The Mars Mystery

by Graham Hancock

  The reader will recall that Mariner 9 was shut down for a while in 1971, when it reached Mars in a dust storm. It “hibernated” until the storm was over, and was essentially reprogrammed to start the mapping.

  There was no reason why NASA could not have attempted such a move with the second computer onboard Mars Observer. Yet inexplicably in the next press release (10 September 1993) the “reboot” option was not mentioned—and never has been since. Did NASA try to reboot the computer? And if not, why not? The secondary computer was placed onboard precisely to fulfill this function. Why not, when you have essentially lost a billion-dollar mission, try this last viable option? NASA’s answer at the time was obviously unsatisfactory:

  Analysis by flight team groups indicated greater risk in doing so than is currently deemed necessary in terms of potential effects on other spacecraft telecommunications subsystem components.12

  So even though the craft was lost, all telemetry defunct, NASA did not wish to reboot the computer because of potential damage to communications equipment! A bizarre state of affairs, considering there was no communication.

  One last hope remained of locating the Observer and regaining control over it—using a beacon inside a separate component in the craft, the Mars Balloon Relay system. Strangely, no attempts were made to deploy this beacon for a month, when the proximity of Mars to the Sun had resulted in solar interference—essentially camouflaging the 1-watt beacon signal.

  SURVEYOR

  Within weeks of the loss of Observer, NASA announced that it would be sending another orbiter to Mars—a kind of scaled-down Observer. This was Mars Global Surveyor, which, as we have seen, was launched in 1996 and went into orbit in September 1997. While we were at Cal Tech in summer 1997, we asked Dr. Arden Albee about the Surveyor mission and how he reacted to ongoing accusations that NASA did not want to rephotograph Cydonia and the Face.

  Dr. Albee was indignant:

  We’ve always said we were going to do it! I could show you the first description of the Mars Observer mission—I wrote it! And it says we’re going to photograph the entire surface of Mars.

  Now, Surveyor will get images of Cydonia all the time, but at low resolution, because the lower resolution camera will cover the planet every day once we get into mapping orbit, so we’ll be getting images of Cydonia, but the high-resolution images we will not. We can’t predict until we get locked up in our circular orbit.

  I will read you a statement that I gave at lunchtime, which I carry for such wonderful occasions.

  Question: “Will Mars Global Surveyor photograph the Face on Mars?” Answer—my answer, and one to which Malin subscribes, incidentally: “Mars Global Surveyors camera will provide low-resolution images of the entire surface of Mars. Included in these daily images will be low-resolution images (about 300 meters per pixel) of the Cydonia region, rephotographed on many occasions when the instruments’ surface track passes over the region. The camera on this mission does not have the capability to be pointed at specific surface features of interest to scientists. And the mapping orbit from which high-resolution [images will be obtained is designed to allow] viewing of any specific location on the surface of Mars only a few times during the entire mission, within error. Targets within the Cydonia region will be imaged as part of the normal scientific investigation. When the orbital predictions permit, advance notice of these imaging opportunities will be available shortly before they occur, and will be provided over the Internet. After the images are acquired they will also be released over the Internet.”

  And that’s an official project position, an official NASA position, an official Malin position—we’ll do our best to take these images, but there’s nothing that will satisfy the conspiracy folks.13

  NASA administrator Dan Goldin is another who has promised to get photos of the Face:

  One of the things we are going to do in our next mission [Mars Global Surveyor] is, when the spacecraft goes over the spot, if we have the right pointing, we’ll try and take a picture, and scientifically show what we have found.14

  The reason, Goldin admits, is public pressure:

  I think we have to be somewhat sensitive, especially when we are dealing with government money, to recognize some of the issues that the public has.15

  UNEXPECTED NEWS

  On 26 March 1998 Professor Stanley McDaniel posted on his Web site some much hoped for, but little expected, news:

  This evening I received a welcome telephone call from Glenn Cunningham of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena…. Mr. Cunningham, who heads the Mars Global Surveyor project, stated that during April there will be three opportunities to image the area of interest at Cydonia, and that attempts to secure images will be made on each of these occasions.

  Fortunately Mars Global Surveyors positioning and orbit calibration had been completed quicker than expected, and a window had arisen in which the Cydonia anomalies—not officially regarded as scientific targets—could be snapped without altering the main mapping schedule.

  In the early hours of 5 April 1998, Mars Global Surveyor, 276 miles above the Martian surface, passed silently over the enigmatic and controversial features that had split the scientific community and began rephotographing them. Ten hours later they had been relayed to Earth.

  Then, for what seemed an eternity, all waited for the first images to appear.

  The silence was broken on 6 April 1998, midmorning Pacific time, as the raw image was posted on the World Wide Web. This long-awaited dark strip of data was an impenetrable mess—and the wait continued for a “cleaner” version of the image via a process of image contrast enhancement that was planned to take “a few hours.”

  After a number of hours of processing at Malin Space Science Systems HQ in San Diego, the new image was released. To the dismay of many, the words “Its not a face” appeared on Malm’s Web site.

  “IT’S NOT A FACE.”

  Amazingly, the Mars Global Surveyors camera had hit the bull’s eye first time and directly pinpointed the Face with breathtaking accuracy.

  The new photographic strip was radically different both in acquisition criteria and in content from the original Viking frames. As Malin commented:

  The “morning” sun was 25° above the horizon. The picture has a resolution of 14.1 feet (4.3 meters) per pixel, making it ten times higher resolution than the best previous image of the feature, which was taken by the Viking Mission in the mid-1970s. The full image covers an area 2.7 miles (4.4 km) wide and 25.7 miles (41.5 km) long.

  The Face was about halfway down the image, and the top right (damaged) corner of the D&M Pyramid was captured.

  For a while the supporters of the Face reeled in shock. Was this really the Face? The primary image was unclear and flat, like a series of dunes and ridges encircled by a lozenge of material like a racetrack.

  In this image the Faces noble features had been reduced to scars, but it had been a speedy processing, and much of the detail, it soon became apparent, had been bleached out in an attempt to refine the inscrutable primary image. By 5 P.M. that evening further work had been done on the images by Malin Space Science Systems: the image of the Face had been fleshed out and oriented so that it lay at the same angle as the original Viking frames.

  But still, this was clearly not the Face that the AOC researchers had predicted we would see under high-resolution photography.

  McDaniel’s reaction was subdued—he said:

  The two “eyesockets” are quite clear, as is the “headdress” or “helmet” feature encircling the object. The small projection on the left cheek appears to be what produced the feature called the “teardrop” in the Viking images. There is a face-like appearance, but the overall impression, except for the regularity of the “headdress” feature, is of a natural formation…. My initial guess is that the low resolution of the Viking images, plus the particular lighting conditions, were what produced the remarkably face-like appearance in the images we are familiar with. On the other hand, there i
s a sufficiently face-like appearance here as to make the hackles rise. Is it an eerie natural formation, or a heavily eroded intentional sculpture?

  He added, in an SPSR press-release:

  In 1976 officials made a snap judgment that the Mars “Face” was “natural” within three hours of receiving the images from Mars. Many of their premature claims turned out to be mistaken. With the arrival of new images from the Global Surveyor, there will once again be a temptation to make premature conclusions. No one image of the Face will end the controversy because of the two dozen or so other anomalous formations in the region which form the basis of many of our statistical conclusions.

  “I HOPE WE’VE SCOTCHED THIS THING FOR GOOD.”

  In the next couple of days the world media was awash with NASA’s “defacing” of Mars. Quotes appeared from experts, such as Michael Carr of the U.S. Geological Survey, saying, “It’s a natural formation, I hope we’ve scotched this thing for good.” But this, like Malin’s cry of “It’s not a face,” may prove a little premature.

  For far from ending the argument, it has merely reopened the debate and acted as a catalyst to the controversy.

  “IT’S A FACE!”

  Richard Hoagland, for one, felt justified in ignoring NASA and Malin’s announcements and proclaimed, “It’s a face!” There was also a certain logic in other claims that a well-weathered sculpture would actually look less like a face the closer one got. Doubts were certainly beginning to creep in….

  Some pointed out that the Face had been photographed in the early morning on 5 April, and yet it waited until 9 A.M. on the 6th to be analyzed, lying apparently untouched in the Project Data Base all night until the start of the next working day, time enough, some might say, for the images to have been altered.

  Strangely, it was the first hurried image of the Face that NASA released to the press, the image most unrepresentative of the true form of the landscape, and the image most likely to look incongruous when compared with the Viking photos.

  The press made little mention of the research of the SPSR, and in many cases failed to mention that the Face was just one feature among many anomalous structures at Cydonia—and as such was not even the strongest case for artificiality. Instead it concentrated on a gleeful debunking of UFO enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists who, it rightly predicted, were unlikely to be dissuaded by the new evidence.

  And yet as it stands, the Face is still anomalous—as McDaniel says, it may not be a face—“but what is it?” Many features found by computer enhancements of the original Viking frames prove to have been correct, such as the “eyeball” discovered by DiPietro and Molenaar, and the bilateral stripes above the eyes found by Carlotto. Even if these are merely natural, if strange, it proves that other features detected by digital enhancement elsewhere in Cydonia are also likely to exist in actuality, such as the details of the fort, the mound alignments, and the angles of the D&M Pyramid.

  However, because it was the Face that had attracted the first attention to Cydonia, its “unmasking” has seemingly destroyed the artificiality hypothesis for many in whose eyes it was, albeit wrongly, the linch-pin on which the whole artificiality argument stood. But we must wait for more detailed pictures of the other enigmatic objects in Cydonia before we can even begin to write off the artificiality hypothesis.

  It may well turn out that in trying to lay the ghost of the Face to rest all NASA has succeeded in doing is creating a martyr. Certainly there are signs of a rising tide of dissent against the agency’s insistently “natural” interpretation. On 14 April 1998, for example, the following comment from the astronomer Dr. Tom Van Flandern of the U.S. Naval Observatory appeared on Hoagland’s Web page: “In my considered opinion, there is no longer room for reasonable doubt of the artificial origin of the Face mesa, and I’ve never concluded ‘no room for reasonable doubt’ in my thirty-five-year scientific career.”

  VALIDATION PERIOD

  One issue that has been continually raised in this debate is whether we can be sure, in light of the Wolpe accusation and the Brookings report, that what we are seeing, and will continue to see, in the Global Surveyor images, is the whole undoctored truth. Doubts were being aired of the authenticity of the Global Surveyor “Face” image within hours of its release, in part due to its difference from the Viking images, and in part from the tardiness of its delivery to the public.

  This “tardiness” added up to no more than a few hours, explained away by NASA as being due to the reception of the data during the “graveyard shift” when the camera operators were home in bed. Given the fuss made over a handful of lost hours, however, it is no wonder that many were perturbed by the six-month “validation” clause, which, as McDaniel explains, was part of Dr. Malin’s contract:

  For some time now, we have been told that the private contractor for the camera onboard, Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, California, has a proprietary period of six months during which it need not release data. On persistent inquiry, I found out just a few weeks ago that now NASA claims there is no such proprietary period—there is instead, they say, a “data validation” period of up to six months. So no matter what it is called, a communication blackout for at least six months after taking any image of Cydonia could take place. Meanwhile, NASA may release images of Cydonia in near real time, but at low resolution from the mapping cameras, essentially useless for the study of the Mars anomalies.16

  It’s easy to see from such pronouncements why many who are interested in the unfolding drama of the “anomalies” tend to regard Dr. Malin as the villain of the piece—a shady background figure, wielding the power to change our entire worldview with a swing of his camera (or at any rate of the spacecraft it is attached to). And yet the man himself has remained invisible, inscrutable, a tabula rasa upon which to project all our Orwellian nightmares—the faceless face of Big Brother NASA.

  On 12 December 1997 we contacted Dr. Malin to offer him a chance to give his side of the story. We expected no reply. But the next day, 13 December, we received a four-page e-mail from him containing detailed responses to many of our questions.

  THE WIZARD

  In The Wizard of Oz there is a scene in which Dorothy and her companions reach the Emerald City to find the eponymous Wizard as a threatening, disembodied, thundering voice. Yet Toto the dog pulls back a curtain to show that this is all mechanical trickery performed by a very human wizard indeed.

  Communicating with Dr. Michael Malin, the wizard of Malin Space Science Systems, felt a bit like that. Because despite all our expectations he came across as a very human being—intelligent, candid, and humorous.

  After reading what he had to say we frankly find it difficult to see him as a villain, and we have begun to suspect that he might really be just a victim of his own consistency. It is as if people’s frustration at the scientific world’s conservatism and resultant failure to examine the Cydonia question properly have been projected onto the “faceless” Malin for the simple reason that the process of re-imaging Mars, and therefore the Cydonia anomalies, lies in his hands. And the latter was something that, until the surprising rephotographing in April 1998, he had no special plans to do.

  Malin forbade us to print his responses to our questions verbatim and seemed concerned that whatever he said would somehow be twisted by us and used against him in an argument that he considers as absurd as it is futile. This is one reason he has kept a low profile—believing that as his responses are usually rejected or claimed to be untrue then it is just a waste of time to reply at all.

  CATCH-22

  We pressed Malin on the issue of capturing new images of the Face. He answered, as we had expected, that the camera cannot be independently pointed, and that it would be difficult to plan to hit a small target of, say, a few kilometers across.

  Time has proven him overcautious here, for as we have seen, when it came to the crunch, Malin was able to target the Face with prodigious, pinpoint accuracy on his first attempt. He added, somewhat prophetic
ally, that even if he did succeed in getting a good image of the Face he thought it very unlikely that the AOC researchers would be satisfied.

  As for the epoch-making importance of such a discovery—did he not think it was worth expending the effort, just in case?

  The answer was a firm no. Malin said that he considered the probability of the Cydonian anomalies being unnatural as too low to justify the time and money that would be required to investigate them thoroughly.

  We remembered David Williams at Goddard telling us that each NASA mission is strictly and tightly funded with a number of set tasks to complete—all of which usually have to be proposed, seconded, and put through numerous selection committees before they get the go-ahead. A five-minute experiment onboard such a probe can be the apogee of a scientist’s working life. With this in mind we can easily understand why Malin has no spare time to “follow a whim” such as the Face on Mars. Nor does the fact that the Face has been reimaged suggest any change in his position. Cydonia was only given a chance at re-imaging because of the development of unforeseen spare time between aerobreaking and mapping. Moreover, the re-imaging was undertaken to satisfy public, not scientific, demand. Had this opportunity not arisen, then it is doubtful that the Face would have been specifically targeted at high resolution.

  But it is precisely this lengthy selection process that the AOC researchers find so invidious. There are no scientists within NASA approaching committees to fund their kind of research—and since the tragic loss of the Challenger shuttle and Mars Observer, money is tighter than ever. It seems that NASA can only afford to send a mission to investigate the entirety of the Cydonian anomalies fully and systematically if there is undoubted proof of artificiality. This is a catch-22, say the AOC researchers, because unambiguous proof, one way or another, is only likely to be obtained by precisely such a mission. And, given the latest damning criticisms of the Face based on the Mars Global Surveyor image, such an investigation seems even more unlikely than before.