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Mars Global Surveyor photographs 'Face on Mars.'

Skeptical Inquirer, July-August, 1998 by David Morrison

One of the curiosities of the Viking spacecraft global mapping of Mars (1976-1977) was the discovery of a strangely shaped mesa in the Cydonia region that resembled a human face. The so-called "Face on Mars" was recognized by Viking scientists and included in one of the early mission news releases. At the low resolution and oblique lighting under which the Viking image was obtained, the mile-wide mesa has an eerie Sphinx-like appearance. In the original release, the effect was heightened by the fortuitous presence of black "drop-outs" where one nostril and one eye would be, but even after proper processing to remove these artifacts, the human resemblance remained.

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Unfortunately a small band of individuals decided that this formation was an artificial, carved sculpture of a human face placed on Mars hundreds of thousands of years ago. A cult grew that tried to deduce the nature of the sculpture and who made it, with links to a variety of other pseudoscience cults such as that of the "crop circles." The leader of this group was former journalist Richard Hoagland, who wrote a book, The Monuments of Mars, and has appeared widely on the lecture circuit and talk radio. Hoagland expanded this story to book length by linking the Face to several nearby hills in Cydonia that he said were pyramids (what else!) and a ruined city. After extensive mathematical analysis of the latitude and longitude of these features and the angles of lines connecting them, he not only deduced the date for their construction but hinted that encoded in this extraterrestrial mathematics were scientific formulas that might reveal the source of unlimited nonpolluting energy. Branching out, Hoagland later released the startling discovery that Apollo-era lunar photos depict many artifacts of extraterrestrial engineering on the Moon, including a crystal dome tens of miles high. This time the press covered the story for its humorous value only, but questions have continued to be raised for the past two decades about the possible reality of the Face itself as an artifact of intelligent life on Mars.

In addition to promoting themselves and their publications, Hoagland and his followers developed a detailed conspiracy theory in which it was not stupidity that blinded NASA officials and planetary scientists to this evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life, but an intentional effort to deceive the public. From the beginning they accused NASA of suppressing additional Viking images of the Face, and of covering up other evidence of intelligent life on Mars while secretly planning to exploit this information. They even went so far as to picket JPL at the time of the failure of the Mars Orbiter spacecraft, which ceased to function in 1992 just before it was to begin a high-resolution orbital survey of the Red Planet as a follow-up to Viking. Stories circulated that the "failure" of Mars Observer was itself a fake, and that the real secret mission of Mars Observer was to photograph the Face.

The high-resolution Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) was reflown on the next available mission, the Mars Global Surveyor, which arrived at Mars in 1997. Mars Surveyor is part of a NASA program to place an orbiter around Mars and a lander on its surface at every opportunity over the next decade when Earth and Mars are properly aligned (roughly once every 26 months). The first two of these Mars missions were Mars Pathfinder, which landed on the surface on July 4, 1997, and Mars Global Surveyor, which arrived a couple of months later and is now in the midst of a long period of adjustments leading toward its final mapping orbit. On April 5, 1998, in Orbit 220, the MOC obtained an oblique image of the Face at a resolution of 4.2 m/pixel, a factor-often improvement in linear resolution over the best Viking image.

Immediately released by NASA, the new image of the Face shows a low mesa-like hill cut crossways by several roughly linear ridges and depressions, which were misidentified in the 1976 photo as the eyes and mouth of a face. The hill is surrounded by an apron of smooth eroded material that produced the effect of a halo or puffy wig in the Viking image. At high resolution, the entire Cydonia area shows much greater evidence of erosion than was evident from Viking orbital photography. Only with a large dose of imagination can any resemblance to a face be seen in the new MOC image, which is an example of how dramatically our interpretation of geology changes with large improvements in resolution. Compared to various rock formations on Earth that have a human resemblance, the Face on Mars is a pretty poor specimen, recognizable only at very low resolution.

After 20 years of promoting pseudoscientific interpretations and various conspiracy theories, will the Face on Mars cult now accept reality? Probably they will find a way out, perhaps by claiming that NASA faked the new image. Shortly after the picture was released, one caller to the Art Bell "Coast to Coast" show suggested a remarkable new interpretation to the Mars Observer failure: that as part of its secret mission the spacecraft not only photographed the Face at high resolution but then obliterated it with a nuclear bomb to destroy this artifact forever. Apparently devoted conspiracy buffs just never give up, but at least we may hope the responsible press will now drop this subject and leave it to the supermarket tabloids where it belongs.

Mars Global Surveyor photographs 'Face on Mars.'

Skeptical Inquirer, July-August, 1998 by David Morrison

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