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major enemy would be boredom. That and secret NASA plans to blow
you up.
No scientist I know has ever regarded the face as anything but a ran-
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dom rock formation that looks vaguely facelike in a distant photograph
with a certain angle of light. But many don’t see it this way. In books,
magazine articles, Web forums, conferences, and television exposés,
proponents of the face-on-Mars conspiracy present detailed analyses
showing that the face and surrounding “monuments” in the Cydonia
region of Mars—eroded pyramids and the like—are constructed in
ways that show clear signs of intelligent design.*
The supreme test of the face on Mars, for believers and skeptics
alike, became possible in April 1998 when Mars Global Surveyor,
which had begun mapping the Red Planet, had an opportunity to take
the first close-up images of the Cydonia region. Within NASA some
debated whether we should shoot the face (with cameras, I mean!),
because this might be seen as legitimizing the question of an artificial
construction. Proponents of the face would portray the mere repho-
tographing as a victory. Of course we should shoot the face. Better to
show that Mars has nothing to hide, and neither do we. Besides, what-
ever we found there would either completely embarrass the face people
and shut them up for good, or else we’d uncover the greatest mystery of
all time. Either would be a positive result.
Here’s what the MGS pictures showed:
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*Ironically, the preeminent “researcher” and popularizer of the face is Richard Hoagland, the man credited by Carl Sagan with the idea of including an interstellar message on Pioneer 10 and also one of the first people to suggest there might be life in Europa’s ocean.
The borderline between science and pseudoscience can be porous.
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There you have it. It’s a jumbled, eroded mountain. Not a face. Case
closed, and we can move on to other things, right?
Wrong.
The hard-core face community was ready to “save the phenomenon”
at all costs. If these features were not in the pictures, then something had
to be wrong with the pictures. The face people spun elaborate theories,
implicating NASA in faking and altering the pictures, or even sending up
a nuclear bomb to destroy the face before MGS got there.
Nothing is inherently absurd about the basic premise of finding some
kind of monuments on Mars. As I’ve already discussed, there is no
good logical reason why we shouldn’t find alien artifacts anywhere in
the solar system. On the contrary, there are good arguments for the
possibility of such artifacts. Remember, all it takes is one rapidly
spreading galactic civilization, or one successful launch of a fleet of self-copying interstellar Von Neumann machines, to have swept through
our entire galaxy long ago turning asteroids into more probes. If they
were ever here, they might have left something behind. So, yes, of
course we should look for the unexpected, the seemingly engineered.
“But why a human face?” is a good skeptical question, but one that
is not hard to answer with a pulp-fiction imagination. Maybe the mon-
ument builders were themselves humanoid or wished to communicate
something to humans once we were ready to find it.
Yet the face on Mars is a classic example of pseudoscience: Proponents
are so committed to a theory that they don’t really care about new data or
find a way to twist the data to support the answer they’ve already chosen.
They are willing to seize on the slightest hint of monuments in an area of
eroded rock formations, and to uncover “contradictions” in “official
statements” that seem in some convoluted way to support their theories.
At the same time, they have a remarkable ability to ignore a wealth of evi-
dence that completely rules out their claims.
The presentation is also classic pseudoscience. Their tracts are full of
equations and complex-sounding phrases that appear scientific, until
you actually work your way through them and you find either complete
nonsense (doesn’t say anything) or complete bullshit (intended to
deceive). I think that some of the purveyors know exactly what is going
on. They are peddling theories they don’t believe themselves, and that is
the definition of hucksterism.
Conspiracy theorists are convinced that Dr. Ed Weiler, NASA Associate
Administrator for Space Sciences, is personally hiding information about
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life on Mars. This actually came up at an SSES meeting* at NASA head-
quarters, when Weiler (whom the committee reports to) was briefing us
on the status of the Mars Exploration Program. He mentioned that he
was being besieged with messages and accusations about the face and
NASA’s cover-up of it.
Why should NASA want to hide a discovery of life on Mars? It would
be the most astounding success NASA could ever hope for, the ultimate
validation of its reason to be, and a sure solution to our funding prob-
lems. Even the notion that NASA could hide something that important
is silly. I’ve worked at a NASA research center, and I can tell you exactly
how long an order to maintain silence about something on Mars would
last, if you tell me how long it takes to type it out and hit “send.”
What these people don’t understand is that, more than anything, I
wish they were right. It is my secret fantasy that when, in the interest of
fairness, I spend a few moments on their Web sites, I will find myself
saying, “Now, wait a minute! There really is something there. Why
haven’t I seen this pyramid before?” I would be on the phone in sec-
onds calling my friends on the Mars Orbiter Camera team. If I encoun-
tered any obstruction whatsoever, I would call the press immediately
and report that government scientists were hiding important findings
from the American people. Hundreds like me would do just the same.
Science has, in the past, missed important discoveries by dismissing
ideas that seemed too far out there, or too good to be true (such as con-
tinental drift, for instance). Reading history encourages us to be open
to thinking outside the box, to at least consider frameworks within
which fringe ideas could be true. These face people and their ilk only
encourage us to ignore the fringes and, with the little time we have
before we become food for worms, focus on that which seems poten-
tially fruitful. They say they want to force NASA to open up and face
the truth. In reality they make us clamp down our filters more tightly,
which could someday actually make us miss something important.
C I R C L E M A K E R S
There is a bit of a parallel here with the crop circles that some people
think are created by aliens. You know what I’m talking about: the
*NASA’s Solar System Exploration Subcommittee, which I served on from 1998 to 2002
(chapter 15).
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strange, often quite lovely, geometrical patterns that show up overnight
in English wheat fields (and sometimes elsewhere as well).
The crop circle mystery turned out to be an ingenious hoax. Well, not a
hoax exactly, but an art project in which the perpetrators, believers,
debunkers, and journalists all played their roles and continue to do so.
The artists Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, of Southampton, England,
came out in 1991 and confessed to making the crop circles. They demon-
strated how they had done it, cleverly wielding boards and rope, and how
others could join the fun. Their many worthy successors, who call them-
selves the circlemakers, continue to create beautiful, increasingly intricate
patterns in nocturnal excursions into fields of wheat and other crops.
Naturally, some believers just became more adamant that crop circles
had to be the work of extraterrestrials. The hoaxers, they said, were
themselves a hoax, perhaps employed by the government. They might
even be alien agents. The crop circles are real and contain important
messages from other intelligences.
The remarkable performance goes on. Sometimes I worry that the
debunkers who don’t get the joke might be too successful. Only after they
succeed in entirely wiping out the irrational scourge of crop circles will
they realize that they have helped kill off an art form. On the other “side”
are those who believe that the circles are alien signals of an approaching
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earth energy transformation in which we’ll, um, you know, all vibrate
together to a higher plane and join the ascended masters with their ser-
pent knowledge. You don’t want that side to be too successful either, or
some cereologist cult might take over the world and force us to worship
wheat. I suppose the current dynamic between strident debunkers and
earnest circle believers is healthy. It gives the circlemakers a reason to
carry on, bless them, and provides fine family entertainment for the rest
of us. Long live crop circles.
D I S C L O S U R E
When I heard that the highly publicized start of the Campaign for
Disclosure tour in June 2001 was going to be held at the University of
Colorado, in Boulder, I decided to attend as a receptive fly on the wall,
rather than as a skeptical scientist. I’m not saying that I left all of my criti-
cal faculties in the trunk, but part of me was thinking, “Do the experiment
honestly. Don’t write it off without listening. Maybe you’ll be surprised.”
In the lobby outside the auditorium a phalanx of eager and earnest
Disclosure Project volunteers gave out literature and sold books, videos,
and CDs containing massive amounts of witness testimony about gov-
ernment UFO secrets. As the audience jammed the auditorium, I let
myself get caught up in the palpable excitement in the air. Here I was in
a room packed with people all enthralled by some of the same questions
that most intrigue me. Like them, I wanted to learn something new and
inspiring about alien contact.
The last time I had been in that same lecture hall (Chem 140), it was
for a public panel discussion about SETI, with scientists from the SETI
Institute and the NASA Astrobiology Institute. Although attendance
was higher at the Disclosure meeting, the audience looked similar. It
was a classic Boulder crowd: well-heeled hippies with carefully matted
dreadlocks falling over designer tie-dyes, bespectacled academics toting
tattered notebooks, and smatterings of spandex, bike helmets, laptops,
dogs, beards and peasant dresses (not necessarily on the same person
but not necessarily not), the occasional whiff of patchouli oil or pot
(but absolutely no tobacco smoking, under pain of death).*
*Boulder is a bubble town nestled against the mountains thirty miles northwest of Denver.
It’s sort of like the city in Logan’s Run, a pleasant place, and anybody who is unhappy or unattractive or too old or unwealthy is recycled, and used to grow organic, free-range fruits and vegetables.
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The Disclosure audience seemed more engaged and excited than the
folks at the SETI symposium. Something stronger was calling them on.
Although the auditorium was sweltering on that sunny afternoon in June,
every seat was taken and people were crammed in the aisles and doorways.
The Disclosure Project is an offshoot of CSETI, the Center for the
Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which has no official relationship
to the SETI Institute. None whatsoever. CSETI was founded in 1990 by
Dr. Steven Greer, a former emergency-room physician from Virginia,
who now devotes all his time to uncovering and spreading the truth
about secret government involvement with aliens.
As we waited for the program to begin, slides looped on a giant screen,
depicting grainy saucer- and cigar-shaped spacecraft photographed against
scenic backdrops. The event officially began with “an exclusive showing of
a two-hour video of fifty government and military witnesses to UFO and
extraterrestrial events and projects.” The video was a seemingly endless
parade of sincere people earnestly testifying about the incredible things
they had witnessed and government efforts to keep them quiet. They had
sighted craft, witnessed crashed saucers and alien bodies, and even person-
ally encountered alien beings. The witnesses included retired military per-
sonnel, retired intelligence officers, retired commercial airline pilots, acad-
emics, flight controllers, FAA officials, and NASA people whom I had
never heard of, except for one astronaut who is a well-known supporter of
numerous esoteric and mystical causes and who seems to me to long ago
have left his powers of discrimination in orbit.*
We were told matter-of-factly about numerous saucer landings and
crashes and top-secret branches of the military that have known about this
for decades. A daytime landing at Edwards Air Force Base in the 1950s was
filmed, but the film is hidden or lost somewhere at the Pentagon. An Air
Force sergeant told us about giant artificial structures discovered on the
back side of the Moon, including large geometric shapes, towers, and
spherical buildings. Someone has been on the Moon before us.
At this point, suspending my disbelief became more difficult, because
I know the Moon. Assuming the soundness of my basic framework of
reality, which I do assume, the giant structures on the Moon are not
there. My attempted open-mindedness began to crumble and my criti-
cal inner voice began to crack jokes against my will.
*I did, later on, do Web searches on several of the witnesses, and the ones I checked seemed to be more or less who they say they are.
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One witness was repeatedly identified in captions as a “McDonald
Douglass Engineer,” which made me wonder whether he worked in
aerospace or fast food. Then it all clicked: of course, McDonald’s, dead
cows, aliens. It’s the military/
industrial/fast-food/aerospace/alien com-
plex. That kinky humanoid Ronald McDonald has been sent here to
lure our children into eating mutilated alien beef.
They had even managed to videotape some guy with a cosmic top-
secret clearance. Only about twenty-five people have one. Not even the
president has this level of authorization. (So who the heck decides who
gets it—the alien overlords?)
After the two-hour video of witness testimony, Dr. Greer himself,
flanked by a few acolytes, appeared to deafening applause. Greer is
charismatic. You like him. Before he said a thing, I found myself want-
ing to be receptive to his message. He explained that he is just a country
doctor from Virginia who has been swept up in incredible events. And
he did look like a doctor on rounds. Handsome and bespectacled, with
a receding hairline, conservative tie, and a pen in his pocket, you would
trust him with your family’s health. The guy is built, too. His shirt-
sleeves were rolled up, revealing impressive Popeye forearms.
A natural motivational speaker, he is relaxed, sympathetic, passion-
ate, self-deprecating, and witty. Confident, cadenced phrases hang on
important words in a way that gently commands your continued atten-
tion. He sat casually on the lab desk at the front of the room, legs dan-
gling, and smoothly, without notes, addressed the hushed room.
Dr. Greer began by identifying his message with the good ol’ princi-
ple of plenitude: In such a huge universe, how could we possibly be
alone? Then he said solemnly that what he was going to tell us about
was nothing less than the greatest secret of the twentieth century. He
asked us to imagine the realistic possibility of achieving a world with-
out poverty, pollution, conflict, or energy shortages, in our lifetime.
Sounds good to me.
All this was possible, he said, if only we could convince the powers
that be to release the secret knowledge that could make it happen.
S E C R E T S A N D L I E S
Then Greer connected the dots for us, putting all that witness testimony in
the context of a massive, decades-long conspiracy involving rogue elements
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of the U.S. government working in secret with extraterrestrial technology.
Several technologies that sound futuristic to us, it turns out, have been in