After the Martian Apocalypse

by Mac Tonnies

  And while the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s probes have reaped a scientific harvest, they fail to elicit any palpable sense of wonder. Devoid of passengers, they remain mere engineering marvels. When the Pathfinder lander touched down and relayed its first panorama of the Martian surface, there were no ticker tape parades. In fact, it seemed the only people actively interested in Pathfinder’s success was the team that had steered it to its destination.

  We have grown numb to the vistas of space; our solar system has been relegated to a sort of technological mythology in which planets are no longer places to visit in person, but abstractions of ones and zeroes painted across the computer monitors of a die-hard minority.

  The ever-inflating World Wide Web has revolutionized the way in which interested persons access NASA’s space science data. During the Apollo missions, NASA was perceived as monolithic and near-infallible, an avatar of the American exploratory spirit. The Internet has subverted NASA into a commodity to be downloaded. We no longer need to rely on the space agency for answers, and in the strange case of planetary SETI, all discoveries have been made by scientifically trained outsiders—originally by physically searching NASA archives and ultimately by accessing image files online.

  Enter the Anomalists

  The Mars anomaly community began to form into something like its present incarnation immediately after the Surveyor imaged the Face in 1998. Despite the image’s poor quality (and JPL’s apparent attempt to deliberately suppress detail by applying a high-pass filter), the Face catalyzed an online movement of epic cynicism. Trust in NASA’s ability to provide spin-free information of Cydonia, flimsy to begin with, dissolved almost completely, although the extent of NASA’s duplicity would await technical analyses a year or more later.

  As it became increasingly clear that NASA/JPL had little interest in providing Cydonia photography in a timely manner, as promised, claims of cover-up actually gained some of the credibility they had lacked in the past. For years, various individuals had claimed that NASA knew the Face was artificial and was covering up the fact for fear of widespread social panic.

  Richard Hoagland, who would serve as both self-professed expert and court jester on all things Martian in the years following Surveyor’s first image of the Face, promptly brought attention to an obscure paper known as the “Brookings report,” a scientific treatise on post-Apollo space affairs commissioned by NASA in the 1960s. Drafted by the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., the report specifically addressed measures to be taken in the event that extraterrestrial artifacts were discovered in our solar system.

  The report’s recommendations are disquieting. Citing indigenous human cultures overrun by more technologically advanced seafaring cultures, the Brookings team advocated that discoveries of ET artifacts be suppressed. The logic behind the Brookings report is somewhat schizophrenic. It’s obvious that the authors were convinced that ET artifacts, if they existed, would represent a technology far more advanced than our own. This was made explicit when the report remarked upon the debilitating effect disclosure would have on terrestrial scientists and engineers: why strive to better the human condition when someone else has already beaten you to all the pivotal discoveries?

  But the features on Mars, if artificial, aren’t necessarily high-tech. The “Cydonian Hypothesis” advanced by NASA plasma physicist John Brandenburg suggests that the civilization that built the Face was native to Mars, and perhaps technologically equivalent to earthly Bronze Age societies. Gravity on Mars is approximately one-third of Earth’s, so constructing large edifices there would be correspondingly easier. It’s difficult to understand how such structures could plunge our culture into technological malaise, as indicated by the Brookings report, although it’s easy to see how mainstream archaeology would find itself uprooted.

  The Brookings Institution’s high-tech interpretation of alien artifacts is directly traceable to the early estimations of Carl Sagan. Before the idea of prehistoric ET visitors became politically unconscionable (due in large part to the fauxarchaeology of sensationalist Erich von Däniken, author of Chariots of the Gods?), Sagan and others seriously considered the possibility of extraterrestrial structures in the solar neighborhood, among them the Martian moons.

  Sagan, after calculating the probable number of existing civilizations in our galaxy, proposed that visiting interstellar craft would likely pass through the solar system about once every twenty-thousand years. He offered the notion that some such visitors may have left behind automated bases; further, he considered it likely that such bases might be located on the surfaces of other worlds, where they would be spared Earth’s dynamic, highly erosive environment.

  This is, of course, the scenario adopted by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 2001, a lunar prospecting team is lured to a buried alien “monolith” by its deliberately anomalous magnetic signature. In this case, our visitors wanted their handiwork to be discovered. And as the movie’s climax reveals in psychedelic clarity, the aliens were very much our technological superiors, able to manipulate space and time in godlike fashion.

  Sagan himself addressed a similar scenario in his 1987 novel Contact, written after he had distanced himself from the prospect of crewed interstellar flight in favor of radio SETI. In Contact, scientists receive an irrefutably intelligent signal from deep space and begin the incredibly complex process of deciphering it. The ET transmission turns out to be none other than blueprints for a “stargate” essentially like that portrayed in 2001.

  There is a certain irony at work here. Sagan’s novel is widely viewed as a fictional endorsement of radio SETI, which he passionately advocated until his death. But proponents of radio SETI have been—at least, until very recently—academically hostile to the possibility of crewed interstellar flight, brandishing a number of porous, albeit superficially intimidating, arguments for why extraterrestrials cannot be expected to travel in the flesh.

  SETI’s leading lights have maintained that interstellar vehicles would be impractical and prohibitively expensive. If it was Sagan’s purpose in Contact to reiterate SETI’s paradigm, which conveniently excludes interstellar travel, introducing a space-time-tunneling “wormhole” into his novel seems like a potentially dangerous flaw.

  Then again, contradiction proved to be a hallmark of his professional career—up to and including Cydonia, which he trashed in a pop science hit piece published in Parade magazine. Unable or unwilling to examine the Cydonia controversy objectively, Sagan resorted to armchair debunking. According to Sagan, the Face was a mere trick of light. To drive this point home, he presented the Face in false color in a blatant attempt to render it decidedly un-face-like.

  Sagan strategically refrained from citing the work of Face researchers (including Mark Carlotto, who had contributed to Sagan’s Cosmos TV series) and ignored other anomalies in the Cydonia region. Without the benefit of context, his argument seemed sound enough to those not privy to the original Mars investigation, whose major players included journalist Richard Hoagland, image processors Mark Carlotto and Vincent DiPietro, and anthropologist Randolpho Pozos.

  Only years later, in the 1997 book The Demon-Haunted World, did Sagan warm to the prospect of a former civilization on Mars, correctly stating that the Artificiality Hypothesis was testable and therefore within the arena of scientific method. Although his commentary on the Face and other enigmas was burdened by some cliched notions and proven falsehoods, it was nonetheless refreshing to find a mainstream scientist addressing the Face outside of the shopworn skeptic vs. believer dichotomy.

  Ironically, it was Sagan who had first popularized the idea of megalithic architecture on Mars. In Cosmos, he draws attention to the Pyramids of Elysium—faceted pyramidal features that “deserve a closer look.” Surveyor images suggest that the Elysium Pyramids are, in fact, natural features. Nevertheless, Sagan’s willingness to even allude to the possibility of non-natural features on Mars demonstrates a degree of open-mindedness no
t evidenced in the Parade article.

  Hoagland and his Detractors

  Former NASA consultant and planetarium director Richard Hoagland has done more to catalyze the Face on Mars inquiry than anyone else. His seminal The Monuments of Mars was one of the first book-length treatments of the Cydonia controversy, and brought together a wealth of early research by Vincent DiPietro, John Brandenburg, Mark Carlotto, and other scientists.

  Monuments of Mars is a particularly worthy book due in no small part to Hoagland’s own role in the early, pre-Internet Cydonia controversy. Perhaps his most significant discovery was the presence of the City, which he described as a rectilinear arrangement of mostly pyramidal forms geometrically linked to the distant Face. The City—whatever it is—has since become a widely recognized component of the Artificiality Hypothesis, with two of its formations—the City Pyramid and the Fort—the subject of considerable discussion and analysis. In high resolution, the City Pyramid appears to be a five-sided structure similar to the D&M Pyramid farther south; the Fort, when viewed in synthetic perspective, appears imploded, suggesting a collapsed, possibly pyramidal formation.

  Hoagland’s underground stardom began to expand after the release of Hoagland’s Mars, a two-part video presentation of his lecture to the United Nations in the early 1990s. Hoagland’s Mars gained notice ten years later when Hoagland’s seemingly fringe notion that the Face’s right half possessed feline characteristics was borne out by the first high-resolution overhead image of the Face. While the correlations are intriguing, the issue of intentional design vs. environmental wear and tear is unresolved. Mark Carlotto, for example, suggests that the Face’s cat-like appearance is the result of mass-wasting below the brow and a partial masking of wind-blown soil deposited by eastward winds, coupled with additional collapse features.

  Indoctrination:

  Mainstreaming the Unthinkable

  The Brookings report remains the lynchpin of the supposed Cydonia conspiracy. While the report seems to be damning evidence of government policy regarding ET structures, how would we know if its recommendations are actually in effect—or, for that matter, if they ever were? And wouldn’t the Brookings authors have realized that a secret of such magnitude couldn’t possibly remain a secret forever?

  To some, the answer to dispensing with official secrecy is an incremental indoctrination program designed to prepare the public with the eventuality of ET contact. Some viewers considered the 1999 movie Mission to Mars, which featured a highly stylized version of the Martian Face, an attempt to subconsciously program the movie-going public to accept the Face as an alien artifact.

  Of course, Mission to Mars isn’t the first movie to feature possible pro-Cydonia symbolism. Total Recall, loosely based on the Philip K. Dick story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” employed an alien pyramid on Mars. And science fiction paperbacks of the fifties and sixties are rich sources of Cydonian imagery, including Eando Binder’s novel Puzzle of the Space Pyramids, in which missions to the planets discover identical pyramidal ruins. The pyramids of the book’s title turn out to be components of a solar system–spanning gravitational weapon used to obliterate a tenth planet that once orbited between Mars and Jupiter. It’s not especially difficult to integrate Binder’s yarn with Tom Van Flandern’s Exploded Planet Hypothesis; all that is missing, it seems, is a mile-wide humanoid face.

  In a similar vein, Richard Hoagland discovered a series of vintage View-Master reels detailing the exploits of Tom Corbett: Space Cadet. Dwelling heavily on symbolic parallels, Hoagland concluded that the Corbett reels constituted a deliberate attempt to inform adolescent viewers of the features waiting on Mars—which wouldn’t be photographed for decades. While Hoagland’s claim drew harsh criticism, he wasted no time incorporating the Corbett mythos into an intricate indoctrination scheme involving former Nazis, Freemasons, and Walt Disney. Interestingly enough, Disney has a long history of working alongside U.S. intelligence; for example, it produced the newsreel animations shown to audiences during World War II. While Hoagland’s “grand unified conspiracy theory” is questionable at best, its basic premise is just weird enough to make one wonder.

  In the book Architects of the Underworld, Bruce Rux argues that Hollywood has waged a decades-long indoctrination campaign endorsing the reality of extraterrestrial visitors. He cites the sci-fi favorite movie The Thing as a dramatized recreation of the Roswell UFO crash, which supposedly yielded at least one alien craft and bodies. Similar theories suggest that major films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and television miniseries like Steven Spielberg’s Taken represent government policy manipulating public perception of extraterrestrial life through the medium of fiction.

  Advocates of the “time-release aspirin” school posit that hints of official duplicity like the government cover-up in Taken are subliminal clues engineered to lessen the shock in the event of extraterrestrial disclosure. Even Contact, based on Carl Sagan’s optimistic (and academically palatable) novel, ends on a conspiratorial note, with the government committee in charge of evaluating the heroine’s claim withholding vital evidence.

  The Face on Mars in Contact?

  In the opening scene in the Robert Zemeckis film Contact, based on Sagan’s novel, the viewer is given a jaw-dropping, faster-than-light tour of the cosmos as the “camera” zooms out from a view of Earth. The planets are rendered with computer-generated savvy, so perhaps it comes as no surprise to note that Mars features an inconspicuous lump the special effects team assures us is none other than the famous Face.

  The blink-and-you-missed-it effect is noted by effects artists Ken Ralston and Stephen Rosenbaum in one of their “making of” featurettes on the Contact DVD. Fans of Mission to Mars, with its elaborate revisionist version of the Face, are likely to be disappointed by Contact ’s depiction of the controversial surface feature. Seen up close, it looks like nothing in particular, and neighboring anomalies such as the Cliff appear to be absent.

  Richard Hoagland suggests that the presence of the Face in Contact represents an inside agenda on behalf of Sagan, upon whose book the screenplay was based. Possible? Yes. Likely? No.

  Hoagland and Mike Bara, the Enterprise Mission website’s most public advocates, are correct in their characterization of Carl Sagan as a politically conscious figure with the resources and know-how to sculpt his public image. In Carl Sagan: A Life, author Keay Davidson notes that Sagan’s early debunking of UFO reports was motivated more out of a desire to appear acceptable to his colleagues (to whom Sagan’s thoughts on exobiology and interstellar travel seemed esoteric if not downright eccentric) than personal interest in the phenomenon.

  However, the notion that Sagan controlled all aspects of the Contact film project (which was completed after his death) is false. Sagan obviously wielded a degree of authority in the adaptation of his novel, but the film bears Robert Zemeckis’s creative signature. A case in point is the opening sequence. In one of the commentaries available on the DVD, Ralston and Rosenbaum point out that the idea for the opening sequence was submitted to Sagan for his opinion (and not the other way around). This tends to cast doubt on Hoagland’s implication that including the Face was Sagan’s personal doing.

  In theory, Sagan could have retroactively insisted on including the Face, but the jocular comments shared by the special effects artists strongly suggest it was entirely their own doing. And if Sagan had spontaneously decided the Face demanded inclusion, it’s extremely odd that Ralston and Rosenbaum don’t mention this most unusual request from none other than one of the century’s most important scientists.

  And why didn’t Sagan simply mention the Face in his novel, over which he had unquestioned and complete control? The only reference to Mars is a dismissive comment about a rover revealing an unspecified Martian pyramid to be a natural landform (most likely a reference to the Elysium formations featured in Cosmos ). This is certainly bizarre behavior for a man supposedly bent on leaking the alleged reality of monumental architecture on
Mars. Are we to accept that the Face’s almost-cameo in the film is anything other than a clever attempt at verisimilitude?

  Supposition is not evidence. Hoagland’s fault is not his willingness to address possible conspiracies and hidden knowledge, but his certainty that such conspiracies exist based on conveniently symbolic evidence. The Sagan/Face on Mars/ Contact scenario (which makes no real sense even if true) is one in a dreary parade of vague coincidences he has plugged into an ever-evolving grand unified theory.

  Hoagland’s Enterprise Mission website commands a prodigious number of visitors, and Hoagland has become near-synonymous with the Face on Mars. His eagerly anticipated radio appearances are never less than fascinating, if for no other reason than the Philip K. Dickian nuances he grants even the dry bones of NASA insider politics.

  Intriguingly, his appeal is comparable to that of The X-Files —which, oddly enough, he occasionally uses as a source. As entertainment, the Enterprise Mission website fills a void with its inimitable formula of paranoia and science; Hoagland has single-handedly created a thoroughly postmodern venue in which fact and fiction are broken down into pixels and liberally blended. The Enterprise Mission website’s role is seated more in myth-making than “science” in any conventional usage of the word.

  Paradoxically (and to Hoagland’s credit), a substantial portion of the Enterprise Mission website’s presentation of science is quite real, featuring provocative explanations for various Martian phenomena. But the site’s substrate of unsubstantiated claims, reliance on science fiction as science fact, implied accusation, and truly Olympian leaps of logic only undermines the central issue: are there artificial structures on Mars, and if so, how does such a discovery effect us as a civilization and as a species?

  Despite myriad shaky indoctrination scenarios, claims that Cydonia is taken seriously at some level within the national security state are effectively impossible to prove. Hoagland points to NASA’s ponderous public relations apparatus as evidence that the agency is withholding space science data and releasing it in piecemeal fashion. But given the agency’s inherently bureaucratic structure, the fact that its updates are generally underwhelming is most likely attributable to academic infighting. For instance, NASA publicly entertained a variety of bizarre concepts before concluding that the tantalizing seeps were most likely caused by liquid water; this trawling for alternatives is wholly consistent with the conventional wisdom of Mars as a dead, waterless planet, and study of JPL’s scientific output reveals its anti-life bias.