Late in the summer of 1975 two Viking spacecraft, each consisting of an orbiter and a lander, were launched toward the planet Mars. The goal of the mission was to search for life – microbial life thought to exist in the red Martian soil. Eleven months later the first spacecraft reached the Red Planet, achieved orbit, and began its search for a landing site. On July 20, 1976 the lander separated, descended, and successfully touched down on the Martian surface. While it began sending television pictures and other scientific data back to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the orbiting mother ship continued its mapping mission, preparing for the arrival of the second Viking spacecraft due a little over a week later.
Early on July 25, while searching for the second landing site, the orbiter photographed an enormous face-like rock formation in the Cydonia region of Mars. After no more than a cursory examination, JPL dismissed the 'Face' as an optical illusion – as a geological feature that happened to look like a face because of the way it was lit by the sun. Viking project scientist Gerry Soffen informed the press that the Face 'disappeared' in an image taken later in the day. In the following weeks as attention focused on the two landers and their search for microbes, the Face on Mars was forgotten.
A few years later, Vincent DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar, engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, came across the picture of the Face in the Viking photo archives and decided to learn more about it. Soffen had said that another picture taken later in the day showed nothing unusual. But DiPietro and Molenaar could not find that picture because, as they soon discovered, later on July 20 Viking was thousands of miles away from Cydonia. They continued to search and finally found another image taken 35 days later. To their amazement the Face was still there.
DiPietro and Molenaar's discovery was totally ignored by JPL and the planetary science community. Gradually over time, however, others began to take notice. One of the first was science writer Richard Hoagland, who realized that the Face was not an isolated formation but happened to be near a group of unusual-looking geometrical features that reminded him of Paolo Soleri's archologies – an idea for housing large urban populations in three-dimensional pyramidal structures. With the help of anthropologist Randy Pozos, Hoagland organized a group known as the Independent Mars Investigation Team to examine the Face and the other features in greater detail. Over the next few months, the group, which included DiPietro and Molenaar, physicists Lambert Dolphin and John Brandenburg, artist James Channon, and others, found additional evidence suggesting that Viking had discovered archaeological ruins on Mars.
The response of the planetary science community was surprising. When asked about the Face, geologists thought other landforms on Mars were more interesting. Gerry Soffen, the Viking project scientist who had informed the press that the Face disappeared in a later image, was simply not interested. And the late astronomer Carl Sagan, then a leader in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, was of the opinion that any serious study of the Face was a waste of time.
Why would JPL and the planetary science community be unwilling to explore the possibility of artificial structures on Mars? After all Viking was sent to Mars to look for life. Why did Soffen, a senior project scientist claim that in a second image taken a few hours later the Face had disappeared? Moreover, how could he make such a statement knowing later in the day on July 20 Viking was thousands of miles away? Why didn't JPL bother to mention that when a second image was finally taken of the Face 35 days later, under different lighting conditions, it was still visible and so could not be an optical illusion? And how could JPL scientists who were trained photo-interpreters miss the other nearby objects, some of these even stranger than the Face?
From the beginning JPL has insisted that the Face and other objects in Cydonia are simply odd looking rock formations, not unlike those seen in the American southwest. They insist that the objects or structures were formed by the interplay of a variety of geological processes such as volcanism, tectonism, catastrophic flooding, mass wasting, freezing and thawing, wind erosion and deposition, fluvial erosion, glaciation, and meteoric impact. They insist that suitable conditions did not last long enough for intelligent life to develop on Mars, and that the very idea of a humanoid face on Mars contradicts everything they know (or think they know) about Mars. In effect they are saying that because the Face can't be there, it isn't.
But do planetary scientists know enough about Mars to state definitively that the Face can't be artificial?
From the middle of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century, Mars was believed to be a planet very much like Earth. Sir William Herschel discovered that it is tilted on its axis, and so like Earth, has seasons. He observed changes in the polar caps which he thought were caused by the seasonal melting of snow and ice by the sun. In the 19th century as the telescope improved astronomers began to notice seasonal changes in the tones and colors of the Martian surface. Some thought the dark areas were wet soil, others believed they were seas. Giovanni Schiaparelli saw linear features which he thought were channels. Percival Lowell later saw them as canals – artificial waterworks constructed by an advanced race of Martians to save their dying planet. Around the turn of the 20th century, spectrographic measurements of the Red Planet revealed that it had very little of the two pre-requisites for life: water and air. The canals were also shown to be an optical illusion caused by the tendency of our eyes to see poorly resolved patterns as linear features.
That Mars was a much less hospitable place than originally thought was initially confirmed by early unmanned spacecraft in the mid 1960s. Mariners 4, 6, and 7 flew past the Red Planet each returning a handful of photographs showing a heavily cratered surface that looked more like the Moon than the Earth. But a few years later, our view of Mars changed again when Mariner 9 orbited Mars and imaged sights that had never before been seen on another planet: enormous volcanoes, vast canyon systems, and extensive networks of channels and tributaries. Orbital photography revealed that Mars once had liquid water on its surface and so must have had a thick atmosphere as well.
In 1971, Viking was sent to Mars to follow-up on these startling revelations. The fact that the planet probably once had water and an atmosphere did not change the reality of its present environment – one that is totally hostile to life. So instead of searching for life on the surface, Viking sought out microbes buried in the Martian soil. At both landing sites, all three on-board biology experiments returned positive indications of life. But because a fourth experiment did not find a sufficient amount of organic material in the soil, most (but not all) JPL scientists decided the biology experiments were responding not to micro-organisms but to the highly oxidized Martian soil. They concluded there was no life on Mars.
For the next twenty years planetary scientists believed that Mars is a dead planet and has been so for billions of years. When, in 1989, a group of British scientists claimed they had found evidence of organic compounds in a 200 million-year-old meteorite thought to be from Mars, they were largely ignored by the planetary science community. But in 1996, after NASA announced that it had found evidence of microbes in a much older Martian meteorite, one about 4.5 billion years old, scientific opinion reversed itself once again about the possibility of life on the Red Planet.
After more than twenty years in response to the growing public interest in Cydonia, the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) re-photographed the Face on April 5, 1998. But instead of resolving the controversy, this new photo seemed to raise even more questions. Within hours JPL posted a 'contrast enhanced' image on its web site that had been processed in such a way as to make the Face appear flat and featureless. Unaware of JPL's processing of the photo most viewers came to the conclusion that night after seeing the picture on the evening news that the Face on Mars was what JPL had claimed it was all along – just a pile of rocks. Within hours the media had pronounced the case for the Face closed.
In the following months after downloading the original unenhanced imagery from the JPL web site, and carefully restoring, enhancing, and correcting for various distortions, a completely different impression of the Face emerged. Although the new MGS image showed the Face to be heavily eroded, there was still much about it that was unusual. Unlike nearby mesas and knobs, features clearly of natural origin, the platform surrounding the Face was highly symmetrical. What appeared to be two faint lines on the top of the head in the lower resolution Viking images were resolved by MGS into a pair of features that looked to be cut into the side of the Face, much like access ramps which would allow someone at ground level to reach the top of the Face platform. And the biggest surprise was finding 'nostrils' and lip-like structures along the lateral centerline of the Face – just the kind of facial details one would expect to find on an artificially constructed representation of a humanoid head.
Remarkably, the Face seemed to pass the Lowellian litmus test. Unlike Lowell's canals which disappeared in better resolution imagery, the Face turned out to be even more interesting up close.
When these findings were presented at the 1998 Spring Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Boston, JPL's chief MGS scientist, Arden Albee, became irate. Why would these results anger Albee? It was clear that JPL's enhanced image was a gross distortion of the Face. But was it an honest mistake, done in haste to make the picture available to the public and the media, or was it an attempt by certain individuals to put the matter to rest once and for all?
In April 2001 MGS was able to obtain a fully illuminated high resolution image of the Face. Seen in its entirety for the first time the formation shows clear evidence of bilateral symmetry and rectilinear geometry – unambiguous indicators of artificiality. Yet, JPL continues to insist the Face is natural, substituting a 3-D elevation model derived from Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) data of a completely different landform on Mars for that of the Face to support its interpretation.
One has to wonder, if JPL is so certain that the Face is natural, why have they repeatedly misinformed and deceived the public? Why do they say that there is no credible evidence the Face is artificial, disregarding scientific analysis that indicates otherwise. Why do they ignore findings published in peer-reviewed scientific and technical journals that show the Face is not an optical illusion, that it contains anomalous details, and that it is but one of a handful of objects, all in the same general area, that also appear to be highly unusual in their own right? Why have they distorted Viking and MGS imagery to make the Face look like an ordinary object. And why has JPL, the organization responsible for exploring Mars, side-stepped the Cydonia controversy by letting the media and the court of public opinion decide the fate of the Face? Why are they using the public, and a misinformed public at that, to decide a matter as important as the potential discovery of archaeological ruins on Mars?
