After the Martian Apocalypse

by Mac Tonnies

  Hoagland’s online legacy is by no means unique in this respect. To varying degrees, the Internet has fostered nearly identical venues catering to a wildly eclectic audience of paranormal connoisseurs. But Hoagland’s determination to quantify the strangeness that defines the scientific-entertainment establishment is unique. He regards Mars much like a mathematician would regard a strange attractor—a nodal point from which truth just might be excavated (metaphorically or otherwise).

  Ideas are strange and intangible lifeforms. They carry out their activities camouflaged as thoughts and inspirations and convictions, gestating in the minds of believers and debunkers alike. Occasionally, they will interbreed, casting unpredictable new strains onto the shores of the ideological battlefield. In the anomalist microculture, the ideas that survive are the ones just deft and twisted enough to resist primeval conformity.

  For a mind to accept an idea, it must find the idea usable in some capacity. Some people simply enjoy savoring weirdness, even if it means lugging around conspicuous mental baggage. Others deliberately seek out weirdness, hoping, like Hoagland, to divine truths or discover vindication for unpopular hunches.

  Ultimately, the best ideas survive because they happen to be accurate—or lead to other ideas that are. In the case of the Face on Mars, the meme that maintains there are artificial structures in Cydonia has survived both a sustained viral attack by NASA and a thorough attempted sterilization on behalf of the mainstream media. The Face on Mars, as pure idea, is as marvelously tenacious as the deepest, coldest Antarctic extremophile.

  We may not have noticed it yet, but the Martians have arrived. Their memetic envoys jostle for headspace, whispering illicit revelations in our ears. They speak ancient languages that modern rationalism insists we don’t remember; nonetheless, we do.

  Cydonia is a recurring dream in the noise-soaked global brain that is the Internet. Like many dreams, it may function as a premonition or catalyst, rousing us from our world of stock quotes, sports updates, SUVs, and PDAs. Perhaps we will wake up to find some foreign yet oddly familiar image staring back at us.

  Speaking in Tongues

  A striking example of cross-germinating memes appeared in 2001 in a field in England across from the Chilbolton Observatory. Consisting of an elaborate dot matrix face and binary schematic, the crop formations were instantly regarded by some as evidence of alien intervention. Proponents argued that the artistically rendered face looked something like the Face on Mars. But the schematic design, while not as visually enchanting, captured most of the attention. Whoever made it, it was clearly modeled on a SETI signal transmitted from Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory in 1978. Encoded in the rectangular glyph are tantalizing references to alien biochemistry, a diagram of the aliens’ native solar system, and even a minimalist image of one of the presumed extraterrestrials. Not surprisingly, it featured a short body (in comparison to the crude human image transmitted in 1978), an oversized head, and conspicuously large eyes. In other words, a Gray.

  Even while crop circle researchers (or “cerealogists”) debated the origin of the two strange formations—both of which were most unlike the characteristic circles and fractal designs that have baffled cerealogists—the Cydonia community was attempting to integrate the new formations into a Martian context.

  Heavy shadow over the eyes of the crop face recalled Viking frame 35A72 and led to the assumption that the face in the crops depicted the Face on Mars. The Chilbolton face, though fundamentally human-like, was also likened to a Gray alien by some observers due to the deep, unfathomable black shadow beneath the brow. It crossed few minds that the crop face was not intended to represent either the quintessential alien face or the Face on Mars. Perhaps it was simply a face—maybe even a clever dot matrix reproduction of its creator, assuming the Chilbolton formations were human-made. It wouldn’t have been the first time crop artists have inserted a subtle signature into their handiwork; the infamous hoaxing team “Doug and Dave,” who demonstrated to the media how they could create extensive glyph-like designs with boards and wire, inserted their initials as part of their designs.

  Online analysis of the crop formations was fast and furious. Graphic designer Chris Joseph produced the first digitally accurate bit-by-bit version of the Arecibo message, clearly demonstrating how the Chilbolton image reproduced the format originally transmitted in 1978. Attempts to decipher the message’s alleged origin resulted in one particularly strange insight: where humans had placed a schematic of the radio dish at Arecibo, the agency responsible for the apparent reply had inserted a simplified version of an intricate crop formation that had appeared a year earlier in the same area.

  The implication seemed to be that while humans used radio telescopes to communicate with possible extraterrestrials, the aliens choose to communicate via grain-based telegrams. While this didn’t rule out actual aliens as the messengers, it did suggest a long-term hoax. Concentrating on the 2001 Chilbolton face, investigators applied Gaussian blur filters to reveal a startling human likeness. Although very low-resolution, the Chilbolton face was an actual photograph, achieved by flattening grain stalks to produce an effect identical to half tone printing.

  Hoax or real, the Chilbolton images constitute two of the most technically impressive crop formations since the phenomenon received wide pubic exposure in the early 1990s. But they were exceeded only a year later, when another “cereoglyph” appeared next to the same observatory. This time, there was no mistaking the big-headed visage of a classic Gray, extending a hand to clutch a sphere or disk inscribed with ASCII computer code. The message, readily translated by armchair cereologists convinced they were dealing either with an ambitious hoax or irrefutable proof of alien intelligence, was cryptically intriguing.

  It reads, with the portentous and cryptic charm students of the paranormal have learned to expect:

  Beware the bearers of FALSE gifts & their BROKEN PROMISES. Much PAIN but still time. EELRIJUE. There is GOOD out there. We OPpose DECEPTION. COnduit CLOSING [bell sound]

  Such enigmatic remarks suggest that, as long as we remain Earth-bound, we will be fated to ignorance of all things alien. The Face on Mars just might offer us something more substantial. Like an afterimage, the Face hovers over the Cydonia region—unaccountable, yet impossible to refute.

  Both the Mars mystery and the often-surprising realm of terrestrial archaeology begin to make a superficial sense when seen from the perspective of Zechariah Sitchin, author of the Earth Chronicles series. Sitchin is a kind of culturally literate von Däniken, and his elaborate reimagining of the solar system has incredible appeal to a number of Mars anomalists despite his frequently shallow grasp of scientific concepts.

  Sitchin’s detailed treatises on extraterrestrial visitors and human history reveal a formidable, if controversial, grasp of ancient languages; Sitchin navigates the Sumerian cuneiform and ancient Hebrew languages with the same fluid certainty that Richard Hoagland juggles NASA cover-ups and Masonic conspiracies.

  Sitchin’s revisionist mythology, in which Sumerian and Babylonian folklore are given a space-age spin, presents no innate difficulty in dealing with a populated solar system, even though specific references to Mars are few and far between.

  Surprisingly, no one is immune to this stew of memes. They manifest most visibly in the form of fiction, where we can deal with them in the virtual reality workstations of our imaginations, spared the burdens of consequence. For better or worse, Mars plays a central role in our space-age cosmology.

  [6]

  Deconstructing Mars

  If Mars did not exist, we would be forced to invent it. In fact, we have—in the form of science fiction.

  The discovery of the Martian Face revived an ancient preoccupation with Mars and its possible inhabitants. Artificiality advocates are like latter-day Percival Lowells, discerning elaborate features on the planet’s surface and speculating on how they came to be. Detractors frequently use Lowell’s mistaken identification of irrigation canals on Ma
rs as justification for burying the Cydonia controversy. While their point is well-taken, it’s overwhelmed by non-subjective efforts to make sense of Cydonia, such as Mark Carlotto’s fractal analysis.

  Skeptical arguments maintain that potential artificial features—such as those documented by the likes of the Society for Planetary SETI Research, Hoagland, and the legions of independent Web-based commentators—are subjective, constituting the same sort of myth-making that resulted in H. G. Wells’s immortal depiction of Mars as a dry, dying planet populated by ruthless aliens.

  Ray Bradbury, drawing on the same canal-riddled impression of the Red Planet, subverted Wells’s notion of would-be invaders; his Mars stories are peopled by oddly pacifist Martians, content to dream away the final hours of their existence as terrestrial invaders systematically decimate their fragile glass cities. Bradbury’s aboriginal Martians are human-like and sympathetic, existing on the margins of human existence. Although Bradbury never says as much, his Martians have reached a techno-social cul-de-sac; the incipient change wrought by the newly arrived Earthlings is accepted with a Zen-like acceptance.

  Even more disturbingly, Bradbury’s human colonists regard the Martians with little more than passing interest. In an abstruse way, Bradbury seems to have anticipated the controversy over how explorers should deal with possible Martian life-forms. Do we dare risk destroying a unique planetary ecology, however primitive by terrestrial standards? Mars advocates such as Robert Zubrin suggest that nonterrestrial species will pose little or no biological threat to Earth-based biochemistry; conversely, the germs that humans will inevitably bring with them if Mars is colonized will almost certainly fail to affect native Martian life.

  The threat of Martian biocontamination is central to the plot of Zubrin’s novel, First Landing. After the first manned mission finds life on Mars, the masses back on Earth become alarmed by the prospect of the mission’s return, fearing a deadly Martian flu.

  This fear isn’t mere fiction. The International Committee Against Mars Sample Return vehemently opposes NASA’s planned Sample Return Mission, in which a bucket of Martian soil is excavated by a robotic lander and launched back to Earth to rendezvous with the International Space Station. Conceivably, Martian organisms could come into contact with terrestrial life, resulting in a microbial “war of the worlds.” The validity of such arguments depends on how alien Martian life is; if fundamentally different from earthly life, the chances of an interplanetary plague are remote. If Martian and terrestrial life share a common ancestry, as postulated by the “Theory of Panspermia” then cross-contamination becomes more plausible (although by no means certain).

  Ian Watson gives the idea of a Martian flu a surreal treatment in his novel The Martian Inca. When a sample return craft carrying a freight of Martian soil crashes in South America, it unleashes a psychotropic virus. Using this device, Watson is able to humanize Mars via the virus’s effects on human consciousness.

  Bradbury inadvertently projected today’s biochemical arguments onto a canvas of mythical scope. Instead of microbes, his Martians were a living, breathing people waiting to be exploited or disregarded by marauding, spacefaring humanity. Unlike the monsters of Wells, Bradbury envisioned the Martians as idealized versions of ourselves. Regardless, the fate of his expiring civilization is eventually overshadowed as humans increase their presence on the Red Planet. By the end of The Martian Chronicles, the humans are the Martians, their reflections staring back at them from the waters of an obsolescent canal.

  Before Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs used Mars as the ultimate escapist arena. While his Mars was a sort of scientifically rationalized Oz, freed of the constraints of astronomical fact, Burroughs was nonetheless drawn to the desertlike milieu popularized by Lowell. Burroughs’s Mars is a dry world carved by huge canals, overlooked by timeless cities that are anachronistic technological theme parks.

  Burroughsian society is consummate pulp—mad scientists, princesses, mutants, and grandiose swordfights. Burroughs never intended to provide his readers with an accurate (or even feasible) portrait of the real Mars, but he succeeded in establishing the planet as a genuine mythological frontier. Amusingly, one of Malin Space Science Systems’ online domains contains “Barsoom,” the native word for Mars in Burroughs’s innumerable pulp thrillers.

  The legend of the Martian canals has never quite managed to die off. Lowell’s globe-circling aquatic web, like a fixture of the collective unconscious, continues to haunt the imaginal Mars, no matter how discouraging the results of our probes and telescopes. Former vice president Dan Quayle even managed to embarrass his hapless speechwriters by making public remarks about the nonexistent features. Fortunately, this blunder took place before the nearly unthinkable Internet era; if similar comments were made today, we would surely see them interpreted as a conspiratorial leak on innumerable websites.

  That a mystery every bit as challenging as that of the canals has come to light has gone relatively unnoticed; popular science books on Mars never fail to include the controversy of Lowell’s time, but seldom address the Face in terms of evidence of intelligence.

  In The Snows of Olympus, Arthur C. Clarke includes Viking’s famous mug shot of the Face and predicts that believers in ancient Martians will likely be unswayed even in the light of contradictory evidence. Needless to say, he’s probably right. But Clarke’s Saganesque reference to the power of belief rings timid and even self-contradictory: Clarke’s fiction master-work revolves around the idea of extraterrestrial artifacts.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, Clarke has also gone on record endorsing pursuit of Face research, even remarking that Cydonia should be a primary target for future space probes. Clarke has since dismissed the Face based on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s 1998 “catbox” image and subsequent orthorectification (which looks nothing like the catbox.). Tellingly, Clarke was under the impression that these wildly differing images represented two separate photos, which makes his dismissal almost understandable. If JPL can confuse someone as space-savvy as Arthur C. Clarke, it’s easy enough to see how it might go about deceiving the general public, especially given that mainstream news outlets are often apathetic to science stories.

  In his critical analysis of esoteric scholar Charles Fort, Politics of the Imagination, author Colin Bennett argues that science’s job has less to do with explaining than marketing. The technocracy responsible for lofting the Viking orbiter into Mars orbit in 1976 was equally responsible for the “explanations” digested by the public. The Face, with no clear relevance to the Viking “marketing team,” was thus relegated to the Fortean attic, where it exerts its influence like an ideological black hole, impossible to observe directly, but discernable by its effects on the surrounding environment.

  Science fiction authors have been characteristically smug in ignoring Cydonia in the long list of recent Mars fiction. With the exception of Ben Bova’s Mars, which ends with an evocative but noncommittal reference to the Face, the only works of fiction to address the Cydonia issue are Allen Steele’s Labyrinth of Night, a techno-thriller set in a foreseeable future, and a space-military trilogy by Ian Douglas. Steele envisions the Face and City as ancient structures tended by an enigmatic and deadly artificial intelligence. While his story addresses pressing existential questions in passing, Labyrinth of Night is essentially a showcase for Steele’s space-literate verisimilitude.

  In 1996, Cydonia took on new life in the hands of “remote viewer” Courtney Brown, who claimed that not only were there artificial structures on Mars, but that the Martians themselves were alive and living in seclusion in the American Southwest. Brown’s Martians were very much of the Bradburian variety—celestial foundlings traumatized by the ecological demise of their planet and forced to seek shelter underground.

  According to Brown’s telling (which evolved considerably, taking on new characters and conflicts as the Martian drama unfolded on the World Wide Web), the Martians had been rescued and moved off-planet by the Gray aliens made famou
s by the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Together, humans, Martians, and Grays comprised a sort of metaphysical tryst that promised evolutionary self-discovery for those willing to take Brown’s claims at face value.

  Well-known author and self-professed alien contactee Whitley Strieber addressed Mars in his autobiographical book The Secret School. While Strieber doesn’t claim to have visited Mars in the flesh, he recalls touring Cydonia via alien-derived virtual reality. Like Brown, Strieber entangles the Mars mystery with the ubiquitous Grays, whose bulbous heads and large, almond-shaped eyes have become a staple of consumer iconography.

  If Strieber (and others with similar tales) is to be believed, then Cydonia is not a passive archaeological mystery, but an active catalyst veritably begging to be revealed. Perhaps the Grays are really nothing more than metaphors, denizens of Jung’s collective unconscious. Drone-like and emaciated, they may represent deep fears of what we are becoming under the burden of postindustrial society.

  On a similar New Age note, the complex in Cydonia may be the archetypal lost city and a permanent fixture of what psychologist Kenneth Ring and others call the “imaginal realm.” Is there such a thing as “racial memory”? Could vitriolic debunking signal a form of recognition, however faint?

  Jungian speculation aside, there is very little doubt that the discovery of a Martian city—whatever that term means in a Cydonian context—would have a powerful effect on human thought, possibly exceeding the discovery of extant intelligent beings. Our minds would be forced to carve out new intellectual territory, if only for conveniently storing knowledge of ET artifacts. Workaday life might begin to seem impossibly mundane; Cydonia is the quintessential unchartered territory, a thicket of burning questions and perhaps even shining new promises.