The Mars Mystery

by Graham Hancock

  Within the margins of tolerance this data warns us that the Earth-Moon system could now enter an episode of bombardment at any time. Indeed, as we will see in the next chapter, an increasingly large and eminent group of scientists believe that we have been in such an episode for almost 20,000 years, that it is implicated in the sudden and mysterious end of the last Ice Age—which resulted in mass extinctions and a global flood—and that the worst is yet to come.

  What no one has considered, perhaps because it seems so far away when viewed from Earth, is the haunting possibility that Mars, which the ancient Egyptians called Horus the Red, and the Aztecs Xipe-Xolotl, the “Flayed Planet,”56 could also have been a victim of that same sustained bombardment.

  24

  Visitor from the Stars

  THE mystery of what happened to Mars is a jigsaw puzzle that has been scattered throughout the galaxy—perhaps even beyond the galaxy—and across billions of years. Moreover, since the distance between Mars and Earth is insignificant on the galactic scale, it is reasonable to suppose that any influence felt by Mars will also have been felt by Earth—and vice versa. The picture that has begun to emerge sets the solar system within its galactic environment and shows us that a clear and present danger is posed by comets.

  The danger is as yet extremely difficult to quantify, and because of this the precise risks are impossible to assess. All that we know for sure is that as the Sun orbits the galactic nucleus, towing the Oort cloud, the Kuiper belt, Mars, Earth, and all the other planets in its wake, it exposes every one of them to periodic surges of cometary activity whenever it passes through a spiral arm or a gigantic molecular cloud. As though propelled by some great cosmic tide, waves of comets are unleashed by such encounters and roll toward the inner solar system—including, at random intervals, giant comets hundreds of kilometers across.

  It may take the missiles in each wave millions of years to fall far enough to cross the orbits, and enter the domain, of the stony planets. During this long spiraling-down process, in which comets have their own orbits repeatedly “nudged” and stressed by interactions with the gas-giants Neptune, Saturn, and Jupiter, many are ripped apart by gravitational forces and split up into multiple fragments—thus vastly increasing the total numbers of projectiles.

  We will argue that much of the damage done to Mars, and such enigmas as the planet’s strange crustal dichotomy, may be accounted for by a single head-on collision with the fragments of a truly gigantic comet that came in from the outer solar system on such a wave. Moreover, when we look at the ruined, cratered corpse of Mars, so grim and dead, so tragic with its empty rivers and its dry oceans, is it not obvious that worlds can be killed by comets? And is it not obvious, too, as the old saw goes, that there but for the grace of God go you or I?

  CYCLES OF THE HEAVENS

  Science has not yet been able to bring back any samples from Martian craters or to undertake a detailed geological investigation of the planet. Almost all of our assumptions about Mars are based on what can be learned from studying photographs taken by orbiting spacecraft—and these cannot tell us when the terminal Mars cataclysm occurred. As we have maintained throughout this book, the thousands of impact craters south of the line of dichotomy need not have accumulated slowly, over billions of years, as most scientists still believe, but could have been inflicted suddenly, perhaps even in one single cataclysmic incident, and perhaps recently.

  This is a hypothesis that can be tested when manned landings are made on Mars. Until then it is only an assumption, and definitely not a proven fact, that the Martian craters are billions of years old. A certain light may be shed on the matter, however, by what we know for sure has happened on Mars’s nearby neighbor, Earth. Here we do not need to rely on grainy photographs taken by orbiters thousands of kilometers up but can look into tangible and empirical matters such as extinction records, data gathered from craters around the world, chemical tests on soil samples—and so on and so forth.

  What these indicate, as we reported at the end of the preceding chapter, is that our planet has experienced cyclic episodes of bombardment and extinction at regular intervals during the past 100 million years—specifically 94.5 million years ago, 65 million years ago (the K/T event), and 36.9 million years ago.1 We have also shown that the cycle has a basic “heartbeat” of 30 million years with “the standard deviation of each individual episode being 9 million years.”2 In plain English this means that if you look at the cycle over a long enough period of time—several hundred million years—you will find that linked bombardment and extinction episodes do occur at roughly 30-million-year intervals, but that the gap may become as small as 21 million years in some cases, or as large as 39 million years in others.

  Returning to the last 100 million years we find that the intervals between extinction events have been consistently within this range. Between 94.5 million years ago and 65 million years ago the figure works out at 29.5 million years. Between 65 million years ago and 36.9 million years ago the figure works out at 28.1 million years. Since we know that the bombardments are caused by waves of galactic material that swamp the entire solar system—not just near-Earth space—we think it is a good guess that Mars, and the Moon, would have experienced bombardment episodes, pretty much in tandem with Earth, at around 94.5, 65, and 36.9 million years ago. As we saw in the last chapter this has already been confirmed in the case of the Moon. In the case of Mars it is another testable hypothesis that will have to await a manned landing—but then so will all hypotheses about Mars, from all sources. For neither the wild theories of the craziest cranks nor the sober reflections of celebrated scientists have yet had to be proven against hard empirical evidence from the surface of the planet itself.

  To reiterate, it is our hypothesis that Mars and Earth both experienced bombardment episodes at around 94.5, 65, and 36.9 million years ago. The final interval, from 36.9 million years ago up till today, is significantly longer then the previous two. Indeed, it is dangerously close to the extreme upper limit of the cycle—39 million years.

  Could we be nearing the end of what is already beginning to look like an untypical and overlong period of quiescence? Could another bombardment of the inner planets be on the way?

  WHERE ARE WE NOW?

  The first steps toward an intelligent assessment of our current predicament have already been taken by a group of leading astronomers including Victor Clube and Bill Napier, David Asher, Duncan Steel, Mark Bailey, Sir Fred Hoyle, and Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe. There is not space here to report all of their discoveries, so in the rest of this chapter we will inevitably have to focus on the central evidence chain that they have built up. We shall do so as far as possible in their own words, which convey to the reader better than we can the deep concern and rising sense of urgency that these scientists feel. We share their concern. And we believe it is a matter of fundamental importance that the public and policymakers should be made aware of their work—which demonstrates that the galactic environment in which the solar system presently finds itself is a uniquely deadly and unpredictable one. Together with a growing number of colleagues from many other countries, they draw particular attention to the following facts:

  There is evidence of “a very recent disturbance of the Oort cloud related in some way to the solar motion.”3

  The Sun has recently passed through the galaxy’s densely crowded mid-plane and is presently “skimming” just 8 degrees above it.4

  For the past 100 million years or so the Sun has been visiting the Orion spiral arm,5 crossing it “at a fairly narrow angle to the axis, completing one or two porpoise-like cycles as it does so.”6

  The Sun has recently completed said passage above and is now poised just above the inner edge of the arm.7

  Here the Sun has “penetrated what appears to be the remains of an old, disintegrating giant molecular cloud. This is a ring of material which incorporates most of the molecular clouds and star-forming regions in the solar neighborhood. The young blue star
s form an arc in the sky now known as Gould’s belt but recognized since the time of Ptolemy … The solar system passed through Gould’s belt only 5–10 million years ago.”8

  The chilling conclusion is that the Sun’s current “address” in the galaxy not only indicates that a bombardment episode is imminent but that it must have already begun and that the impact rate at the present time should be exceptionally high:

  The Sun’s position at the inner edge of the Orion spiral arm ensures that we are currently in an active phase. Further, the solar system has just passed through the plane of the galaxy where the tidal stresses acting on the comet cloud are at their maximum; the comet flux is therefore near a strong peak of its galactic cycle. It has also recently passed through Goulds belt and is therefore undergoing an exceptional tidal stress due to a recent passage through an old, disintegrating molecular cloud…. This encounter must have created a sharp impact episode, within which we are still immersed…. [Indeed] the conditions which would yield an exceptional flux of comets on to Earth—positioning near the galactic plane, proximity to a spiral arm, and recent passage through a system of molecular clouds—are all simultaneously met by the solar system at the present time…. We are in an impact episode now.9

  THE TRAIL OF A GIANT COMET

  The detective work that the astronomers have done pinpoints the Suns turbulent passage through Goulds belt as the single most likely source of the episode. Near the end of the passage, around 5 million years ago, they believe that a wave of comets was expelled from the Oort cloud by tidal stress and began the slow, light-year-long journey toward the inner solar system. Among these comets was at least one giant “up to a few hundred kilometers in size”10 that took several million years to spiral down toward the planets. There it first entered the realms of Neptune, Saturn, and Jupiter, where it was detained for perhaps another million years as its orbit gradually decreased in size while at the same time evolving into an ever more elliptical form. As recently as 50,000 years ago, a gravitational “kick” from Jupiter finally brought it into the inner solar system, where it settled into a steeply elliptical orbit with a perihelion very close to the Sun and an aphelion just beyond Jupiter.11 Such an orbit would inevitably be both Earth-crossing and Mars-crossing. Victor Clube told us:

  We have a very specific picture that this giant comet was deflected into a sun-grazing orbit. Now that’s one that goes very close to the sun. And also highly eccentric, meaning that it gets very close to Jupiter as well. Now this very narrow, elliptical orbit is the key to the evolution of this particular giant comet. The frequent passages close to the Sun ultimately cause the comet to break up into lots of lumps. But it doesn’t do it straight away. This is a long-drawn-out process.12

  The process did not begin in earnest until about 20,000 years ago—although some of the astronomers suspect it could have been as recently as 15,000 to 16,000 years ago,13 when a major change seems to have overtaken the giant comet.14 The approximate date of this event has been established by dynamical studies, and from samples of interplanetary dust taken from Earth and the Moon (which show that a great flux occurred between 20,000 and 16,000 years ago15) and is likely to be correct, give or take a couple thousand years.16 Astronomers, however, are much less certain about exactly what happened in that crucial epoch.

  One possible line of speculation is that the original object had become so volatile as a result of repeated passes close to the Sun that it literally tore itself apart in an explosive fragmentation. Another, perhaps more plausible, is that it trespassed the Roche limit of a planet—as comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 did during 1992–1994—and was pulled to pieces by intolerable tidal stresses.17

  This is a puzzle to which we will need to return.

  MILLIONS OF PIECES, THOUSANDS OF YEARS

  Whatever the precise nature of the original fragmentation event, astronomers have demonstrated that it was followed by a very lengthy and continuing “hierarchy of disintegrations” spread out all along the path of the comet’s orbit and periodically bombarding all the inner planets with dense meteor streams, fireballs, and short-lived swarms of Tunguska-sized projectiles, together with

  many individual asteroids of a kilometer in size or greater, which themselves break up, and at least one conspicuously large core remnant which is probably enveloped in a swarm of dust and debris.18

  Sir Fred Hoyle points out that when the original giant comet was still in its undivided state the chances of a collision with Earth were small—he estimates only about one part in a billion on each orbit:19

  But as [such a] comet divides into more and more chunks the chance of one or another of them hitting Earth rises inexorably, until one or another of them will indeed score a bulls-eye on our planet.20

  Within 10,000 years of the initial explosive fragmentation event, Hoyle estimates that the original comet would already have “divided into about a million pieces” with an average weight in the range of 10,000 million tons each (implying a weight of 10,000 million million tons for the mother object).21 Further hierarchical disintegrations into smaller and smaller—and more and more numerous—pieces would then have followed, spread out over an immensely long period, with the rate of individual collisions rising as the numbers of available projectiles increased.22

  It is obviously important to know how long such a process might be expected to continue.

  Victor Clube calculates that the “comminution lifetime” of a giant comet after fragmentation begins—that is, the time it will take to reduce itself to pieces too small to cause impact damage—may be as long as 100,000 years.23 Since the first major fragmentation event of the comet that we are interested in is thought to have occurred only 20,000 years ago, the implication is that swarms of deadly projectiles of assorted sizes are still likely to be orbiting along the Earth-crossing path previously pursued by the original intact comet.24 Moreover there is a chilling possibility that the larger nuclei remaining in the swarm could prove extremely difficult for astronomers to detect “due to their immersion in obscuring dust—giving them overall something of the character of a ‘holy grail.’”25

  The laws of probability suggest that if such a near-invisible menace is indeed lurking on an Earth-crossing orbit, then fragments from it should have collided with the Earth-Moon system several times during the past 20,000 years.

  HIDDEN HAND

  Clube, Napier, Hoyle, Wickramasinghe, and their colleagues have demonstrated that precisely such a series of encounters may have been the hidden hand at work behind the sudden, catastrophic, and hitherto unexplained end of Earth’s last Ice Age.26 This meltdown began 17,000 years ago, reached two dramatic peaks at around 13,000 and 10,000 years ago, and by 9,000 years ago had freed the world of ice sheets that had been stable for the previous 100,000 years.27

  This immense and—in geological terms—extremely rapid change is one of the central mysteries explored in Fingerprints of the Gods, which further argues that the cataclysm that ended the last Ice Age also obliterated almost all traces of a highly advanced prehistoric civilization. It is our hypothesis, explored now in a number of works, that there were survivors of that lost antediluvian civilization (a global flood with tidal waves hundreds of meters high was one of the most devastating consequences of the terminal Ice Age cataclysm), and that they spread out all around the world, passing down myths and traditions of a golden age brought cruelly to an end—the biblical story of the Flood of Noah is a classic example. We are also firmly of the opinion that something more than myths and traditions has been preserved from “before the flood”—even to this day—in initiation teachings transmitted by secretive groups and in certain compelling works of architecture, of unestablished provenance, such as Stonehenge in England, Teotihuacan in Mexico, and the pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza.28

  Occurring as they do on a devastated planet that has indisputably suffered a grand impact cataclysm that caused (among other effects) gigantic floods and tidal waves kilometers high, the reader will appreciate why we co
uld not turn our backs on the enigma of the pyramids and Sphinx-like Face of Mars—whatever they may ultimately be proved to be.

  Parallel worlds?

  Parallel cataclysms?

  Parallel lost civilizations?

  Who knows? Some mysteries, surely, are worth looking into just because they are there—even if final answers may never be forthcoming.

  What is certain, meanwhile, is that the inner solar system has experienced a great surge of cometary activity in the past 20,000 years, that Earth has suffered a mysterious cataclysm during this period and that Mars has also suffered a mysterious cataclysm (although there is as yet no proof as to when). These traumas were severe enough in the case of Mars to snuff out the planet altogether as a habitat for life, and in the case of Earth to cause the extinction of an estimated 70 percent of species and to raise sea levels by more than 100 meters.29

  GRAVE CONSENSUS

  We need not repeat here the evidence and arguments, already fully developed by ourselves and others, in Fingerprints of the Gods and elsewhere, concerning the spectacular disaster that shook the earth at the end of the last Ice Age. But the great challenge with which this evidence confronts researchers is the need to work out what sort of event could possibly have caused such a massive disaster on such an astonishing worldwide scale. Lengthy consideration was given in Fingerprints to Charles Hapgood’s theory of crustal displacement—which was then being strongly advocated by the Flem-Aths in Canada30—but very little attention was paid to the possible role of cosmic impacts, either as trigger factors in displacements (see discussion in chapter 18) or as direct causative agents.