Continued
Continued
5-30-01
Overhead Photo of "Face" Released: Natural or Artificial?
Complete overhead view of the "Face," showing eastern side previously obscured by shadow.
1. The Face: What Is It?
The acquisition of a complete, overhead view of the Face on Mars is a historic occasion that demands caution and scrutiny.
Since the remarkably detailed new image hit the Net, I've encountered a great deal of confusion and disillusionment on behalf of the justifiably curious public as well as from the self-appointed "experts," who have offered us the predictable stew of negative sound-bites and extremely little actual science. Saying "it's a hill" without recourse to geological evidence does not make the Face a hill, just as a finger pointing at the Moon is not the Moon.
Critics have unanimously declared the Face "natural" because the newly revealed eastern side of the formation is not a perfect match with the familiar western half, despite the fact that no Face investigator ever suspected such a match. The relatively chaotic morphology of the eastern half has been amply demonstrated from the beginning.
1976 image (Viking 70A13) showing morphology of Face's eastern side in shadow.
Indeed, the variation between halves was made quite clear in Viking frame 70A13 in 1976. Richard Hoagland would later use this image to posit his "feline double-image" hypothesis.
Viking frame 70A13 shown side by side with the new Face image. Claims to the contrary notwithstanding, the new image has not been altered or manipulated.
As demonstrated by Chris Joseph, the Face retains a remarkable degree of symmetry. "Eye sockets" are present on both sides, as are the right-angled extensions of the "framing mesa." While NASA assures us that symmetrical rectilinear features appear elsewhere on Mars, the agency has yet to produce a single image that would defend this contention.
Right angles are extremely rare in nature and the Face, whatever it represents, boasts enough of them to warrant careful archaeological inspection. The Face can be neatly divided down its centerline (as marked by the unusual "harelip" feature noticed by Mark Carlotto), confirming the base mesa's estimated 95% symmetry. This figure alone argues compellingly for artificial origin.
2. The Two Sides of the Face
There is no arguing that the respective sides of the Face are different, and in this sense I concur somewhat with the skeptics. The amorphic appearance of the eastern half can be attributed to any of the following factors:
1.) Erosion. The eastern side's relative irregularity may be the result of wasting and/or wind/water erosion. Lan Fleming has noted that the smooth appearance of the Face's eastern side seems inconsistent with mass wasting as a geological mechanism. This theory presupposes that the Face was at one point more human-like.
2.) Structural decay. If the Face is an intentional sculpture, the eastern side's irregularity may be due to literal collapse of the Face's surface, implying a hollow interior. Fine-scale details described by Robert Harrison of Cydonia Quest suggest this might be a useful scenario in furthering our understanding of the Face mesa's origins.
3.) Intentional design. If Richard Hoagland's "double image" model is correct, the "irregularity" may be no such thing, but an intentional aesthetic element identical to certain visages carved by the ancient Mayans.
I find the "double-image" possibility well worth pursuing. We suffer a limiting tendency to forget that the Face, if artificial, may never have been built for "us" at all, but strictly for the society that built it. If the "encoded" message of the Cydonia Face references hominids and felines, then confirmation may only come after on-site archaeological study.
3. The "Null Hypothesis"
Of course, debunkers will maintain that the options above are merely attempts to dismiss the fact that the Face is not "perfect." But again, no one seriously pursuing this enigma ever expected such a thing. The Face presents a wealth of anomaly just the way it is; there is no need to invoke wishful speculative models in an attempt to bury the Artificiality Hypothesis -- especially when we finally have the data Mars anomalists have been clamoring for.
If the Face is artificial, then we will probably not know for sure until a manned mission to the Cydonia Mensae region. The new image has forced us to confront the Face on its own terms; announcements "confirming" the Artificiality Hypothesis and those relegating the Face to freak geology are premature and betray our limited ability to make sense of potential extraterrestrial artifacts. I sincerely hope future efforts to make sense of the Cydonian enigmas are carried out by proper investigation as opposed to "science by proclamation," as witnessed by NASA's recent comments.
6-02-01
The Two-Sided Face
Ten years ago, Richard Hoagland theorized that the notorious Face on Mars, instead of being a simple likeness of a human being (or similar hominid), actually encoded hominid and feline forms. For evidence, he presented a mirrored version of a "local contrast stretch" image produced by Mark Carlotto, which succeeded in bringing out the shadowy eastern side. The frame Hoagland worked with, 70A13, was marred by an annoying camera registration mark that tended to detract from a facial likeness, feline or otherwise.
The local contrast stretch image used by Hoagland to arrive at the "feline hypothesis."
When Hoagland presented his unusual theory to the United Nations a decade ago, I felt the "feline" aspect was probably a result of reading too much into the scant data. Only a new, high-resolution photo could properly frame the controversy.
That photo has now been taken, and preliminary analysis suggests that the "feline" appearance discernable in the 1976 image is a real phenomenon. The Face, while consistently facelike in a gross sense, does not appear to be a strictly human visage. Like many "split-image" motifs constructed by ancient cultures here on Earth, it seems to represent a fusion of humanoid and animal features (see photo section below).
The Face (as seen in 1976) subjected to simulated changes in lighting. Certain frames reveal a vague "feline" appearance.
While it has been apparent from the beginning that the Face wasn't perfectly bisymmetrical, it nevertheless retained a convincing facelike appearance under a wide variety of lighting angles, as demonstrated by Mark Carlotto's increasingly sophisticated shape-from-shading renditions. When the "catbox" image of the Face arrived in April of 1998, Cydonia researchers immediately voiced disappointment in the angle and lighting, which made assessing the Face mesa in its entirety effectively impossible.
Although attempts to orthorectify the Mars Global Surveyor's substandard image provided tantalizing detail of the Face's "dark half," the overall facial appearance was still relied on sophisticated computer imaging. Mark Kelly's enhancement -- an eerily compelling frontal rendition made by "stretching" the available detail on the first MGS photo and adding shadows to simulate Viking light conditions--remained the most definitive photographic reconstruction of the Face until late May of 2001, when the mesa was finally rephotographed.
The final product of Kelly's enhancement and the properly contrasted MGS image is a peculiarly schizophrenic visage. Digitally "mirroring" the Face's western half reveals an ape-like "proto-human" face complete with anatomically accurate "eye," "brow," "lips," "chin," and "nostril." The eastern half yields a cat-like face including a feline "nose," "nostril" and an indication of anatomical structure near what might be an eroded "mouth." Also visible is a slitted "eye" (albeit with no visible internal structure) and sloping "forehead." The strange semi-triangular groove seen on the eastern "headdress" in the 1998 Face photo begins to look more than a little like a stylized "ear." As with the proto-human elements comprising the western side, the various features conspiring to form the feline visage appear in proper proportion and are not the result of selective choosing. The "harelip" feature noted by Mark Carlotto on the 1998 image, estimated to lie at the exact lateral center of the Face mesa, appears to serve as a "dividing line" for the split-image motif.
Geologist Ron Nicks suggests that the eastern side may be the most well-preserved of the two, with evidence of a structural casing beginning to crack and peel away under millennia of eastward Martian winds. An identical phenomenon afflicts the Great Pyramid in Egypt, underlining the argument for the Face being an intentionally constructed work of art as opposed to a fluke of erosion.
The riddle posed by the newly unveiled Face on Mars smacks of strangeness, calling our planetary identity into question. Viewed from our frustrating vantage in Mars orbit, the Face appears to be an interplanetary chimera -- a literal sphinx. I suspect that unraveling its riddle will be neither easy nor comfortable for those rooted in the slowly unraveling certainty that we are -- and always have been -- alone in the solar neighborhood.
Both sides of the Face mirrored, revealing "hominid" and "feline" aspects, as predicted by Richard Hoagland.
These digital "transparencies" by Chris Joseph were created by mirroring the Face's respective halves...
Superimposing the two transparencies (above) results in this extremely facelike likeness, demonstrating the close resemblance of the eastern half to the familiar western half. The Face displays compelling underlying symmetry.
The Face's mirrored halves (top) correspond with the design behind this two-faced Mayan mask (center), in which a human and cat face are merged, resulting in two new visages (bottom). (Thanks to George J. Haas of The Cydonia Institute.)
This hand-crafted Iroquois mask is a similar example of an intentionally asymmetrical face. Interestingly, by NASA's logic, this mask could not possibly be man-made since it is not perfectly symmetrical.
6-7-01
Intriguing Convex Feature in Crater
This "Epcot Center"-like dome lies in the center of a Martian crater. False-color rendering by Mike Lomax.
The unusual convex feature above features ridges strongly reminescent of a Buckminster Fuller dome or the dimples of a golfball.
6-8-01
Faceted "Wall" Discovered
Trish Anderson has discovered an interesting faceted wall-like feature not too far from Cydonia. Like the "Octagon" (featured on a previous page), the "wall" features unexpectedly sharp angles. If Mars was once inhabitated by intelligent beings, additional suggestions of structure like Anderson's "wall" may ecentually be found in abundance.
Reader Bill Dasheff, noting the symmetry of the "wall" on Trish Anderson's website, posits that it may be evidence of defensive architecture:
"The [faceted "wall"] is eerily reminiscent of 18th and 19th century forts. Important fortresses of this period were commonly constructed using this shape. On our planet, the 'star' configuration is what's known as a 'defilading design.'
"'Defilading,' in military architecture, is a careful arrangement of defenses, where walls or breast works are laid out in a series of protrusions, often wedge shaped. This configuration, permits a defender to create zones of interlocking fire. The result is that no matter from which direction an enemy advances, his forces are always held under a 'withering crossfire.' The attacker is thus unable to easily mount a frontal assault upon any side, while also being denied the opportunity to stand off and deliver raking or enfilading fire.
"The long snaking trenches of WWI with their characteristic 'dental' pattern, is yet another method of defilading design.
"Of course, with the advent of long range artillery, and then tanks, aircraft and paratroops, static defenses like forts and trenches obviously went the way of the do-do. Just ask the Iraqi army.
"Who knows, perhaps it might be a derelict stronghold, from a period of Martian history, before they became a hi-technology culture.
"Or maybe it's just a odd pile of dirt...which I highly doubt."
