The View from Number 80

Face on Mars Special

Aliens about Face

This issue is a little different in that it is devoted to a single subject - although this subject contains some familiar concepts - aliens, conspiracy theories, gullibility (my own, if the Face folk are correct). Apparently not only is Mars home to a collection of monumental alien artifacts so is the moon, and NASA's cover up of these facts has links to the ritual murder of their own astronauts, the Great Pyramid, astrology and cutting edge physics. Read on.....

  In a recent View I mentioned the idea of a Face issue (not forgetting the" Fort", the "Tholus", the "City", and, of course, the "Pyramid" - there has to be a Pyramid.) These ancient "artifacts" - and for all I know the "Amusement Park" and the " Sewage Farm", are supposedly located on the Cydonia Mensae (mensae? - small plateau) region of the Red Planet. Little did I realise the quantity of material on this subject out there. (Do these people have nothing else to do? Don't I?) Consequently what follows is the merest glance at the collision between NASA's space science and the world of aliens and conspiracies.

Eyeballs - the astronomer Percival Lowell (1855 - 1916) was one of the first people to start the inhabited Mars ball rolling. He saw features through his telescope that he believed to be canals - although now it appears they were more in Lowell's imagination than reality - thereby starting a trend. His distinctive drawings of their networks led Arthur C. Clarke, I believe, to refer to him as "the man with the tesselated eyeballs". The human mind is adept at distilling patterns from detail - sometimes where no pattern exists. The fine detail of the Martian surface can appear as canals and the color variations on the surface of a tortilla as the Virgin Mary. (Or a jumble of rocks seen with the eye of faith looks like a face.)

  One lasting effect of Lowell's work was to predispose people to a belief in an inhabited Mars. This received a blow from early missions to the planet which showed a lunar-like landscape. Fortunately NASA persisted and later forays (Mariner 9 and others) revealed a world of gaping canyons, giant volcanoes and dune covered deserts.

Face Off - now to the Face.  In 1976 the Viking 1 spacecraft was taking pictures of alternate landing sites for the sister mission's Viking 2 lander. Picture no. 35A72 showed what looked like a gigantic (approx. 1 mile in diameter) human face, staring blankly up at the sky. The effect is heightened by "bit errors"  (information lost in transmission) that speckle the image with black dots - a couple of these forming part of an eye and a nostril.

  Many people took to the idea that it was indeed a face and any naysaying by NASA was (and still is) attributed to a government cover-up - attributed by, in particular, one Richard C. Hoagland, of whom more later. Another proponent of the Face and the soon to be discerned other artifacts such as the "Tholus" (as you ask, it means circular domed structure) is Stanley V. McDaniel, whose website contains a mass of information. He too believes in a cover-up - or at the very least a suspicious unwillingness on the part of NASA and MSSS ( Malin Space Science Systems who operate the Mars Global Surveyor which has made more than 5,000 orbits of Mars and has been systematically mapping the Red Planet since March 1999.) to reimage the Face and its companions. The fact that this has been done and shows a natural feature is obviously not to the believers' liking. There have been (and are still ongoing) efforts to pressure NASA to take yet more pictures of Cydonia Mensae (indeed some have been published - to my jaundiced eye there are still no artifacts).

Breeding Conspiracy - Richard Hoagland's Enterprise Mission is the largest and best organised of the Face websites. To trawl through the material there is a voyage of discovery - can you link Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick (of 2001 fame) with Tom Corbett - Space Cadet, Wernher von Braun, Hyperdimensional Physics (sic) and Carl Sagan? (oh, and I forgot the Masons).  No? - well Hoagland and friends can. (Friends like CAUS - remember them?) As far as I can tell the big idea is we humans are the product of an ancient alien breeding program - the aliens being Egyptian deities. Of course the US government is privy to this and is part of a huge conspiracy to hide the truth - some of which can be revealed by Martian artifacts, astrological alignments and similar underwhelming evidence.  You have to stop now and again and realise these people are serious - at least serious enough to ask you fork over your hard-earned cash so they can further their "research". Another, far from  savory, aspect of these daft speculations is the idea put forward that NASA, under orders from the Johnson White House deliberately killed three astronauts  in the Apollo 1 fire at an astrologically propitious moment in  order to stop one of them, Gus Grissom, from being the first man on the Moon. This is not merely stupid but genuinely offensive to the memory of these three men and to their colleagues.

Update    An excellent page looking at the exploits of Richard Hoagland by Gary Posner can be found here        

Nazi Cats - talking of CAUS, other Face related sites seem to share the same mixture of "modern" UFO/alien stuff straight out of hackneyed sci-fi with the old  superstitious magic/astrological beliefs. So we have Gematrian Numbers rubbing shoulders with Hyperdimensional Physics. Something old, something new.... The list of links on this page has a bit of everything. You want Nazis - they've got Nazis.  Ancient Egypt, The X-Files, UFOs (natch), and conspiracies and "connections" - all present. (Whatever you need to get the punters in - it reminds me of Alan Coren, the humorist, who, before publishing a collection, claimed to have researched bookbuyers' favorite categories and found them to be golf, cats and  Nazis. Hence the cover of the book, Golfing for Cats, showed a cat putting on a golf green with a swastika flag flying above the hole.)

In all the accusations of a NASA cover-up there is to me a puzzle - one I have noted before. If the boss of NASA, Daniel Goldin, has to fight for funds every new budget year why is he sitting on the very kind of information that could finance the start of a piloted Mars mission tomorrow. (Goldin could hardly be called a shrinking violet - look at all the bally-hoo over the "microbes" in the Martian meteorite.) Me, I go for Occam's razor - there is an easy answer that Hoagland et al. do not consider, or don't want to, and that is that there is nothing to hide.

Recently NASA and MSSS have placed on the web a Martian year's worth (687 earth days) of images - 20,000 plus of them - all available for download. Open science or cynical disinformation?  Go and take a look - you might just find a Martian Mount Rushmore or horror of horrors a Cydonia Disneyland - you never know - the truth is out there! 

  Quotes

  "Does the government spend money on ghost research?  Or the Loch Ness monster? Or the lost continent of Atlantis? I think the Face was a kind of stupid thing to spend money on."  Michael Malin of MSSS

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