The Mars Mystery

by Graham Hancock

  There can be little doubt that Carl Sagan, while he lived, was an extremely effective NASA spin doctor calming public concerns about the Face. He even wrote a piece on the subject for the Sunday newspaper magazine Parade in which he staunchly defended NASA’s “illusion” arguments about the Face and likened it to many faces that appear in nature, such as the Great Indian Face, the Man in the Moon, and Jesus in a Tortilla.

  It is with exactly such arguments that NASA has consistently defended its policy of not prioritizing Cydonia. But are its arguments really valid—or merely dismissive? In McDaniel’s view they are the latter. Indeed, they are not only dismissive but fundamentally flawed, perhaps even deliberately flawed.

  LOST PROBES

  Mars Observer offered the ultimate means to settle the controversy—new high-resolution photographs of the Cydonia plains—but only if NASA and Michael Malin could be persuaded that it was worth pointing Observers camera in the right direction. The lobbying began in earnest. Then, just twenty-four hours before Richard Hoagland was scheduled to debate the matter live on national TV with Observer scientist Bevan French, the probe was lost.

  It was not the first probe in recent history to have been mysteriously silenced. Two Russian probes sent to Mars in 1988 also lost contact. Phobos 1, launched on 7 July 1988, was deemed lost after just 53 days, while Phobos 2, launched three days after Phobos 1, managed, it is thought, to map some of Mars. It was somehow destroyed while imaging Phobos, one of the tiny moons of Mars. The last image it sent back to Earth was of a huge baffling cigar-shaped elliptical shadow—miles long—on the Martian surface.8

  GLOBAL SURVEYOR

  As we write these words, Mars Global Surveyor—the successor to the doomed Mars Observer—is engaged successfully in the mission; its predecessor failed even to begin.

  Essentially it is a less expensive Observer, with only five of the original seven experiments on board, yet it still has the same Malin Space Science Systems Camera, and Dr. Malin still presides over the use of this piece of modern technology.

  But what of NASA’s official policy? Is it the same as before? Has the work of the AOC researchers convinced them to make a thorough study of Cydonia?

  9

  Face Staring Back

  Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth,/And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; … /Up, up the long, delirious burning blue/I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace,/Where never lark, or even eagle flew/And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod/The high untrespassed sanctity of space,/Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

  JOHN GILLESPIE MAGEE, JR., “HIGH FLIGHT,” 1943

  A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint, or a death mask.

  SUSAN SONTAG, New York Review of Books,

  23 June 1977

  WHEN Tobias Owen discovered the Face on Mars in Viking frame 35A72 he reacted in a totally natural way: “Oh my God, that looks like a face.”

  Typically the image does produce this response—an instantaneous gut reaction of recognition. But is it really what it seems? Or is it just a trick of light and shadow? Some very intelligent and highly qualified people have spent a great deal of time during the past twenty years trying to answer these questions.

  SECRETS OF PIXELS

  Vincent DiPietro, the first scientist to take the Face seriously (and the man who rediscovered it in the Goddard archives in 1979) is an electrical engineer, specializing in digital electronics and image processing. He shared the discovery with fellow Lockheed computer scientist Gregory Molenaar, who was on contract to NASA with the Computer Sciences Corporation and has a similar background in computer image analysis. Seeing the whole process as an “adventure,” the pair embarked on a clandestine project to enhance the image of the Face and to reexamine the original Viking data tapes for other anomalous objects on the Martian surface.1

  The Face occupies an area of only 64 × 64 pixels in the original image, with each pixel representing an area of 150 × 155 feet.2 Anything smaller than this simply does not register. Nevertheless the pixels are encoded with helpful clues that enable computers to reconstruct what is there.

  As the orbital camera was of low resolution, it had to average out the tone of each 150 × 155-foot area to come to a value for the pixel that would represent it. To the lightest areas it assigned a low numerical value (white = 0) and to the darkest areas it assigned a high value (black = 256). The orbiter was then able to transmit the images back to earth as a sequence of numbers that could be printed out as black-and-white pictures built up out of “gray-scale” pixels.

  The image-enhancement work done by DiPietro and Molenaar was an attempt to glean some detail from each pixel about what lay below its average 256 tone. This could be done by comparing each pixel with its neighbor. For example, if one pixel was light gray and its neighbor on the left lighter, and its neighbor on the right darker, it was probable that these three blocks of tone actually represented a gradual change from light to dark, not a markedly stepped difference in tone, from left to right.3 Using such an approach, more detail could theoretically be squeezed out of the grainy Viking images:

  In order to magnify digital images, additional pixels must be added and their values determined. [One] method is to calculate intermediate pixel values … using some combination of their surrounding values. For example, bilinear interpolation uses a pixel’s four nearest neighbors and produces results that are smoother than pixel replication, but tend to be blurry.4

  SPITTING IMAGE

  The first step was to clean up frame 35A72 by removing transmission errors (errors due to interference, etc., characterized by pure white or black single pixels). Next, realizing that most of the data on the frame was between gray-scale values 60 and 108, DiPietro and Molenaar stretched the contrast so that 60, not 0, became white and 108 became black. Thus the middling gray tones of which the images were made were replaced by a broader range of light and dark.

  This was better but the researchers were still not satisfied with the results, which they described as “huge pixels with stair-step-like images.” They therefore “designed a way to remove the ragged edges by dividing each of the original pixels into nine smaller units. Each new pixel is shaded by summing percentages of the original adjacent pixels with the subject pixel to aim at discreet new values.”5

  They named this process SPIT, after “spitting image,” and the acronym for Starburst Pixel Interleaving Technique. As a control they subjected terrestrial low-resolution satellite photographs of the Pentagon and Dulles International Airport in Virginia to SPIT processing and achieved much clearer images, which were verified against aerial photographs of the sites.

  Satisfied that their technique worked, DiPietro and Molenaar now used it on frame 35A72:

  A remarkable improvement occurred. The Face began to reveal much more detail than had previously been observed.6

  MISSING FRAMES

  In 1976 NASA spokesman Gerry Soffen had stated categorically that another image of Cydonia—on which the Face “disappeared” in a different sun angle—had been acquired just “a few hours later” than frame 35A72. Naturally DiPietro and Molenaar wanted to study this frame, but an exhaustive search proved it did not exist in the archives. Indeed, as we have seen, Soffen was being either presumptuous or economical with the truth when he made his 1976 statement—for “a few hours later” Cydonia had been in darkness and the Viking orbiter had been elsewhere, photographing an entirely different part of the planet.

  The two Lockheed scientists persevered, however, and eventually did come across one other Cydonia frame showing the Face—frame 70A13. It had been acquired thirty-five days later than 35A72 and had been curiously misfiled. This is the only other frame that shows the Face. When it was taken the sun was much higher than it had been on frame 35A72 (27 degrees instead of 10 degrees). Far from “disappearing” under this
different sun angle, the Face was still clearly visible:

  Not only did the second frame confirm the first, but additional features emerged. The contour of the eye cavity remained unchanged. The second eye cavity became more distinct. The hairline continued to the opposite side. A chin line began to take shape.7

  Next DiPietro and Molenaar replaced the gray-scale tonal values in the the two frames with a scale based on colors. They did this because color differences are easier to see than shades of gray. The result was that the contents of the eye cavity began to become visible. To their amazement the researchers found themselves looking at something very much like a representation of an eyeball with a distinct pupil.

  This, then, was the initial evidence put forward by DiPietro and Molenaar—strongly suggesting that there was much more to the Face than a trick of light and shadow. But were they right?

  Before coming to any conclusions of our own on the matter we felt we needed a second opinion on the imaging techniques DiPietro and Molenaar used.

  AN EXCITED DR. WILLIAMS

  A good place to start asking questions was NASA itself, with the scientists currently working on the Pathfinder and Global Surveyor missions to Mars. In July 1997, therefore, three weeks after Pathfinder had touched down in Ares Vallis, we arranged a meeting with Dr. David Williams, Pathfinders chief archivist at the Space Science Data Center in the Goddard Space Flight Center, where DiPietro had rediscovered frame 35A72.

  Goddard is a huge expanse of offices and laboratories set in lush Maryland countryside half an hour by car from the center of Washington, D.C. Feeling a little daunted by the military thoroughness of the security procedures, we picked up our passes at the gatehouse and were ushered inside.

  After a ten-minute walk along a pleasant wooded road we reached the archives building. Expecting to find a grizzled, die-hard scientist, we were pleasantly surprised at Dr. Williams’s youth and enthusiasm, which sharply contrasted with NASA’s official image. Better still, Dr. Williams was keen to talk about the Face on Mars:

  Well, I know that there’s a number of scientists, serious scientists, who are working on this from the angle that it’s an artificial structure—a sign of intelligence—so personally I would like to see what Mars Global Surveyor finds when it takes its images, hopefully high-resolution, different lighting angles, things like that, to see what this area looks like, what this “face” looks like.

  I would be surprised if it did not turn out to be natural, but on the other hand, I think it would be pretty cool if it wasn’t! That would be neat, imagine it—if pictures came back and unequivocally said this was an artificial structure. I mean, it would change our whole view of the entire universe. I think that would be pretty exciting.

  NEW FOR OLD

  As chief archivist for the Pathfinder mission, Dr. Williams has to assess and interpret incoming data. He was therefore the appropriate person to give us NASA’s views about the nature and validity of the enhancement techniques used on the earlier Viking images.

  Only the raw Viking images could strictly be said to be 100 percent accurate, he pointed out. But, he admitted, it is standard practice at NASA to manipulate such images to make them cleaner and more defined:

  If you open up a raw Viking image, most of them look like there’s nothing there, and even though it doesn’t take long, you have to enhance the contrast, you have to stretch it, you have to do things so that you can actually see what is really in the image.

  Indeed, he confirmed, the computer enhancement of received raw data is not only standard procedure but is absolutely necessary to make sense of the kind of information transmitted by orbiting cameras. He also confirmed that techniques such as the SPIT process devised by DiPietro and Molenaar are now used in a great many commercial applications. As he pointed out, DiPietro and Molenaar had recently received an award from the Computer Sciences Corporation of Virginia for developing the SPIT process, which has proved itself as an effective method for extracting information from computer images.

  ARTISTIC MERIT?

  In the early days of his research, Richard Hoagland suggested that artists should evaluate the ratios and proportions of the Face. He reasoned that if it accorded with artistic criteria then this would be another sign of artificiality. Jim Channon, artist, concept designer, and illustrator, took up the challenge.

  Channon concentrated on proportions (anthropometry), the supporting structure (architectural symmetry), and expression (artistic cultural focus). His conclusions were as follows:

  I find no facial features that seem to violate classical conventions. The platform supporting the Face has its own set of classical proportions as well…. Were the Face not present, we would still see four sets of parallel lines circumscribing four sloped areas of equal size. Having these four equally proportioned sides at right angles to each other creates a symmetrical geometric rectangle. These support structures alone suggest a piece of consciously designed architecture.

  The expression of the Face on Mars reflects permanence, strength, and similar characteristics in this range of reverence and respect. There is overwhelming evidence that the structure revealed in the photographs presented to me by Dick Hoagland is a consciously created monument typical of the archaeology left to us by our predecessors. I would need much more precise evidence at this point to prove the contrary.8

  NEW FEATURES

  Channon’s analysis was done before computer analyst Mark Carlotto had re-imaged the Viking frames using techniques that improved upon those of DiPietro and Molenaar. We will review Carlotto’s work in more detail in chapter 10. But, briefly, what it revealed was a highly controversial set of new features on the Face—features that would echo, as Channon had said, monuments “typical of the archaeology left to us by our predecessors.” These features include teeth, a diadem, a teardrop, and a distinctive headpiece decoration that is striped like the characteristic nemes headdress worn by the pharaohs of Egypt (seen as the headdress of the Great Sphinx of Giza).

  Carlotto’s work on the second frame, 70A13, revealed that the Face is not as symmetrical as other researchers had previously thought. Using a technique known as “cubic spine interpolation,” which greatly enhances contrast, he was able to pick out details in the Face that previously had been too faint to be noticed.

  Its left side, in shadow on frame 35A72, is better lit on frame 70A13, which was taken at a higher sun angle. The left eye socket can be seen and the mouth is revealed as not quite straight. Instead it seems to rise upward at the corners, as though in a sneer.

  Carlotto also uncovered a “convoluted” area below the left cheek. Some see it as a kind of ramp, but this is pure speculation because the relevant area is marred by either a crater or a camera registration mark that cannot be removed from the enhancements.

  A “TRICK OF LIGHT AND SHADOWS”

  On 31 July 1997, twenty-one years after NASA’s first attempt to explain the image of the Cydonia Face as an illusion, we traveled to Pasadena, California, to visit the California Institute of Technology. This private university and think tank runs NASA’s nearby Jet Propulsion Laboratory and has been home to some of the legendary scientists of the century, including the Nobel Prize-winning physicists Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman.

  The impeccable buildings of Cal Tech nestled beneath the San Gabriel Mountains spread out among lush gardens and cooling fountains. Unlike the anonymous, heavily guarded blocks at JPL, one can roam the aesthetic vistas of Cal Tech at ease. We found refuge from the burning heat in the air-conditioned office of Dr. Arden Albee.

  We were lucky to see him. After spending hours on the phone, being passed from pillar to post, we were finally, in desperation, put through to him. He was leaving for Japan the next day to discuss his work as chief scientist on the Mars Global Surveyor mission, which was then fast approaching Mars orbit. This craft was destined to re-image the whole of the Martian surface—including the Cydonia region. On the eve of a possible test of the Artificial Origins at Cydonia hy
pothesis, what did Mars Global Surveyors chief scientist, and onetime JPL chief scientist, make of the furor?

  Dr. Albee is a busy man, at a busy moment in Mars research, and we were grateful for his time. Replying slowly, with deliberate emphasis, he answered our queries as though he was at one of the numerous press conferences that had been a common event for him in the preceding weeks. At the mention of Cydonia his face dropped. What, we asked, was his opinion of the Face on Mars and the case for its artificiality made by AOC researchers?

  What it is is a shadow that has an appearance that somewhat resembles a face. And so there is a difference in the albedo [surface coloration], in that pixel by pixel the return clearly has some resemblance to a face, and what their [the AOC researchers] calculations did was to assume that these differences in color or differences in albedo, really, were due to slope—because that’s how your eye looks at it, and sort of says, hey, that’s a slope! It doesn’t have to be that, it could be changes in the amount of dust on the surface; it could be partly slope, partly dust, partly different material, and so on. It is a trick of light and shadows.

  We asked Dr. Albee if he knew of the McDaniel Report, or the work of DiPietro, Molenaar, Hoagland, or Carlotto. In answer, with a broad grin, he took down a copy of the McDaniel Report from his bookshelf.

  You know, people dream up all kinds of crazy things. Every place you go there’s a tourist spot, whether it’s in the Alps or Wisconsin, or the Grand Canyon—the great Indian face or the great Yogi bear. People look at natural things and see human faces in them. It’s a natural phenomenon, it goes back to prehistory.