by Mac Tonnies
The grooves may not come as a surprise to proponents of the Artificiality Hypothesis, who have long suggested that the Cliff was assembled out of debris ejected from its adjacent impact crater. Lack of blast shadow strongly suggests that the Cliff formation was formed after the impact event, possibly as a megascale building project using impact ejecta as a construction medium. This possibility was hinted at in the Viking image of the Cliff, in which the terrain to the feature’s eastern side looks strangely roughened, as if plowed or otherwise excavated. The Surveyor photo adds weight to the hypothesis that the Cliff was in fact built, possibly using large machines.
Like the Face, Fort, and D&M Pyramid, the Cliff is but a single component in a bewildering, self-referencing complex. Seen without the benefit of context, it would remain a curiosity. But plugged into the Cydonia region’s apparently systematic display of unconventional geomorphology, its value as a piece of evidence is strengthened.
Is someone trying to tell us something?
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The Siren Call of the Face
When NASA revealed the Surveyor’s first picture of the Face on Mars in April of 1998, vigilant anomalists knew it looked bad. How bad wasn’t known until digital image processor Mark Carlotto and others produced proper rectifications that showed that the flat, wavy-looking rendition (known as the catbox photo) actually conformed to the Viking data once lighting, resolution, and angle were taken into account. The Face, newscasters and condescending headlines to the contrary, was still a face—only now boasting apparent ornamentation on the headpiece, anatomically correct nostrils and lip-like structures around the broad, stoic mouth.
NASA’s 1998 release was historic not merely for being the first attempt to resolve a potentially extraterrestrial artifact on the surface of another world but also for its confusing and substandard format. Mars watchers know all too well that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s press releases do their best to make Mars look like a temptingly detailed world, with resolution so fine one can often make out individual boulders. And well they should; funding for continued exploration hinges significantly on the public’s interest in space science. For example, the Mars Observer, Surveyor’s failed predecessor, carried a high-resolution camera included largely for PR interests. How can NASA justify costly exploratory missions to Mars when the public can’t even see the results?
So the catbox stacked anomaly on top of anomaly. Why was the so-called enhancement so bad? Even those peripherally aware of the Mars Face controversy knew that the Face was a large mesa. Paradoxically, the catbox made the Face appear flat and grainy, like so many scratches.
Only later would NASA reveal its second attempt to get the Face right—geologist T. J. Parker’s orthorectification, which warped the Face’s centerline to such a degree that the nostril features appeared on the Face’s far right. This image has gone on to become NASA’s final word on the subject, and publications that feature Parker’s Picassoesque rendition never fail to exclude any disclaimer explaining that the asymmetry evidenced in Parker’s fanciful image is the product of bad computer work.
NASA imaging subcontractor Lan Fleming was one of the few observers who noted the catbox’s deceiving format right away. His attempt to replicate NASA’s enhancement procedure show the spurious un-face-like image for what it has to be—either gross incompetence on the part of NASA’s otherwise capable image processors or a deliberately substandard image designed to kill interest in an issue that, by the space agency’s own admission, is considered scientifically without merit.
NASA’s very first mention of the Face, upon its discovery in 1976, was founded on error when it was publicly dismissed as a “trick of light and shadow”—presumably because the Face failed to register in a second image taken of the Cydonia region “a couple hours later.” Later sleuthing revealed that not only did such a disconfirming image not even exist but that the Viking orbiter was in no position to take a second photo a couple hours later, being on the other side of the planet at that time. Indeed, a second confirming frame, 70A13, was later tracked down by independent researchers Vincent DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar, ruining the trick of light explanation.
The botched catbox image of the Face was a deliberate scam to nullify public interest in an object NASA never considered worth investigating. The evidence of NASA’s negative attitude is a matter of record, as is the fact that Mike Malin, the contractor in charge of the Surveyor’s camera, has vented not a little disgust at being “forced” into taking the allegedly disconfirming photo in 1998.
For the most part, the public swallowed NASA’s conclusion that the Face was a false alarm despite meaningless reassurances that the agency held no official opinion on the Face’s origin. NASA forfeited a chance to engage in research that may ultimately prove the existence of a previous technological civilization on Mars. After twenty-five years of debate, the ball was back in the court of independent researchers.
In the words of one NASA employee upon eyeing JPL’s haphazard photograph, “I hope we’ve scotched this thing for good.”
We can only hope he doesn’t speak for us all.
Do Skeptics Need the Face?
The mainstream skeptical community, composed of such entities as the The Skeptics Society and the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), rallies around a few notorious icons in order to prove its debunking prowess. Foremost among these are the alleged Roswell UFO crash and the Face on Mars.
Unfortunately, both Skeptic and CSICOP’s Skeptical Inquirer are curiously unenlightening publications. Instead of taking on pseudoscience and popular delusion (and few in our media-soaked culture would argue that we’re adrift in a veritable sea of the latter) with finesse and wit, their articles are routinely devoted to the same subjects—tried-and-true straw men that move ideology as effectively as Wal-Mart moves power tools and dog food. To the self-proclaimed skeptical elite, this repetition is somehow reassuring, like attending a church service every Sunday to sing the same comforting hymns.
Ironically, the so-called fame of the Face on Mars can probably be more correctly attributed to the repeated debunkings it receives in the pages of skeptical publications than to appearances in popular culture, which are scarce at best. Most people don’t realize there is a face-like formation on Mars until they stumble across a page devoted to its nonexistence in an astronomy book.
The mission of the hard-core debunkers is not to separate truth from fiction but rather to rouse members of the fringe-science pantheon from their complacent slumber and then slaughter them for all to see. The articles in the Skeptical Inquirer denouncing UFOs, crop circles, and Martian megaliths are presented with all the candor and good taste of medieval witch-burnings.
Skeptic sometimes aspires to a commendable (if condescending) educational outreach mode. But make no mistake, Skeptic is written for those who have made up their minds, not neutral parties. The 2003 cover story on the Roswell incident is a case in point. Essentially, it’s a watered-down reprint of the U.S. Air Force’s 1997 The Roswell Report: Case Closed on the controversial events in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. The question that bubbles instantly to mind after reading it: Why bother? If the case has been closed since 1997, why the loud cover story in 2003?
Even mainstream news publications poked fun at the Air Force’s attempt to explain apparent alien bodies by citing balloon tests involving “anthropomorphic dummies” dropped years after the 1947 Roswell incident. Yet Skeptic seems frozen in time, recounting the dummy story as if it had just broken.
Most magazine editors would concede that this is pitifully bad journalism. But Skeptic isn’t out to conduct journalism so much as to issue official doctrine—even if this means repeating itself. The goal, as always, is to reassure. This overriding agenda has a debilitating effect on objectivity.
The logic portrayed by the Skeptical Inquirer is the logic of the self-same cults and quacks would-be debunkers endlessly lament. When you commit yourself to an organizati
on’s definition of skepticism—which, in practice, is seldom the correct definition—you run the risk of being taken for many long rides. Your reward is a certain smugness and a vicarious sense of intellectual infallibility. After all, it’s much more academically becoming to be seen reading the latest Skeptic than, say, UFO Magazine.
A 2003 issue of Skeptic also features a rote debunking of the Face on Mars in its “Junior Skeptic” section, committed to banishing all notions of interstellar flight from impressionable young minds by raising such anthropocentric biases as cost —as if beings from another star system will inevitably share the financial infrastructure of the modern United States. The Skeptic editors should—and probably do—know better. After all, ancient Egyptians built incredibly “expensive” pyramids because they were considered a necessary and defining aspect of their culture. Might not interstellar flight be a suitably defining characteristic of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization?
Junior skeptics are also treated to a side-by-side comparison of the Face on Mars as photographed by the Viking mission in 1976 and by the Surveyor in 2001 and told that what they’re seeing is a “hill.” No resources or references are given, and the images featured are of the thumbnail variety, which of course eliminates any sort of fair-minded assessment by enterprising youngsters who might otherwise pursue the subject with open minds. This is precisely Skeptic ’s intent, and it perfectly reflects the myopic fact-management regime controlled by mainstream “skepticism.”
All of this results in an ugly false dichotomy between so-called skeptics and so-called true believers. Of course, many people indeed believe that the Face is an extraterrestrial monument. And there may even be some soft-spoken souls at the Skeptics Society and CSICOP who aren’t totally unwilling to take a good look at the evidence favoring artificiality. But lightweight dismissals of the sort found in “Junior Skeptic” continue to be the rule. Illustrated books on space exploration include snide, seemingly devastating comments about the Face almost as if under obligation.
The editors and writers behind such lofty sentiments think they’re acting out of a pursuit of scientific truth, and this is where pop skepticism is most hurtful. By fostering a spurious us vs. them mentality toward the anomalous mainstream “skepticism” provides an unprepared audience with an instant dogmatic certainty that specific things simply cannot be and that those who suggest otherwise are, by definition, hucksters and pseudoscientists.
When the Skeptical Inquirer ran a cover article in 2002 on the Face (which it subjected to an interesting graphical filter to help stifle the feature’s likeness), it didn’t have much to say about the Face at all. Rather, it dissected the merits and motivations of Richard Hoagland, who, rightly or wrongly, is considered the most readily apparent personality behind the Cydonia controversy. Attacking the messenger is always easier than confronting a genuine enigma.
Skeptics groups rail against pseudoscience. But perhaps the time has come for independent thinkers, armed with real knowledge as opposed to false preconceptions, to begin questioning the agenda behind pseudoskepticism.
Skeptics and Other Aliens
Students of extraterrestrial archaeology are constantly confronted with three terms that quietly challenge assumptions of reality: skeptic, debunker, and believer. In the storm of claims, hypotheses, and accusations that define esoteric research, these labels are routinely misused. Let us look a bit closer at these emotionally charged words in order to see what they really mean and how they sculpt the epistemological landscape.
Skeptics are thinkers. Skeptics evaluate evidence, realizing that there is no absolute plane of reference on which to cling. Skeptics neither debunk nor believe—unless they are able to establish that a given phenomenon deserves to be debunked. Belief is not a luxury the true skeptic can afford; the mechanics of skeptical thought are rooted in probability and open-mindedness. Being a skeptic requires courage and intellectual flexibility. What looks like a neat idea may turn out to be unsubstantiated nonsense; conversely, it might be the real thing.
Debunkers comprise the most virulent of contemporary self-described skeptics. There is nothing inherently unsound about debunking, contrary to the many appeals on behalf of the pro side of any given paranormal controversy. But in order to debunk, the subject being debunked must be bunk. Valid, substantiated evidence cannot be debunked until new evidence supplants or alters it.
The term debunker is often taken as a negative word, perhaps best personified by orangutan scientist-theologian Dr. Zaius in Planet of the Apes. But there’s nothing wrong with being a debunker as long as the debunker can back up his claims. Of course, this doesn’t mean that some commentators won’t abuse the urge to debunk—usually in the name of skepticism. For example, astronomer Donald H. Menzel debunked countless UFO sightings based on his scientifically baseless a priori conviction that there were no UFOs. Veteran ufologist Philip J. Klass continues in Menzel’s role, correctly debunking many spurious UFO reports but erroneously debunking others. This is inevitable, as Klass’s self-stated maxim is that all UFO reports can be attributed to prosaic causes.
Along with faux-debunkers, believers are the most significant fetter to open-minded inquiry. Believers have no pressing need for facts; a few vague correlations or anonymous insider remarks will suffice. Believers typically revolve around the notion that great shifts in scientific thought are usually initiated by lone eccentrics whose genius is often recognized only posthumously. Thus, their being branded as “cranks” by the mainstream is flaunted as a badge of honor, as if they are being identified as architects of the next great paradigm.
While genuine pioneers are indeed often derided in their time (e.g., Galileo, Darwin), this is no promise that today’s crackpot theory will be vindicated. However, this doesn’t faze believers. Nothing fazes believers. True believers will weave contradictory evidence into their own models of reality, rationalizing it with painfully arcane philosophical acrobatics. Ideally, we should all strive to be skeptics. But that means taking a hard look at the principles of skepticism as relayed by the mainstream skeptical community (whose output is as flawed by what it doesn’t present as believer-oriented media is flawed by its excessive credulity).
Astronomer Carl Sagan was one of the century’s true heroes, but at times his reductionist approach to the search for extraterrestial intelligence betrayed an unsettling condescension. His arguments against the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs were lazy and hopelessly anthropocentric; he dismissed evidence of alien architecture on Mars in a flippant magazine hit piece so unlike the passionate, reasoned perspectives in his books. He also popularized the single most annoying pseudo-intellectual sound bite to grace the pages of the Skeptical Inquirer: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
As longtime paranormal/esoteric researcher Daniel Drasin aptly notes in his humorous essay “Zen and the Art of Debunkery,” “extraordinary” is an essentially emotional word, not any sort of objective standard. This allows the would-be debunker to define extraordinary at her whim, establishing a forever out-of-reach “evidential horizon” that no amount of evidence can hope to surpass.
Of course, skepticism is not merely the focus of semantic confusion. Its implications are exceedingly political. Cults, governments, advertisers, religions, schools, and the news media have an abiding interest in infecting people with their beliefs. If one’s not vigilantly skeptical, it’s all too easy to succumb. The moment this happens, one traps herself in a given “reality tunnel” (to borrow a term from skeptic extraordinaire Robert Anton Wilson).
The Earth of the early twenty-first century is a deceiving, perilous place, and we may ultimately pay for the luxury of our zealously guarded tunnel realities with our own extinction. Wrench your mind out of its routines and eviscerate your most cherished notions, leaving belief severed and twitching on the dissection tray. The invisible fog will begin to part, and the idiot chatter of our collective human television channel (all ads, all day) fades to a whisper some
where in the distance.
A Brief History of Planetary SETI
Planetary SETI, defined as the search for intelligent structure on neighboring worlds via remote sensing, has had a brief yet extremely controversial history, with believers shouting “Proof!” as often as self-described skeptics dismissing the hunt for artifacts as pseudoscience.
A revealing arrogance typifies both sides of the controversy. Believers and self-stated debunkers don’t want to be bothered with inconvenient facts. Having established an identity on whatever end of the debate (such as it is), commentators continue to force the scientific method into contortions in order to justify preconceived ideas.
Ironically, it is the Face—the very feature that drew our attention to Cydonia to begin with—that has prevented meaningful dialogue between anomalists and the mainstream geological community. Stanley V. McDaniel, professor of philosophy emeritus and former chairman of the philosophy department at Sonoma State University argues that an undertaking as philosophically ambitious as planetary SETI demands the inclusion of nongeologists. Engineers and comparative anthropologists, for instance, would make an invaluable addition to any team seeking to pursue the Martian enigmas objectively.
But NASA has already written the Face off as a trick of light, based on conveniently nonexistent evidence and public relations trickery, as evidenced by the catbox. Dissenters, regardless of their technical literacy, are laughingly dismissed as “Face believers” and pseudoscientific malcontents. Taking its cue from NASA, the mainstream media are content to take occasional potshots at the Face on Mars, seemingly unaware that the Face is but a single element in a much more elaborate and potentially significant scientific problem.
While the space agency may gripe about accusations of cover-up, a significant portion of those accusations are well-deserved. Someone saw fit to effectively obliterate the 1998 Face image with a high-pass filter. Why? And are independent researchers to accept that the faulty data from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter are due to yet another episode of gross incompetence on NASA/JPL’s behalf?
