merit further study. Mark Carlotto, a former
division staff analyst with the image computing technology division at TASC - 
an analytic services corporation that performs satellitebased image processing
- began examining the Viking data in 1985 after reading about Hoagland's stud-
ies. Carlotto's expertise in analyzing satellite images has made him a key 
player in the investigation.

The mesa obviously looks like a face, says Carlotto. It always did to me, and
that was the intriguing thing that piqued my curiosity to make me take a clos-
er look at the data. Carlotto, author of The Martian Enigmas, has specifically 
attempted to test the validity of NASA's trick of lighting explanation for the
face. Using a shape from shading image analysis technique that creates a 
three dimensional image from two dimensional data, he has concluded that the 
impression of a face is not a trick of lighting. Three dimensional imagery su-
ggests that the impression of facial features persists over a wide range of
illumination and viewing conditions.

While the face has received the most attention, another object that Hoagland
discovered back in 1983 and termed the "fort" is perhaps the most interesting
feature in the Viking frames, according to Carlotto. I characterize this as a
polyhdral object, Carlotto says, with very straight sides and regularly shaped
markings or indentations. When he used shape-from-shading to create a 3-D ima-
ge, he adds, this object appeared to be an enclosed structure that had somehow 
lost its top. It did not look natural.

Other test Carlotto has performed indicate that the face and some other Cydon-
ian objects are strongly nonfractal, meaning they don't appear to have occured
naturally. Using some techniques developed at TASC to detect manmade structur-
es in satellite images, he and some colleagues determined that the face does-
n't share the characteristics of the terrain that surrounds it.

Hoagland, Carlotto, and others investigating the structures have concluded
that only high resolution photos, the type Mars Observer was to take, can lay 
the mystery of Cydonia to rest. But the Observer's camera, while capable of
taking pictures 30 times sharper than Viking's, had targeting limitations that
made it quite possible that the probe wouldn't have captured sharp photos of
the structures in question - and the new spacecraft currently on the drawing
board will carry the same type of camera. So even if the new probes get off 
the ground, we could be left without high resolution pictures of the face and
other structures unless NASA - or another organization capable of sending a
spacecraft to Mars - makes photographing the Cydonian monuments a mission pri-
ority.

There's been a lot of discussion, some of it well informed and some of it not 
particularly well informed, having to do with this feature on Mars, says Stev-
en Squyres, professor of astronomy at Cornell University and chairman of the
Mars Science Working Group, which consists of scientists form both government
and private universities and advises NASA on its Mars exploration program. And
it's an issue that I think could be nicely put to rest, once and for all, if
we could get one good picture of this thing.

That doesn't mean that Squyres subscribes to Hoagland's hypotheses regarding
Cydonia or that he agrees with Carlotto's shape-from-shading analysis, which
he says demonstrates only that the structure looks like a face. Neither shape-
from -shading nor your own visual analysis of this thing tells you how it got
that shape, Squyres says. So you can massage the data all you want, but the
fact is that we have a very fuzzy, low resolution picture of the face, and
we're not going to know how it was formed until we take a higher resolution
picture.

The camera that may capture that picture will fly on just one of the two orbit-
ers that NASA currently plans to send to Mars. Both the Mars Science Working
Group and NASA's own team formed to study plausible Mars exploration options 
in the wake of the Observer's failure endorsed the two orbiter approach, spli-
tting essentially the entire Observer payload between the two spacecraft due 
to be launched in 1996 and 1998, Squyres says. They also recommended a series
of lander missions that NASA will begin in 1997, when the Mars Pathfinder spa-
cecraft lands on the planet's surface and deploys a small rover.

Described by Squyres as an engineering experiment with a very modest scientif-
ic payload, the Pathfinder mission gives NASA  an opportunity to showcase its
new commitment to quicker, cheaper, but perhaps riskier missions. Shortly aft-
er the loss of Mars Observer, NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin told NBC News
that the agency had introduced a policy where we build smaller spacecraft in
larger number, so we don't have to risk everything on any given launch. With
Pathfinder, Squyres says, NASA is spending just $150 million to build a compl-
etely new type of spacecraft and successfully land it on the Martian surface 
and deploy instruments.

NASA will likely send the camera aboard the first orbiter, enabling it to ta- 
ke high resolution photographs of the planet's surface that will help NASA 
select Pathfinder's landing site and decide where to send the rover. It makes 
a certain amount of sense to put the highest priority on those orbital object-
ives that will enable us to do the landed science better, Squyres says. There
are other factors besides science that come into it, too. One is having an in-
strument on there that the public can deal with. An imager is important from
the standpoint of making sure that the public sees comprehensible, tangible
results form the mission.

The camera on the new spacecraft will do more than simply transmit images to
flash across America's TV screens, of course. If, as planned, NASA intends it
to duplicate the mission of the Observer's camera, it will photograph the ent-
ire surface of the planet, producing detailed maps. In addition, the camera
was designed to help test some hypotheses regarding the planet's geology by 
focusing on some specific geological features. The Cydonian structures are not 
among those features of highest geological interest. Accordingly, although
Michael Malin, the principal investigator in charge of Mars Observer's camera
and the camera that will fly aboard that craft's replacement, attest that 
he'll try the best he can to get high resolution photos of the face and other
nearby objects, he doesn't think they should be his highest imaging priority.

Complicating the entire issue are the rather severe limitations of the camera 
and of transmitting data through space. The camera will photograph less than
one percent of Mars surface in high resolution - not because it can't photoga-
ph more, but because there's no room in the probe's transmission stream for
the additional data to be sent back to Earth. And pinpointing exactly what on
the surface it photographs is far from simple: Bolted to the spacecraft, the
camera can only point straight down. We always said that it was very difficult
to image the face because of the targeting ability of the whole system, says
Arden Albee, project scientist on the Mars Observer mission and a member of
NASA's Mars Recovery study team.

That hill that we're trying to take a picture of in Cydonia is very small - it
's only a couple of kilometers - and the field of view of Malin's camera when
it takes a picture of the surface is also very small, Squyres explains. But
the really important point is that the spacecraft is not able to point very
accurately at all. If you build into the spacecraft, at great expense, the 
capability to point your camera very precisely and the capability to determine
the orbit and the orientation of the spacecraft very precisely, then you can 
hit a specific imaging target.

While Squyres recognizes that there may be considerable public interest in the
face, he doesn't believe that it mandates photographing the face at all costs.
But if Congress decided that they wanted to put so much money into the Mars
Observer follow up mission that we could afford to point that camera with high
enough precision to put this issue to rest, he adds, that would be great. Fra-
nkly, he doesn't think that Congress will take such a step in the current eco-
nomic climate.

NASA might get Congress to cough up the additional funds by playing up the 
Mars face angle to the public, which would demand action form its elected off-
icials. But Squyres considers such tactics intellectually dishonest. If you 
mislead people by making something sound particularly likely, when in fact
your personal view is that it's not, he says, sooner or later it's going to
come back and haunt you.

And although Squyres and the NASA investigators insist that they are open to 
any new evidence that the Mars probes may turn up, they don't at present beli-
eve that it's likely that the Cydonian structures are artificial. [Carlotto's]
shape-from-shading argument is unconvincing because it doesn't prove anything,
Malin says. Just because a hill looks like a face doesn't prove that it is a
face. In my view, the face barely resembles one, and there is certainly nothi-
ng in its form or topography that is even suggestive of its being artificial.
Carlotto has also applied fractal analysis to photographs of the face, the 
results of which, he says, indicate the face is anomalous. In order to prove,
however, that the face is anomalous on Mars, Malin says, Carlotto must examin-
e as many locations on Mars in mountainous terrains and show that only the th-
ings in the Cydonia area - pyramids and the like - are highlighted by his tec-
hnique. Even such results, he add, would suggest simply that the features are
different, not that they are artificial.

And what does Malin think of Hoagland's assertion that the alignment of the 
face and other objects indicates unnatural origins? I don't know of very many 
scientists who would endorse it because there is no physical basis for it,
Malin says. If aliens did create the structures Hoagland points to with the
intention of leaving a message, Malin contends that they picked a very poor 
place to do it because the area is already fractured by Mars - which created
a lot of angles there. As for the pyramids, Malin says that natural forces do,
in fact, produce such structures. I've done a lot of work in Antarctica, and
there are lots of pyramidal shapes cut by ice, he explains. They can also be
formed by other processes of erosion, and there are far stranger things in
Antarctica than I have seen on Mars.

Another figure involved in the debate, however, has taken issue with Malin's 
arguments against the Cydonian structures artificial origins and indeed with 
NASA's treatment of the Cydonia issue as a whole. Stan McDaniel, a professor
of philosophy at Sonoma State University with a 30 year background in such
areas of study as ethics, philosophy of science, and critical thinking, has
conducted a two year study of NASA's official policy regarding the face and
the methodology that both NASA and the independent investigators have employ-
ed in analyzing it. Many of NASA's arguments against the independent investig-
ators conclusions are seriously flawed, both in terms of methodology and logi-
c, McDaniel says. Moreover, the methodology used by DiPietro, Molennar, Carlo-
tto, Torun, and Hoagland is sound, based on established scientific criteria,
he says.

NASA itself uses the shape-from-shading technique to determine the probable
three dimensional shape of objects in space photographs, McDaniel says. The 
fractal analysis technique used by Carlotto is a standard scientific method 
in use for for determining the probable artificiality of objects is satellite
images, he adds. And in McDaniel's view, the magnitude of the issue at stake-
which is the possible proof of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence
- should compel NASA to ensure that any new Mars orbiter takes high-resoluti-
on photographs of the landforms by making them a top mission priority.

Hoagland founded the Mars Mission, a grass roots constituency organization 
composed of researchers and lobbyists, to do just that. The group has dedicat-
ed itself to ensuring that NASA obtains high-resolution images of the face and
other nearby objects at Cydonia at the earliest opportunity and then immediat-
ely releases them to the U.S. public.

That issue, however, could soon be moot: It may not be a U.S. spacecraft that
gets the next opportunity to take high-resolution images of the curious struc-
tures. In 1996, the Russians plan to launch a Mars orbiter equipped with a
German camera, and if it overflies the Cydonia area and takes a picture of the 
face, Squyres says, it will be able to do a very nice job of imaging it at a 
high resolution and putting the issue to rest.

Regardless of whether a U.S. spacecraft or a Russian one takes the coveted
High resolution picture of the face and, ideally, the surrounding structures,
those on each side of the issue know what the image must show to vindicate 
their arguments - and what would reveal that they are mistaken. For Malin, a
photo of the area near the face showing roads or large areas that have been
excavated will prove his hypothesis wrong. On the other hand, if we see just 
a natural looking surface, then I would argue my hypothesis is correct, he
adds. For Hoagland, only fractal analysis of high-resolution photos indicating
that the objects are part of the natural terrain will dissuade him from the
views he's firmly held for the past ten years.

And despite the unexpected failure of the Mars Observer, Hoagland, Malin, and
the rest of the world could know before the decade is out the elusive truth -
whatever it may be - behind the mysterious monuments of Mars.


**********************************************
* THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo *
**********************************************