The Mars Mystery

by Graham Hancock

  NASA observations going back as far as Mariner 4 suggest that the Martian orbit, which the reader will recall is unusually elliptical, “has been seriously disturbed and the planet’s structure severely strained at some time in the past.”43 Furthermore, telltale fractures on the Martian crust indicate that there has at some point been a significant change in “the planets rotational equilibrium figure”—that is, in its rate of spin.44 The laws of celestial mechanics dictate that it should be revolving once every eight hours; instead a complete revolution takes almost twenty-five hours.45 Such a change appears to have been far too large to have been caused by tidal interaction with Phobos and Deimos, the two tiny moons of Mars, and scientists recognize that “some other cause” must be sought.46

  Might that same cause have had something to do with another oddity of Mars?—namely the fact that the tilt, or obliquity, of its spin axis is subject to wild fluctuations. Presently at about 24 degrees, its “normal” range is already very large, varying from 14.9 degrees to 35.5 degrees over cycles of just a few million years.47 In 1993, Jihad Touma and Jack L. Wisdom of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered that “the tilt can also change abruptly. Excursions of the tilt axis through a range of as much as 60 degrees may recur sporadically every ten million years or so.”48

  Another curious characteristic of Mars is that it has almost no magnetic field, although there is undisputed evidence that it did once possess a strong one.49 And last but not least, there is evidence of a major, possibly rapid and possibly violent one-piece slippage of the entire Martian crust around the inner layers of the planet. For example, typical mantled and layered polar deposits have been found 180 degrees apart at the equator—that is, in positions antipodal to one another—as would be expected with former poles.50

  INTERPLANETARY VISITORS

  What set the Martian crust in motion and its axis rocking, and snuffed out its magnetic field and drastically slowed down its rate of spin? Was it the same event that brutally cratered the south of the planet and scalped the north down to a depth of three kilometers? And when did these things happen?

  Patten and Windsor suggest that many of the answers lie with their hypothetical tenth planet, Astra. Such a body could certainly have disturbed the orbit of Mars—and slowed down its spin—if, as supposed, it had exploded inside the planet’s Roche limit. This is by no means an unorthodox position. Hartmann too speaks of the possibility of “a large interplanetary body” entering the solar system51 and envisages how it might have trespassed the Roche limit of one of the planets and been “torn apart by tidal forces.”52 Where Patten and Windsor do fly in the face of conventional wisdom, however, is in their proposed chronology. They assert that the timing of the Astra cataclysm was “thousands of years ago, not millions.”53 Subsequently they narrow down the window to a period “neither earlier than 15,000 B.C. nor later than 3000 B.C.”54

  In their important study When the Earth Nearly Died, D. S. Allen and J. B. Delair also propose a massive interplanetary visitor—to which they give the name Phaeton. Like Patten and Windsor they believe that its appearance was extremely recent and that it passed close to Mars and Earth approximately 11,500 years ago.55 As to the precise nature of the object, they suggest that “Phaeton was spawned in an astronomically-near supernova explosion,” and that “Phaeton was a portion of exploded astral matter.”56

  Other authorities who make a related case include the eminent Oxford University astronomer Victor Clube and his colleague William Napier whose extraordinary work we will examine in part 4. They present evidence that a giant interstellar comet wandered into the solar system and began to fragment less than 20,000 years ago spreading ruin among the planets.57

  TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS FIVE?

  Until rock samples can be returned to Earth for radiometric tests, all proposed chronologies for the planet Mars should be regarded with skepticism. This is because the only dating procedure presently available to researchers is to pore over orbiter photographs and count the craters on features for which they wish to establish an age. As the reader will have gathered, the basic assumption behind this sort of abacus-level science is that impacts with asteroids and meteorites have occurred at a predictable rate over the last four billion years or so, with the largest number of impacts being registered early in the history of the solar system.58 Accordingly, heavily cratered areas are always judged to be older than lightly cratered areas, and because Mars is heavily cratered south of the line of dichotomy it is assumed that most of the cratering there must have occurred billions of years ago.

  Yet crater counting has some severe and perhaps fatal flaws. Peter Cattermole points out that it cannot give absolute dates, only relative dates.59 This is because it is honestly impossible from photographic evidence alone to assess how long ago an impact occurred. The most that crater counts can do is tell us that “some feature is probably older or younger than another feature, but we cannot say by how much or what the age of each feature is.”60 Because of this grave weakness, the method cannot make any allowance for the possibility, envisaged by Patten and others, of a sudden erratic, unpredictable blizzard of missiles hitting one hemisphere of Mars all at once, creating huge numbers of craters in a very short time, perhaps recently, thus giving the illusion of great age to features that are in fact young.61

  Could it be such an illusion that has convinced most scientists that Mars was last massively bombarded billions of years ago? Could a tremendous mistake have been made?

  LOST CIVILIZATIONS

  The notion that the terminal Mars cataclysm might have occurred recently—perhaps less than 20,000 years ago—is an astronomical heresy that raises peculiar resonances for us.

  In earlier books we have shown that an enormous cataclysm occurred on Earth in precisely this period.62 It was then that the last Ice Age came abruptly and disastrously to an end. No scientist has ever explained how or why this tremendous change occurred. The only certainty is that the sprawling ice caps of the Wurm and Wisconsin glaciations, which had enshrouded northern Europe and North America for at least 100,000 years, suddenly went into a ferocious meltdown—and that this began around 17,000 years ago. The next eight thousand years witnessed catastrophic floods, earthquakes, volcanic activity, and an overall rise in sea levels of more than 100 meters.63

  By the time the worst was over the face of the earth had changed almost beyond recognition: former coastlines, islands, and land bridges had been inundated, and many animal species had passed into extinction. Emerging from the mud and the ashes, the survivors included a small ragged remnant of humanity.

  Among the most treasured baggage that these surviving humans carried with them were memories—in the form of myths—of far-off times “before the Flood” when a great civilization flourished and the world was ruled by god-kings with mysterious powers and strange technology. In Fingerprints of the Gods and in Message of the Sphinx we showed that these myths, which are astonishingly consistent from culture to culture, could reflect a profound historical truth. An advanced civilization could indeed have arisen during the last Ice Age—only to be destroyed by the global flood that brought the Ice Age to an end. Some of the oldest myths and scriptures invite us to consider the possibility that the sacred wisdom and technical knowledge of this antediluvian civilization might not have been entirely lost in the cataclysm—that indeed a concerted effort might have been made to ensure that the best parts of an extraordinary legacy would be preserved.

  We have traced the theme of hidden knowledge through a labyrinth of ancient sites in widely scattered regions of the world.64 Our travels have convinced us that among these sites is one that is paramount—Egypt’s Giza necropolis, the sacred domain of the three Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx. We have made the case that elements of this site may be far older than the 4,500 years allocated to them by orthodox scholars, some dating back as far as 12,500 years, and we have shown that the pyramids and the Sphinx are terrestrial models of the constellations of Orion and Leo a
s they last appeared in the sky above Egypt 12,500 years ago.65 We have also investigated traditions of a “hall of records” at Giza—perhaps hidden in the bedrock under the Sphinx, perhaps in a concealed chamber in the Great Pyramid—where the ancient Egyptians believed that sacred writings from before the flood were stored.

  We are not prepared to rule out the possibility that such a repository—a time capsule from an antediluvian civilization—could still exist and may yet be found.66 Nor are we prepared to rule out the possibility, suggested by the work of Clube, Napier, Allen, and Delair, that the cataclysm that struck Earth at the end of the last Ice Age could have occurred in the same epoch as the cataclysm that destroyed Mars—and might have had the same cause.

  We therefore naturally find it curious, and will investigate the matter in later chapters, that the ancient Egyptians envisaged a profound connection between Mars and Earth and, more specifically, between Mars and the Great Sphinx of Giza. The planet and the monument were both seen as manifestations of Horus, the divine son of the star-gods Isis and Osiris. The planet and the monument were also both called by the same name, Horakhti, meaning “Horus in the Horizon.” Mars in addition was sometimes known as Horus the Red, and the Great Sphinx, for much of its history, was painted red.67

  What really died on the Red Planet during its last great cataclysm?

  We already know that the solar system lost something infinitely more precious than just a barren and empty world when the murderous barrage of cosmic debris slammed into Mars. We know that until the moment of its execution the planet possessed a strong magnetic field and a dense Earth-like atmosphere that permitted the formation of oceans, lakes, and rivers. We know that there had been frequent heavy rains on Mars and that vast quantities of water are still locked up as ice at its poles and beneath its surface. We know that many tantalizing hints and traces of organic life processes have been encountered.

  We also know that there is a gigantic Sphinx “face” on the plains of Cydonia, close to the shores of a former ocean, associated with a group of immense pyramidal structures.

  Are these just tricks of light and shadow playing with weird geology?

  Or is the most staggering revelation of the millennium about to unfold?

  PART TWO

  The Mystery of Cydonia

  5

  Close Encounter

  HUMANITY’S close encounter with Mars and the current search for life there may ultimately be looked back upon as a seminal moment of history. So far as we know, such an encounter has never happened before. Nevertheless, since NASA’s physical exploration of Mars is the end-product of more than a century of international endeavor, our reactions to what is found there will inevitably be influenced by entrenched ideas.

  Scientific interest in the possibility of life on Mars seems to have begun in 1877 when the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli announced a startling new discovery. He had observed a network of crisscrossing single and double lines on the Martian surface—giant grooves, canali in Italian, a word that was translated loosely into English as “canals.”1 Schiaparelli’s findings were widely hailed at the time as evidence for the existence of an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization on our neighboring planet. Among those who found themselves electrified by the discovery was the American Percival Lowell, a rich Harvard graduate with an interest in astronomy.

  Lowell read up on Schiaparelli’s canals in La Planete Mars, a book by the French astronomer Flammarion,2 and was inspired to build an observatory to study the planet under clear skies and at high altitude in the Arizona city of Flagstaff.3 He referred to his work there as a “speculative, highly sensational and idiosyncratic project.”4 Its goal, he said,

  may be put popularly as an investigation into the condition of life on other worlds, including last but not least their habitability by beings like [or] unlike man. This is not the chimerical search some may suppose. On the contrary, there is strong reason to believe that we are on the eve of a pretty definite discovery in the matter.5

  CANALS AND FLYING MACHINES

  Lowell died in 1916, having arrived at no definite discovery, but his views of the nature of Martian life were to have lasting effects, capturing the public imagination for decades.

  One popular theory of Lowell’s was that the Martian canals brought water from the frozen polar ice caps to an ancient civilization, far older than any human civilization, in the arid vastness of the planet’s tropical and equatorial deserts.6 He also proposed that certain dark fluctuating patches visible on the surface of Mars were vegetation.

  Lowell was using the most up-to-date equipment to make his discoveries, and his announcements caught the mood of the world at the fin de siècle—an openness to new ideas such as occultism and spiritualism, which naturally favored the possibility of life on other planets.7

  The widespread interest in occultism and extraterrestrial life lay behind the success of the prodigious French writer Camille Flammarion. In 1861, aged nineteen, he wrote a book entitled La Pluralité des Mondes Habités, which argued for the probable existence of extraterrestrial life. It became an instant bestseller, as did his later work, La Planete Mars (1892), the book that directly inspired Lowell. In it Flammarion states:

  The actual conditions on Mars are such that it would be wrong to deny that it could be inhabited by human species whose intelligence and methods of action could be far superior to our own. Neither can we deny that they could have straightened the original rivers and built up a system of canals with the idea of producing a planet-wide circulation system.8

  The ideas of Schiaparelli, Flammarion, and Lowell stoked Mars fever in the final years of the nineteenth century. In 1898 H. G. Wells cashed in on this with his tale of the Martian invasion of Victorian Britain, The War of the Worlds. Then in 1902 the eminent Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung published his doctoral dissertation On the Psychology of So-called Occult Phenomena. In it he subjected his cousin Hélène Preiswerk—who was in the habit of falling into mediumistic trances—to a detailed psychological analysis.

  In her trances Hélène often talked of journeys to Mars:

  Flying machines have long been in existence on Mars. The whole of Mars is covered with canals, the canals are artificial lakes and are used for irrigation. The canals are all flat ditches, the water on them is very shallow. There are no bridges over the canals, but that does not prevent communication because everybody travels by flying machine.9

  Clearly Flammarion and Lowell’s Mars was entering humanity’s psyche at a most profound level. Here, a fourteen-year-old, uneducated Swiss girl, in unconscious utterances, was revealing the preoccupations of an era.

  In 1902, the same year that Jung’s thesis was published, a prize was offered to the first person to make contact with an alien life-form. There was one stipulation: contact with Martians was not included, for the simple reason that this was thought to be too easy. In 1911, nine years after the competition was launched, an article appeared in the New York Times headlined “Martians build two immense canals in two years.”10

  EXPERIMENTS

  The belief that Mars could be, if not inhabited, then at least habitable was sustained among laymen and scientists alike until the second half of the twentieth century. For example, in the early 1960s the popular British astronomer Patrick Moore and a microbiologist, Dr. Francis Jackson, sought to test the possibility of life on Mars by conducting simple experiments:

  We built a Martian Laboratory, filled it with what we thought to be the correct atmosphere—nitrogen, with a pressure of 85 millibars—and gave it the right temperature range between day and night. When we grew things in it, the results were interesting. A cactus fared badly, and after a single Martian night looked decidedly worse for wear, but more simple organisms did better, and we felt quite encouraged.11

  Similarly, the late Carl Sagan built what he called “Mars jars” in which these experiments were repeated.12 His results were similar—some microbes actually grew if a little water was prese
nt.

  But any optimism over such results was soon to be crushed when space probes in the mid-1960s sent back images of Mars as a barren and frozen lifeless hell.

  ROCKETING TECHNOLOGY

  In 1926 Robert Hutchings Goddard (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center is named in his memory) built the forerunner of the space rockets that we are familiar with today—though his small prototype traveled only 60 meters before crashing and could reach a top speed of just 100 kilometers per hour.13 He was the first person to test and prove the theory that rockets could be used to leave the earths atmosphere and even travel to other planets—a view first proposed by a Russian schoolteacher named Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky in the late nineteenth century, and further refined by the German Hermann Oberth in 1923.

  During World War II, the rocket was developed as a weapon by the Nazis. Their V-2 relied upon and improved Goddard’s technology. Three years after the end of the war a two-stage V-2/WAC Corporal combination bettered Goddard’s distance phenomenally, reaching a height of four kilometers.14

  THE SPACE RACE

  If the Second World War was a catalyst to rocket science, then the Cold War was a thousand times stronger. With the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging in the air, the American rocket program—led initially by Wernher von Braun—waged a guerrilla campaign of intellect and design with its Russian counterpart, headed by Sergei Korolov. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, masses of government funding went into improving the propulsion systems for atomic weapons.15 On 4 October 1957, an offshoot of all this research and development allowed the Russians to send humanity’s first ever satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit. The “space race” had begun.