After the Martian Apocalypse

by Mac Tonnies

  So the alien ruins on Mars meme links up with the “NASA cover-up” meme. This is more interesting. It’s multifaceted, with room to play. Even better, it spawns new memes: within a few generations we have a “NASA cover-up of alien ruins on Mars built by ‘Gray’ aliens who created the human race by genetic engineering” meme.

  Unlike genes, memes occupy an abstract realm. The Internet strengthens the foundation of the meme ecology, allowing veritable epidemics of rogue information to traverse the planet in moments. This is the battleground of dissidents like Hoagland and lumbering, pre-digital behemoths like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Fringe” speculators have learned that good ideas can benefit from a strategic cladding of imaginative hype. Alarmist pronouncements are the very stuff of microcultural online campaigns, which realize that what the opposition lacks in speed and finesse, it can make up for in raw, unmitigated authority.

  The parallels to military electronic warfare and signal jamming are far from trivial. Memes advocating artificiality on Mars are countered by flat denials. The two memes clash and, like collided subatomic particles emitting a quark, yield a third, more exotic meme. This is where the Mars/NASA cover-up was born, entrenched in the bunkers of the primeval Internet. Call it “memespace.”

  Sites devoted to Cydonia and alien artifacts are ripe with memes that would have likely died off without the Internet’s supple breeding ground. And they have a tendency to expand, like all life, into the mainstream. Their power shouldn’t be underestimated. NASA’s re-imaging of Cydonia is due directly to the power of the “ruins on Mars” meme, which blossomed into a full-blown infection (even getting sympathetic page space in a book on skepticism by Carl Sagan).

  The downside of this meme ecology is overburden. Armchair theorists plug too many arcane ideas into the same contextual matrix only to have it fall crashing to their feet and jeered. A concept taken too far off the edge self-destructs, sometimes doing irreparable damage to its constituent memes. The debunking community characteristically relies on just such ludicrous chimeras to downplay sincere interest in resolving the Cydonia issue.

  The Skeptical Inquirer, a journal for members of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, even went beyond citing nonsensical claims in its effort to erase Cydonia from memespace: it simply made up the notion that believers in the Face considered it the work of human time travelers from our future. I can honestly say that I have never encountered this particular theory outside the pages of the Skeptical Inquirer. Not only does it probably exceed the creative prowess of most gung ho Cydonia believers, but its implicit assumptions are just too unwieldy. As an exercise in meme theory, it falls disastrously short. It fails to achieve escape velocity. It’s lifeless. And a dead meme is no good at all.

  There is no absolute fossil record of dead Mars memes, only a scattering of texts. Some memes only appear dead while in reality they are hibernating. The dubious glass tubes, for instance, breathed life into the positively ancient memes spawned by astronomer Percival Lowell. Within hours of Hoagland publishing the so-called glass tube on his site, the halcyon days of the image of Mars as a dying desert planet were revived and updated for the early twenty-first century, streamlined tunnels taking the place of Lowell’s earthen canals and massive, eroded pyramids substituted for Edgar Rice Burroughs’s gleaming cities.

  As long as there have been ideas and minds to appreciate them, we have had a sort of cyberspace, a moderately consensual infosphere that is as much a part of life on Earth as the ozone layer or plate tectonics. The Internet hasn’t created the Cydonia controversy except in the most abstruse postmodern sense. It has, however, hastened the exchange of ideas at a remarkable rate. Perhaps most notably, it has served as a haven and breeding ground for weird, unpopular ideas that might have otherwise outlived their welcome and disappeared into our cultural recycle bin.

  The Face on Mars, as image and metaphor, is wildly powerful, but it has yet to eclipse the dominant extraterrestrial archetype—the ubiquitous “alien head” that entered the idea pool upon publication of Whitley Strieber’s Communion in 1987. The alien portrait on the cover quickly became synonymous with aliens and close encounters, and was eventually minimalized into a tapered oval with black ellipses for eyes and a straight line for a mouth (thanks, in large part, to the work of underground cartoonist Bill Barker).

  Today, this alien head icon is as pervasive as Nike’s “Swoosh” or Tommy Hilfiger’s patriotically colored “T.” It’s emblematic of the unknown. By rendering it into a caricature, vendors of the “intelligent extraterrestrial” meme have fostered a communion the likes of which Strieber couldn’t have possibly guessed.

  Alien iconography inundates popular culture. Even children (who have never heard of Betty and Barney Hill, the first contemporary UFO abductees, let alone new-wave abduction researchers such as Harvard psychiatrist John Mack) immediately recognize the minimalist alien head as something strange and portentous—as well as imminently stylish. It’s no coincidence that the characters in recent video games and animated television series bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the alien á la Strieber and Barker. From Japanese anime to the Powerpuff Girls, the consummately cute, bugeyed motif has played a quiet but important role in demystifying what was once unthinkable. Like a fish with embryonic gills, the alien meme has crawled ashore and flourished, populating the zeitgeist with consumer-friendly weirdness.

  With the very notion of extraterrestrial contact in place as a consumer touchstone, there seems little need for elaborate external indoctrination schemes and “time-release aspirin” disclosure. Ironically, profound ideas fare best in an information society when trivialized; what they lose in impact, they make up for in numbers. Hence the ever-imminent disclosure of extraterrestrial reality familiar to politically aware anomalists will certainly fail. Disclosure is not a singular event orchestrated by Men in Black; it’s a process as tenacious and unstoppable as thermodynamics.

  If the Face is a message left by a nonhuman intelligence, then it wouldn’t be surprising to see the same sort of infiltration achieved by the alien head. But whereas the alien archetype is amenable to creative tinkering (toy stores and T-shirts boast varieties of both cute alien visitors and menacing abductors), the Face is more gothic, like something glimpsed in a half-remembered dream.

  Devout Face enthusiasts still cling to the famous low-resolution Viking frame as their rallying banner despite better images taken by the Surveyor. This isn’t because the Face is less interesting or provocative when seen in high resolution, but because it presents too much information to process upon casual inspection. The shadowy Viking frame has an unmatched mystique, whereas the “new” Face reveals inevitable geological blemishes.

  Viewed as an ideological product, the new Face doesn’t sell because it lacks the iconic simplicity of its precursor. Seeing the Face up close produces viewer anxiety, as demonstrated by the apocryphal story of the NASA scientist who literally covered his eyes with his hands rather than see the Face and wrestle with its implications.

  Intelligent Martian life, as both meme and prospect, has proven resilient despite dogmatic foes and fashionable ignorance. Perhaps we’re playing a temporal game of “telephone” with a real civilization that disappeared thousands or millions of years ago. If so, what are “they” saying and how do we translate for them? Inevitably, there have been attempts to fuse the classic alien face with the Face on Mars. Several speculators noted that if the 2001 image of the Face is placed upside-down, the depressed portion that comprises the mouth can be construed—albeit vaguely—as large “eyes.” After some Photoshop retouching and reconstruction, the Face reveals a completely spurious quasi-resemblance to Whitley Strieber’s famous Gray.

  As pure idea, the implications are attractive: it combines the close encounter enigma with the anomalies on Mars in a single reductionist masterstroke. It produces fixating images of a wasted world once inhabited by spindly, big-eyed Grays who now haunt our lonely night road
s and bedrooms in service to some incomprehensible dream.

  The deliberately upturned Face and its proposed resemblance to a Gray alien is quintessential cyberspace reality manipulation. Malin Space Science Systems’ online Mars catalogue and software tools such as Photoshop, coupled with free, instantaneous electronic publishing, equate to epic metafictions altogether stranger than any role-playing game. On a computer screen, at least, the solar system can be shifted and reformed at the speed of thought. The sheer frequency of false returns on the Mars anomaly radar can render Cydonia watchers into slack-jawed savants, clicking madly in an attempt to extricate themselves from labyrinths of their own collective design.

  For example, the arrival of the World Wide Web greatly expanded Hoagland’s audience, and many of his postings reveal an eagerness to vent speculation unavailable in the original The Monuments of Mars or its subsequent expanded editions. The “Mars Mission,” Hoagland’s multidisciplinary research team, evolved into the Enterprise Mission, with Hoagland serving as principal investigator.

  Theories about Martian architecture began to share increasing space with elaborate NASA conspiracy scenarios, some of which strained acceptance even among those willing to consider the likelihood of alien artifacts on Mars. Hoagland’s regular appearances on radio host Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM cemented his reputation as the most articulate, controversial Mars anomaly researcher, whose ruminations were often as improvable as they were exotic.

  Hoagland’s outspoken thoughts on lunar anomalies and far-reaching government cover-ups culminated in a schism between the Enterprise Mission team and the rest of the Cydonia research community, who urged caution and peer review. The result was the Society for Planetary SETI research (SPSR), launched by professor Stanley McDaniel (author of The McDaniel Report, which highlighted NASA’s political and scientific failure to investigate Cydonia).

  SPSR’s membership was limited to a relatively small circle of academics. Except for the publication of The Case for the Face, a collection of essays detailing the search for extraterrestrial relics on Mars, SPSR has continued to maintain a low profile, leading Enterprise Mission contributor Mike Bara to proclaim that they had “wimped out” of the artificiality debate by refusing to take sides. That taking sides based on insufficient data only corrupts scientific method was evidently overlooked.

  Even though The Case for the Face lacked the infectious quality of Hoagland’s more openly speculative tome, the voices behind it nevertheless proved instrumental as NASA, through the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, continued its debunking campaign. Lan Fleming, an image processor subcontracted to the Johnson Space Flight Center, was quick to dissect NASA’s blanket claims denouncing the Face. He effectively proved that the high-pass filtered “enhancement” of the Face released to the news media in 1998 was a (presumably deliberate) fraud. Later, he successfully exposed the space agency’s attempt to falsely represent Cydonia data from the Surveyor’s Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA).

  While the Enterprise Mission’s claims of NASA ritual worship and plodding numerological treatises alienated many curious readers, Hoagland’s team embraced discoveries such as Fleming’s, as they upheld what by now had become Hoagland’s central tenet: NASA is covering up.

  But SPSR’s collective refusal to follow in the Enterprise Mission’s footsteps and conclude an artificial origin for the Cydonia enigmas has kept the gulf between the two entities almost as wide as the gulf between Earth and Mars.

  Despite Hoagland’s uneven output, he remains without doubt the Mars anomaly community’s most outspoken voice. Although both lauded and chastised for his heretical, often bizarre theories, he has helped to marshal a vast network of interested parties. By turning the Cydonia controversy into a form of interactive entertainment, he has increased its audience. This double-edged approach has produced some solid speculation on the Enterprise Mission’s behalf alongside outrageous claims that fuel the debunking contingent’s assertion that Face believers can and will find patterns anywhere they look.

  Hoagland has successfully addressed many pressing issues, such as NASA’s apparent commitment to micromanaging the public perception of the Red Planet by methodically adjusting the color settings of its instruments. (JPL appears more than a little unnerved by hints of blue and green on Mars that suggest a more Earth-like planet than is academically acceptable, despite repeated telescopic observations of presumed Martian vegetation.)

  More difficult to accept are Hoagland’s assertions that NASA has known the Face was artificial since at least the 1950s, based on symbolic (and highly selective) interpretation of antique View-Master reels and the presence of “tracked vehicles” and Nazi iconography at the Pathfinder landing site. And his preoccupation with Egyptian-style ritual worship supposedly practiced by space agency policy makers has effectively alienated him from many researchers, not to mention NASA (although he maintains he’s in contact with an agency “leak” whom he playfully refers to as “Deep Space”).

  Hoagland chooses to unveil his grand unified theory of Mars incrementally, confounding both colleagues and detractors. Robert Harrison’s Cydonia Quest site, for instance, was created with the specific intention of analyzing Hoagland’s theoretical output and providing independent commentary. But even Harrison’s cogent attempt to make sense of Hoagland’s holographic view of the Martian legacy is forced into frequent topical detours. Like other sites devoted to Mars anomalies and alleged cover-ups, Hoagland and his Enterprise Mission simply won’t stay still long enough to be examined; this invariably enhances the site’s mystique.

  Attorney Peter A. Gersten, founder of the group Citizens Against UFO Secrecy, playfully refers to Hoagland as the “Wizard of Mars” in his email news updates. “Wizard” is an incredibly apt label. Hoagland’s articles, blustery and meandering as they often are, pave the road that the Cydonia microculture inevitably follows, even if it must do so kicking and screaming.

  Hoagland’s treatises—almost always conveyed as oracular fact as opposed to speculation—build Mars from the ground up in his readership’s collective mind as surely as JPL press releases inform the general public. Hoagland is both wizard and would-be planetary conqueror, wielding an arsenal of powerful ideas that fuse the psychedelic impact of the movie 2001 with the sobriety of a peer-reviewed science journal.

  For a consummately grassroots movement, the Enterprise Mission is quick to identify enemies. The Enterprise Mission’s condescending opinion of SPSR’s research approach epitomizes its view of potential challengers. Despite this innate territoriality, Hoagland has populated the speculative arena with a mass of ideas, many of them testable. Even anomalists leaning toward SPSR’s cautionary stance speak of Hoagland with a certain reverence.

  Nevertheless, his efforts are perceived as a double-edged sword. While there would very likely be no Cydonia controversy per se if not for Hoagland, his more seemingly outlandish notions quickly frighten away impartial onlookers who might otherwise tend to support planetary SETI. And while Hoagland’s smug certainty in his own infallibility produces some patently fascinating yarns, his implied unnamed sources and assumed high-level contacts betray an unbecoming PR sensibility.

  Science shouldn’t be the stuff of endless cliffhangers and indulgent machismo. Hoagland’s unrecognized genius lies in his showmanship and iconoclasm. Anomalies on Mars are practically irrelevant: for Hoagland and his fans, reality itself is an anomaly composed of countless seething layers. Extraterrestrial artifacts are mere prelude to a conspiracy so profound (and willing to mutate on command) that we have no paradigms large enough to grasp it.

  Although Hoagland maintains that the Face (and other formations) in Cydonia are indisputably real, the “reality” portrayed by the Enterprise Mission is in fact metamorphic. Fact and fiction break down into component bits of elusive truth and nagging disinformation in which every idea has its own inscrutable political agenda.

  There is a fine thread of suppressed mysticism running through Hoagland’s writings remi
niscent of Philip K. Dick’s paranoid science fiction. Incidentally, Dick experienced an ambiguous epiphany that he likened to encountering an advanced artificial intelligence. Many of Dick’s interactions with his strange visitor, which he dubbed “VALIS” (for “Vast Active Living Intelligent System”), bear tantalizing resemblances to contemporary reports of alien contact. Whitley Strieber, for instance, has claimed that his alliance with apparent nonhuman intelligence has allowed him to perceive religious truths via past life recall. More pertinently, he also claims to have received powerful images of Mars and grim prophecies concerning Earth’s future. In Communion, he describes seeing the Earth spewing its atmosphere into space, a haunting scene that suggests a collision with an asteroid or comet.

  The reality of Strieber’s experiences, like that of Hoagland’s outré conspiracy theories, is easy fodder for debunkers. And since Strieber was a regular guest on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM alongside Hoagland, it’s conceivable that Strieber’s “memories” have more than a little to do with Hoagland’s ideas. In any case, between the two of them, an outpouring of Martian memes has saturated the airwaves and the woolly back alleys of the Net. Engaged in fierce Darwinian competition, ideas of aliens and Martian ruins rose, simmering, to the top of the planet’s newfound collective digital unconscious.

  The Enterprise Mission’s fantastically popular online bulletin board system is a singularity where suppressed technology, UFOs, remote viewing, reverse speech analysis, digital image processing, religion, crop glyphs, celestial mechanics, and the Roswell crash merge into an outlandish microcosm where nothing can be trusted but virtually everything is permitted. Hoagland is a cyber-literate iconoclast who coolly subverts the vernacular of cutting-edge science to form an ongoing, dynamic mythology. Like Charles Fort, the great Bronx collector of anomalies that rattled the scientific mainstream, Hoagland delights in punching holes, real or imagined, in consensus reality.