I realized that I was looking at something that was either a complete waste of time, or the most important discovery of the twentieth century if not of our enti
The “Face” On Mars | By Richard Grossinger | Issue 128 | The Sun Magazine Your web browser (Chrome 68) has a serious security vulnerability! Our website works best when using up-to-date web browsers. Please check for updates if you're having trouble.To contact customer service, e-mail [email protected] Update browser Ignore close Search 45 years of archives Search Popular Pages Contact Us Events Quotations Readers Write Poetry Independent, Reader-Supported Publishing Sign In Current issue December 2022 Readers Write By Our Readers Changing Your Mind About a career, about college, about living in America The Sun Interview By Finn Cohen Under The Surface Güven Güzeldere On The Mysteries Of Consciousness And Artificial Intelligence In This Issue archives Featured Selections Browse by year Browse topics Browse Sections November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 Browse 45 years of archives news & events News & Notes Events Submit Letter to the editor Essays, Fiction, & Poetry Readers Write Interview Pitches Photography Donate Search Subscribe Personal. Political Provocative. Ad-free. Subscribe and Save up to 45% Subscribe now & save Renew your subscription Give the gift of the Sun Independent, Reader-Supported Publishing Current issue archives arrow Featured Selections Browse by year Browse topics Browse Sections news & events arrow News & Notes Events Submit arrow Letter to the editor Essays, Fiction, & Poetry Readers Write Interview Pitches Photography Donate Sign In Subscribe Personal. Political. Provocative. Ad-free. Subscribe and Save up to 55% Subscribe Now & Save Renew your subscription Search 45 years of archives Search Popular Pages Contact Us Events Quotations Readers Write Poetry Taken from NASA Frame 35A72, this shows the “face” upper right and the “city,” made up of pyramidal shapes to the left of the center. Picture courtesy of Dr. Mark Carlotto, The Analytical Sciences Corporation. © Dr. Mark Carlotto The Sun Interview The “Face” On Mars An Interview With Richard Hoagland By Richard Grossinger • July 1986 Print Email Facebook Twitter I’ve never doubted there was life on other planets. Common sense suggests it (as well as every science fiction book I’ve read since I was twelve). But as one planetary probe after another turned up nothing but rocks or swirling, poisonous gases — no life and no evidence of any ancient civilizations, at least in our own solar system — I lost interest. Either “they” would find us, or it would be quite a while before we could extend the search to other stars. Planetary Mysteries by Richard Grossinger has rekindled my interest, to put it mildly. It now appears that one of those probes may have turned up something after all — a discovery so improbable, so controversial, so mind-boggling, that NASA and the scientific establishment have disclaimed it, and it’s been left to a group of maverick scientists to sort through the scanty but highly suggestive data that points to the existence of a carved, mile-high, upward-looking human “face” on Mars and an adjoining “city” of pyramids. Science fiction? Maybe. Perhaps even more extraordinary than this “proof” of extraterrestrial intelligence is the capacity of humankind to deceive itself. Certainly many reputable scientists have dismissed the “face” as a play of light and shadow. Perhaps they’re right. And I’ll confess to some ambivalence about printing this: I’m sure the “face” isn’t a hoax, but it may turn out to be a big joke, just another pile of rocks, about as historic a discovery as the man in the moon. If so, no one will be laughing but us lonely humans. If not, if the “face” is artificial — left behind, perhaps, by intelligent beings from outside the solar system — now isn’t too soon to start asking why. What follows is an edited version of Grossinger’s interview — which appears in its entirety in Planetary Mysteries — with Richard Hoagland, reporter and science writer and former consultant to Walter Cronkite and CBS News. Hoagland, who helped design the Pioneer 10 Plaque — humankind’s first interstellar message — is as knowledgeable as he is impassioned about Mars. His own book, Monuments on Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever (to be published next year by Grossinger’s North Atlantic Books) is a voluminous study of the search for life on Mars since the nineteenth century, the various space missions and their discoveries, and the different scenarios and interpretations of the “face.” Planetary Mysteries contains, in addition to the interview with Hoagland, an article by Rolling Stone writer Jeff Greenwald on the social and political issues involving Mars, as well as other provocative essays on megaliths and glaciers. The revised edition is available for $12.95 plus $1.00 for postage and handling from North Atlantic Books, 2320 Blake Street, Berkeley, California 94704. [Grossinger was co-editor of Nuclear Strategy and the Code of the Warrior, an excerpt of which appeared in Issue 125 of The Sun.] Another book on Mars has just been written by anthropologist Randolfo Rafael Pozos. The Face on Mars: Evidence for a Lost Civilization is a chronicle of the computer conference which Hoagland and Pozos convened in order to have an interdisciplinary team of scientists look more closely at the “face” and the “city.” It’s available from the Chicago Review Press, 814 North Franklin, Chicago, Illinois 60610, for $12.95 plus $1.00 for postage and handling. — Ed. GROSSINGER: Could you describe the history of the Mars project? HOAGLAND: For the last twenty-five years this culture has been mesmerized with the idea that there is, or could be, someone out there. We have looked at everything from Mercury out to Saturn, and in the back of everyone’s mind, at least most of the lay public, there was this hope that with every new picture they would see a city, or a McDonald’s, or something that would indicate that we weren’t alone. Simultaneously, there has been this idea that some narrow-band radio signal would stream into someone’s dish one day, that it would be decoded, and that there would be an announcement that They Are Out There. If you look at the Gallup Poll, you find that sixty to seventy percent of the people think there is someone out there, and that it’s only a matter of time before we find them. Meanwhile, what has happened is that we have, on certain unpublicized photographs from the Viking spacecraft in 1976, come across a set of objects which may in fact be that evidence. And we are having a devil of a time getting anyone to pay attention to them. The gap between the myth and the reality is so vast that if I had not gone through this experience, I would not have believed it possible: if someone had said to me that on such and such a day the data will arrive and no one will listen. . . . The story of the non-listening, and the tortuous path whereby these images and this data have made their way from NASA, which took the pictures, to this investigation, which is now trying to resolve the question, would fill volumes. In the summer of 1976, as sort of a last-gasp effort to find out whether we are alone, we sent four Viking spacecraft to Mars as part of the bicentennial celebration. They took an awful lot of pictures; something like 60,000 pictures were taken in orbit in the three or four years the orbiters survived. The initial objective of those pictures was to find a landing site for the Viking craft; after that had been accomplished the mission went basically to mapping, to map Mars with as much detail as possible, and we now have pictures of the entire surface of Mars down to about one-hundred-meters resolution, which is not too bad, and selected areas down to about ten-meters resolution. It was on July 25, as part of one of these mapping sequences, that the first Viking orbiter took a frame in the northern region of the planet called Cydonia at about 41 degrees North Latitude. And it went through various processes — from the spacecraft to the ground antennas through the computers and into the imaging area to be examined by scientists with all the others. A guy named Toby Owen, who was a member of the imaging team, on a Sunday afternoon, on his hands and knees with a magnifying glass looking at a set of mosaic polaroids, found on this one frame, 35A72, a very peculiar-looking mesa, which looked like a human face. He said, “Oh my God, look at this!” — a reasonable reaction. One does not expect to find a human face on Mars, needless to say, and certainly not one that’s a mile wide. After a few moments of, “Gee whiz, isn’t that weird,” it was very quietly forgotten. It obviously could not be real. It just didn’t fit any paradigm that one could whomp up even in the wildest science fiction. No one had ever written about a mile-wide face on Mars — although I did find a few days ago a story from Arthur C. Clarke. In the early Seventies, Clarke wrote a short story in which he has a human face on Mars as an ineffable mystery. His face is only eight inches high — and the one we’re working with is a mile — but the fact is Arthur’s footprints are all over this story. He’s been so many places where other people then come afterwards. That may explain why Arthur can’t take this seriously yet — because his line from the story is “a human face where no human face has any business being,” or words to that effect, and I have said that so many times myself. That was what made Toby Owen and all the members of the Viking imaging team ignore it. It didn’t fit the paradigm (we’ll get into “the paradigm” in a minute, but let me finish the history of this particular photograph). Well, Gerry Soffen, the Viking project scientist, got up in front of about a thousand reporters at a press conference on the mission and showed us this quirky face and said, “Isn’t it peculiar what tricks lighting and shadow can do?” And then he said, “When we took a picture a few hours later it all went away; it was just a trick, just the way the light fell on it.” And those of us who were there accepted this. I mean, Gerry Soffen was a very open, very careful, very engaging project scientist who really typified the spirit around Viking, which was a multidisciplinary, open, American approach to probing the unknown. And so we believed him. Well, the “face” the mesa, the frame (35A72), all got forgotten. It wasn’t rediscovered until 1979 when two gentlemen named Vince DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar were looking, on their lunch hour, through the National Space Science Data Center files in Washington, D.C. Vince turned over a glassine envelope and there was “the face” staring back at him. And it blew his mind. Because his last impression of it had been in a 1977 “ancient astronauts” magazine, one of those Von Danikenesque things, and he had presumed that it was just a hoax. So there he is in 1979 and it suddenly is in a NASA file, and it looks real. Well, Vince put two and two together. In one part of his mind was lurking the ringing statement of NASA that the reason for Viking was “The Search For Life.” And then in the other side of his brain he was looking at this “face” which looks very much like life, especially the sort of life that we readily recognize and understand. And the two images suddenly came together and he said to himself, “Well, why, if they were looking for life, haven’t they done anything more about this obviously lifelike image, except put it in the file?” So he went looking for the analyses and the geology and the geomorphology and the explanation of what this “face” was, and found nothing. At this point he and his friend Greg, who between them have about thirty years of computer-imaging expertise, decided to do what no one had done before, and that was to bring computer expertise to bear on this particular picture to see if in fact they could elicit more detail, because it was a pretty cruddy picture. They spent several months borrowing equipment and basically brought the same technique to this one image that NASA in its normal wisdom brought to the other selected pictures we’ve seen from space over the last twenty-five years. When they finished they had a picture that looks like that poster on the door. It was a very striking countenance. It had all the interesting proportions — mouth, eyes, hair, nose, even features under the eye — that one would expect of a human face. It had a sort of beauty to it, an aesthetic quality. It’s not, as one of our analysts years later wrote, “just another face.” Artists strive for years to achieve the effect that face has as it looks out from the frame at you. But in this particular picture, because the sun angle was very low, you see only the left-hand side; the right-hand side is missing. They could not tell whether the striking albedo markings and features that looked so humanoid were in fact raised relief or merely lights and darks or splotches on the flat surface (although, since this thing had a very long shadow stretching to the southeast of it, one could tell that it had significant relief). In science what one does in this kind of situation is look for corroborating data. Now this is where Vince and Greg, I think, really shone, over and above their image-processing talents. They took it upon themselves to contradict the official pronouncements of the project scientist of Viking, Gerry Soffen. I realized that I was looking at something that was either a complete waste of time, or the most important discovery of the twentieth century if not of our entire existence on earth. Remember, back in 1976, Gerry stood up in front of all of us and said, “There’s no confirmation; we took a picture a few hours later and it all went away. It was merely a trick of light and shadow.” Vince and Greg went looking for corroborating frames. And they found there was no picture from a few hours later over this region. If you think about it, it stands to reason. This picture (35A72) was taken at about six o’clock local time on Mars. The sun was very low in the summer sky, hanging just ten degrees above the northwest horizon. A “few hours later” would have put you in night in that region of Mars. So there couldn’t have been a picture a few hours later. If those of us in the press room had been smart, or on top of things, we would have figured this out and maybe asked a couple more questions. But the whole thing was too unbelievable even to consider seriously. Vince and Greg looked through the entire Viking data set, the file, number by number and frame by frame; and they finally found, thirty-five days later, a second set of pictures taken over this area, at a different sun angle. When they blew up that frame, lo and behold, the face was still there at a lighting change of twenty degrees. There is no question that this is a remarkable bisymmetrical humanoid countenance. The question of course is: is it a trick of erosion, or did someone make it? But one can no longer, with this data, dismiss the fact that it is there. Now you only find bisymmetry in biological systems on Earth; you rarely find it anywhere else. Then, of course, there is the degree of bisymmetry; it is very bisymmetrical. Having found all of this, Vince and Greg published their data in a monograph entitled “Unusual Martian Surface Features,” and they presented a paper to the American Astronomical Society in June of 1980 in Baltimore, Maryland. And they expected, I think slightly naively, that NASA would immediately round up the resources for a mission back to Mars to go and check it out. Nothing happened. In fact, nothing happened for about three years, except that when they tried to explain their research to a Mars conference in Boulder, Colorado, run by the “planetary community” (which is a subset of the whole NASA infrastructure), they were prevented from officially presenting their paper. They instead presented it in a clandestine meeting in a hotel room at two o’clock in the morning. Even at that point NASA’s approach to this was that it was merely a trick of light and shadow, period, closed subject. I saw Vince and Greg’s clandestine presentation. I was very impressed with how the “face” had changed in four or five years — 1976 to 1981; the difference between the batch-processed version that NASA had released and the version that they produced is like night and day. There’s just a whole lot more information available than had been made use of on any of the NASA versions. I was intrigued enough to get a copy of their monograph, take their card, and come home . . . and forget about it. I didn’t think about it until the summer of 1983, when I was working on a piece for Science Digest on Saturn. I remembered that Vince and Greg had not only worked on this intriguing project and had done some really remarkable things with the Mars data, but that their process itself would be useful in many other applications. I wanted to borrow their algorithm to apply to some other NASA pictures that might fill in parts of the puzzle on the story I was working on. So I called up Vince, and asked him to send me some of their data. And it was when the actual pictures came and I sat here looking at the glossies, particularly one five-by-five-inch full frame enhanced and processed version of 35A72, that the whole resonant mystery sort of came to a point. And I realized that I was looking at something that was either a complete waste of time, or the most important discovery of the twentieth century if not of our entire existence on earth. There is no middle ground. It either is or is not artificial. If it’s not, it is not worth worrying about. If it is, it is imperative that we figure it out, because (it comes back to the “face” itself) it does not belong there. Its presence, if it was made by someone, is trying very hard to tell us something extraordinary. Now to understand the extraordinariness you have to understand the whole field of evolutionary biology, the paradigm that goes on in scientific discussions now about the evolution of life: punctuated equilibrium versus original Darwinian biology, the whole Scopes thing, a bit of Genesis thrown in. I mean there’s a huge paradigm having to do with the uniqueness of the human beings on this one place. And the epitome of that thinking was written by a guy named Gaylord Simpson, who was a Harvard paleontologist, back about 1964 in an article in Science called “The Non-Prevalence of Humanoids.” Simpson, being from the old school, tried to call a halt to what he thought was silly pseudoscience about a populated galaxy filled with other human-type beings. He wrote this very definitive paper (for his time), saying basically that We Are Unique; that we are the ultimate by-product of trillions of separate decisions (I use the word in the broadest sense) made in the terrestrial biosphere, and the odds against our duplication either in form or in consciousness anywhere else in the accessible universe (and he meant accessible optically, not by travel) is infinitesimal. It was a statement as ringing in its declaration of our centricity and uniqueness as anything that has come out of the Church in the last three to five hundred years. And remember that because of that kind of certainty, Galileo had been persecuted and Copernicus didn’t say anything about us orbiting the sun until he was on his deathbed. It was the official pronouncement of the cardinal of the community, that all this nonsense about other humanoid beings or parallel evolution was just that, nonsense; that you could not be scientific and still believe it. You have to read the paper; it is the most interesting piece of scientific hubris that I have seen in probably the last twenty years. From a data point of “one,” namely the earth, it extended its way to the observable universe! On the basis of Simpson’s rather emphatic plea, there were no more papers on the independent appearance of the humanoid for… truncated (41,479 more characters in archive)