by Mac Tonnies
The Fort looks weathered, defeated. Its eastern side is riddled with small, shallow craters that terminate as abruptly as the holes left from a burst of machine-gun fire. Indeed, it’s easy to imagine that you’re examining the sterile ruins of some unimaginable conflict. The reddish soil beneath your feet reminds you of blood.
Behind the toppled Fort, the City Pyramid casts an enormous triangular shadow across the cold sand. Seen from the surface, the City Pyramid looks less pyramidal than from above; it lacks the fine-edged steepness and immaculate casing of the pyramids in Egypt. But there is no mistaking its enormity, or the huge facets that give it its peculiar five-sided shape.
For a moment, the sense of scale overwhelms you. Comparing the City Pyramid to its Egyptian counterparts is useful only in the most superficial context; the City Pyramid is far larger than anything dreamt by ancient Egyptians. Mankind’s largest monuments could fit within the City Pyramid many times over. But is the City Pyramid a “monument” in the familiar sense? Its vast size—and the seemingly imploded remains of the adjacent Fort—brings to mind immense enclosures of some kind. Perhaps insulated cities that once teemed with motion, sheltered from the diminished sky.
You strain your eyes looking for evidence of an opening, some crack in the pyramid’s rocky veneer, but see nothing blatantly artificial: no crumbling smokestacks poking from the massed sand at the pyramid’s base, no derelict earth-movers or frozen Martian corpses.
This pullback from the Face reveals additional features of interest, including the “City Pyramid,” the “D&M Pyramid,” and other anomalous formations. Courtesy of NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology/Malin Space Science Systems.
Blinking away afterimages, you turn southwest to the distant bulk of the D&M Pyramid. Named after the initials of its codiscoverers, computer imaging specialists Vincent DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar, the D&M shares the City Pyramid’s five-sided configuration and features a shallow, tapered buttress that gives it the general appearance of a colossal arrowhead with symmetrical sides.
Seen in high-resolution, the D&M’s surface is not the smooth finish found elsewhere in Cydonia. Rather, its shallow incline is swollen and cracked, as if once molten. Despite this, no signs of volcanism are apparent. An unknown dark, sooty material has settled into fine-scale fractures, with a thick concentration near what researchers have referred to as a “domed uplift,” thought by some to represent an ancient internal explosion.
Interestingly, there seems to be a tunnel-like opening into the D&M. If the D&M is an extraterrestrial structure, then perhaps you’ll find evidence there proving beyond doubt that civilized Martians once existed, ending centuries of raging debate about the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Far to the east, past the brooding Face, you come across the Cliff, a tapered mesa with a well-defined rectilinear ramp running most of its length. Like the Fort, the Cliff parallels the Face’s axis of symmetry. And it appears to have been constructed atop a crater ejecta blanket; a maze of grooved fissures in the terrain nearest the crater suggests a mining operation or quarry. But for what purpose?
Exactly south of the Cliff is the “Tholus,” a dome-like feature with what looks like an eroded ramp winding up its side and topped by a triangular formation situated on a shallow five-sided platform.
Standing on the Tholus and looking out across the desert, you notice that the platform is aimed at a single landmark—the Face, its partially collapsed southeast quadrant exposed like a festering wound to the atmosphere’s embalming chill.
Whisked back to Martian orbit, you take a long look at the scarred landscape rotating slowly far below. With sufficient magnification, the relics of past robotic expeditions can be seen littering its surface under a film of red dust. Dead rivers mingle like fossilized capillaries; extinct shield volcanoes rake the thin amber sky, oozing halos of snow-white carbon dioxide. Deep within the ravaged crease of Valles Marineris—to which the Grand Canyon is but a scratch—liquid water flows in small amounts, wetting the soil for a hypothesized microbial ecology.
With the land surface area of Earth and a frozen ocean caged beneath its unassuming surface, Mars could be Earth after some environmental holocaust.
The Red Planet has a right to be angry.
The Face
The Face on Mars has become a fixture of Space Age iconography. Despite repeated efforts by NASA officialdom to remove it from the museum of our collective psyche, it remains a star attraction, promising the alien vistas denied us when Venus and Mars were shown to be bleak, unforgiving worlds, bereft of civilizations.
The Face could be a shrine from an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, or a prop from some never-filmed science fiction epic. It is more than geomorphology; it is myth, eliciting the desire to believe.
But believe in what, exactly? Extrasolar aliens? Ancient astronauts?
If the Face is artificial, then its implications promise to redefine who we think we are. It could be a Bronze Age monument built by indigenous Martians, or it could be a component in a solar system-wide menagerie of artifacts waiting to be discovered. The Face is more of an invitation than any sort of declarative answer, not to mention a philosophical can of worms.
Ironically enough, official reticence to deal with the Face objectively might have more than a little to do with the disquieting possibility that it might be real. Proponents of the search for extraterrestrial radio signals (SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) never fail to point out that the discovery of intelligent life in space would be a momentous opportunity, every bit as profound and far-reaching as the Copernican revolution.
But the aliens in SETI’s theoretical arena are almost impossibly distant, whereas the Face and related anomalies are virtually next door. This introduces an element of shock not found in SETI’s statistical analyses by giving the prospect of ET intelligence an uncomfortably human face.
Partial photo of the Face taken in 2002. Although the resolution is inferior to the Surveyor’s 2001 image, this image is unaffected by failed attempts to correct for viewing angle, making this one of the most representative images of the Face. It also shows the western “eye” formation in detail, as highlighted by Society for Planetary SETI Research member J. P. Levasseur. Courtesy of NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology/Malin Space Science Systems. “Eye” sketch by J. P. Levasseur.
The Face photographed in its entirety in 2001. Each half of the formation possesses a unique texture, evidence of prevailing winds scouring the right side and depositing a cushion of sand on the left side, which has partially collapsed. Courtesy of NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology/ Malin Space Science Systems.
A popular SETI maxim has it that extraterrestrial contact, if it occurs, will be unbearably strange. Yet possible ruins on Mars have been rejected precisely because they’re strange, like the works of some celestial practical joker bent on overturning the early twenty-first century scientific zeitgeist. The Face is as challenging from an epistemological perspective as it is from an exobiological vantage; if real, it promises to rewrite not only our science books, but our own role in the cosmos.
Dismissal of the Face has always been founded on emotional bias rather than evidence—or, at worst, outright character assassination of those who would have us take a closer look. Attempting to methodically study the Cydonia region and present findings to the public has been a strange and enduring spectacle: it’s The X-Files as conceived by Kafka.
Independent researchers of disparate disciplines have offered compelling circumstantial evidence to support a non-natural origin for the Face, only to have the scientific mainstream offer characteristic scoffing rebuttals. But the controversy over the Face that has raged since the formation’s discovery in 1976 has never been successfully shouldered aside. The mystery of the Face seems fueled by a force almost Jungian in its tenacity.
It took twenty-six years for NASA to admit that it had never co
nducted a scientific survey of the Face, so its vehemently negative estimation of the Cydonia region was baseless from the beginning. But the damage to the subject had been done, hastened by a pop science media eager to flaunt its own self-proclaimed skepticism.
Skeptics among the ever-present debunking contingent have capitalized on the propensity of the brain to “see” apparent faces based on visual cues (e.g., faces in clouds, the Man in the Moon, or Carl Sagan’s Jesus in a tortilla chip). Some argue that the Face and apparent structures on Mars are seen only because the viewers have higher-than-average levels of dopamine, a neurochemical that augments the ability to read meaning into disparate stimuli. But the skeptical media ignored the argument’s obvious corollary: viewers with lower-than-average dopamine levels don’t perceive likenesses that really do exist.
The difficulty with resolving the controversy surrounding the Face is twofold. First is the limitation of telerobotic cameras operated by a science team openly hostile to the possibility that Cydonia is anything more than a pile of rocks.
Second, it seems our own neurological and psychological predispositions play a significant role in our ability to investigate potential extraterrestrial structures. While an archaeologist used to examining aerial or orbital photographs in search of archaeological sites might have an inclination to discern intelligently constructed features, the geological survey team in charge of the Surveyor is less likely to take note of the unexpected—unless, of course, it’s extremely obvious. But archaeological sites are seldom obvious. Until relatively recently, some Native American earthworks, such as the grass-covered ritual mounds of Ohio, were thought to be naturally occurring hills. Inspecting an alien landscape in search of ruins—built by a hypothetical civilization about which we know nothing—presents an unprecedented challenge to science.
If we are to take the search for extraterrestrial intelligence seriously, we must be willing to investigate exotic avenues, not merely wait placidly in the hopes that a passing radio transmission will betray the existence of extrasolar aliens. Unfortunately, the Face has come to epitomize fringe science—that twilit realm of fact and speculation that hovers like a fine smoke at the edges of accepted paradigms.
The Face is a mile-long rectilinear mesa with an unusually symmetrical framing platform popularly dubbed the “headdress.” This headdress appears as a close-fitting helmet in Viking orbiter images, prompting parallels with the ancient astronauts of Erich von Däniken.
On its western side, the Face features a parted “mouth” with evidence of eroded “lips,” a protruding, almost simian “brow,” “nostril,” and a readily discernable “eye” complete with conical “iris.” The eastern side of the Face is less humanoid. Nevertheless, it is hauntingly face-like, with a slit “eye,” continuation of the mouth, a nostril-like feature situated next to its western counterpart, and a “chin” area that has apparently collapsed inward in several places.
Near the chin, a rectangular piece of the face’s framing mesa appears to have vanished, leaving behind a number of anomalous dark parallel lines. Repeated imaging of the Face shows that the lines remain stationary, arguing that they are “fixed” features and not deposits of dark dust, which would likely be erased by wind.
To the south of the “missing” rectangle is a crescent-shaped crevasse. Analysis suggests the crevasse could be as deep as a forty-story building, in which case the Face may be hollow or porous, as might be expected from a sophisticated sculpture. Together with the sunken regions on the chin, the crevasse is evidence of interior structure caught in the act of decay.
Advocates of artificiality typically view the Face as a modified mesa, constructed from “carving” an existing landform to architectural tolerances rather than building from scratch. In this sense, debunkers who insist the Face is merely a mesa are most likely correct.
There are obvious signs of erosion at work on the Face. The eastern brow appears to have slumped, and an apparent buildup of sand gives the eastern half a smooth finish. Prevailing winds have left the more human-looking western half bare and rocky, with the porous texture expected from rock after long exposure to airborne sand. Unfortunately, the build-up on the eastern side obscures the continuation of the mouth feature, giving the Face an oddly chimeric appearance. When high-resolution images from the Surveyor showed the Face in its entirety, some disillusioned viewers insisted that the Face had somehow managed to change shape since its Viking mug shot in 1976. This misperception is easy to trace; in the most widely circulated Viking image of the Face, the eastern portion is mostly in shadow, leaving the mind to fill in additional facial details. A careful look at Viking’s high sun-angle image shows that while the mouth deviates slightly from the west side, it corresponds to Surveyor imagery.
While the facial resemblance is subjective, the Face possesses additional characteristics amenable to quantitative analysis. Digital image scientist Mark J. Carlotto surveyed the Cydonia region using a computer program designed to test for nonfractality. Nonfractality is a feature’s relative “non-naturalness” based on the geometry of surrounding topology. Natural surface features such as mountains and beaches maintain a strong fractal signature, while manufactured objects (even when camouflaged) tend to register as nonfractal. During the first Gulf War, computers applying this technology were able to identify Iraqi military vehicles without assistance from human operators.
Carlotto hypothesized that if the Face was an artificial sculpture, it should have a noticeable nonfractal signature. Not surprisingly to artificiality proponents, the Face showed the highest nonfractal rating in the region, seconded by the nearby Fort.
Critics of the Face are left with an engaging paradox. While it is certainly possible to “see faces” when presented with unfamiliar geology (an argument ritualistically employed by Carl Sagan before softening somewhat on the Cydonia issue before his death), it’s certainly odd that a subjectively artificial-looking landform should also appear strange to an impartial computer program.
The fractality of a given surface feature is relative, not proof of artificial construction. But Carlotto’s results forcefully imply that the Face deserves a very careful examination. At the very least, the Face’s nonfractal signature demonstrates that the Face is at odds with the surrounding landscape. Even if the Face is a freak of erosion, its strange topology should contain much to tell us about Mars’s tantalizing geology. Upon seeing the first new image of the Face in April of 1998, one geologist remarked: “The Face on Mars is almost certainly natural, but I wish it was artificial so I could explain it” [emphasis mine].
Astronomer Tom Van Flandern, founder and president of Meta Research in Washington, D.C., conducted another noteworthy test for artificiality. Working from the hypothesis that the Face was an intentional representation of a terrestrial hominid, Van Flandern predicted from 1976 Viking images that future high-resolution images of the feature should reveal secondary detail consistent with megascale sculpture. Specifically, Van Flandern predicted the presence of an eye-like feature (now confirmed), nostrils (also confirmed) and further anthropomorphic detail years before such features were visible.
Van Flandern carefully avoided the pitfall of selective choosing. For example, if the Face was riddled with small craters, each the proportionate size of a nostril, then it would be possible to simply choose the most nostril-like crater and present it as evidence. But the Face features only one small nostril-like “pit”—right where a nostril should be if the Face were created to look like a face.
Likewise, the eye, a shallow almond-shaped basin with a blunt, cone-like protrusion sheltered beneath the heavy brow, appears singularly eye-like. By taking into account apparent lips and “eyebrows,” Van Flandern came to the controversial conclusion that the Face was artificial beyond reasonable doubt, adding that he had never committed himself to such odds at any other time in his scientific career. While it’s certainly possible to disagree with Van Flandern’s conclusion, his a priori argument nevertheless carries the weig
ht of established scientific methodology.
The porous western side of the Face features a small rectilinear structure with what appears to be a narrow, enclosed interior. Such fine-scale detail is wholly inconsistent with geologically derived models, and invites speculation. The rectilinear feature may be an inexplicable decorative adornment or it may be a clue to the Face’s true function.
The Face may have once been an inhabited structure. The shadowy crevasse and partially collapsed chin certainly suggest a hollow interior. Given the presence of additional enigmas in the region, such as the Fort and D&M Pyramid, it’s tempting to envision Cydonia as a sort of megalithic refugee camp, with subterranean habitats serving as bunkers for a beleaguered race. Water erosion on the sides of the Face’s framing mesa indicates the Face was once an island, rising above the Cydonian sea like the head of a drowning god. Seen from the City, the Face’s reflection would have reflected downwards in a stunning mile-long double image. Inhabitants of the Fort would have had an especially spectacular view, as would anyone standing in the vicinity of the “City Square,” a group of small structures huddled among the City Pyramid and other City formations.
If the Face was designed to beckon from the Martian surface as well as from above, then it apparently served an important cultural function. Humanoid faces must have had some meaning to the City’s inhabitants. What did it symbolize? Could the Face be something as trivial and anthropocentric as a monument built to commemorate some Martian ruler? Or is the Face intentionally generic, representative of an entire race?
Some researchers have postulated that the Face’s relatively amorphic eastern half was deliberately left unfinished. This makes sense if the Face was meant to be seen from the direction on the City; computer-generated synthetic views show that the Face remains quite face-like when seen from the surface.
