The Mars Mystery

by Graham Hancock

In our scenario it was the initial explosion of the giant comet that killed Mars—in a single, phenomenal impact storm. But the rest of the massive swarm of fragments would have missed the Red Planet and continued to travel at high velocity along the comet’s original orbit. Since this was a deeply Earth-crossing orbit (with its perihelion close to the Sun and its aphelion beyond Jupiter), we should not be surprised that fragments began to rain down on Earth during the next several thousand years—not killing it, as they had Mars, but nevertheless causing profound and dramatic changes.

  A SPECULATION

  It is permissible, sometimes, to speculate and we offer the following as no more than an amuse gueule, a harmless speculation, intended to entertain. It is a kind of artifact of our imaginations that arises every time we look anew at the image of the Face on Mars and at the geometrical structures that seem to have been arranged so purposefully around it on the Cydonian plain.

  The math feels like a message.

  The peculiar interlinkages to Giza and to Teotihuacan don’t feel accidental.

  The latitude games played at all three sites do feel as though they share the same designer.

  Last but not least, some of the structures of Cydonia stand immediately beside and even inside impact features—including, for example, an intact pyramid, unencumbered by ejecta and not at all damaged, poised on the very edge of a crater rim.3 Such anomalies suggest to us that the monuments must have been built after the terminal Mars cataclysm, not before it.

  Our hunch, therefore, is that Cydonia is indeed some sort of signal—not a radio broadcast intended for the entire universe, but a specific directional beacon transmitting a message that is intended exclusively for humankind.

  To receive that message we have to prequalify.

  We have to be able to look at Mars closely, which means high technology. But we also have to have the intelligence and open-mindedness, the vision and the spiritual humility to accept that even a dead planet can speak to us.

  In short, humanity has to be able to see Cydonia, to realize what it is and to act on what it says.

  Who might have devised such a message? And how could they have arranged to express it in a distinctive “architectural/geometrical code” that would much later turn up on Earth in the pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza and other terrestrial sites such as Stonehenge and Teotihuacan?

  Could it possibly be that the builders of Cydonia also contrived to exert an influence upon the early civilizations of Earth? Were they somehow involved here, perhaps during the darkest midnight of prehistory, perhaps even long before the biblical flood? Could this explain why there seems to be a lingering and tantalizing “memory” of Cydonia imprinted upon the design plan of the Giza complex and why not only the Sphinx but also the Arab city of Cairo that grew up around it were called by names meaning “Mars”?

  Lastly, what about the content of the message of Cydonia?

  We go on instinct, nothing more, but in our speculation it is a warning that a Mars-like doom lies in wait for the Earth unless we take steps to avert it—a doom that could spell the end not just of individual species, not just of human civilization, but of all human beings and of all life on this planet. That is why the message is addressed exclusively to us—because we are its potential beneficiaries. That is why it is expressed in a language of architecture, geometry, and symbolism that strikes a chord with humans. And that is why there is indeed a deep and ancient connection between Earth and Mars, anchored to certain astronomical monuments that were designed, from the very beginning, to awaken us at the eleventh hour.

  A PATTERN OF IMPACTS

  Let us now return to the giant comet and recall its life cycle after it descended from the galaxy into the inner solar system:

  20,000 years ago: explosive fragmentation beside Mars

  13,000 to 12,000 years ago: major bombardment of Earth; glaciers retreat

  11,000 to 10,000 years ago: second major bombardment of Earth; Ice Age ends

  None of the astronomers who opened up this extraordinary field of study in the past twenty years are under any illusions that the menace to Earth ended with the Ice Age cataclysms. On the contrary, they are certain that fragments of the giant comet have continued to fall among us.

  The detailed investigation into the matter by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe has yielded information from temperature records and other sources suggesting that major impacts—though none as severe as those that occurred during the Age of Leo—have continued at sporadic intervals throughout human history. According to these two scientists, the evidence suggests that there were episodes of chaos, disruption, and rapid climate change at around 7000 B.C., 5000 B.C., 4000 B.C., 2500 B.C., 1000 B.C., and A.D. 500—in each case lasting for several decades or even a century and involving repeated collisions with multiple fragments of at least Tunguska size, up to a rate of 100 per year.4

  Duncan Steel believes the rate of impact may at times have been much higher and calculates that in such episodes

  Cataclysms visit wide areas of the planet due to the coherent arrival of many impactors in a few days. It is entirely feasible that within those few days the earth could receive hundreds of blows like that of the Tunguska object. [authors emphasis]5

  THIRD MILLENNIUM B.C.

  Post-Ice Age history has also been looked into by other researchers, who agree that many anomalies are explained by the notion of an irregular rain of fragments repeatedly disrupting cultures all around the world.

  The second half of the third millennium B.C., for example, from 2500 B.C. to 2000 B.C., appears to have been a turbulent and dangerous period during which surprising numbers of formerly well-established civilizations inexplicably collapsed or underwent a period of chaos and disintegration. After studying more than five hundred excavation reports and climatological studies, Dr. Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moore’s University has demonstrated that all of the affected civilizations “suffered huge changes in climate at exactly the same time.”6 These disasters occurred “in the Aegean, Anatolia, the Near and Middle East, Egypt and North Africa, and large parts of Asia.”7 There was also a related catastrophe as far afield as eastern China.8

  The Indus Valley civilization in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent was one of the victims, vanishing mysteriously.

  Egyptian civilization survived the climatological upheaval but preserved memories of intense heat, violent floods, and the abrupt desertification of previously lush agricultural lands.9

  In the same epoch the Akkad empire of Mesopotamia and Syria collapsed amid floods and evidence of a major cataclysm—hitherto presumed to have been a large earthquake—which was confirmed by researchers in 1997 to have been an impact.10 Marie Agnes-Courty of the French Center for Scientific Research found microspherules of a calcite material—unknown on Earth but abundant in meteorites—scattered across an area of thousands of square miles in northern Syria in soil samples and archaeological deposits dated to 2350 B.C.11 She also uncovered evidence of gigantic regional fires in the form of a thick deposit of black carbon.12

  Parallel research has identified at least seven other impact craters around the world “which were formed within a century of 2350 B.C.”13 And Professor Mike Baillie, a paleoecologist at Queens University, Belfast, reports that his studies of tree rings have uncovered evidence of widespread ecological catastrophes at this date.14

  THE TAURID MYSTERY

  In the second half of the third millennium B.C., while all these events were unfolding, astronomical calculations show that the orbit of Earth would have intersected the core debris of the particularly massive and widely diffused Taurid meteor stream—so called because it produces showers of “shooting stars” that look to observers on the ground as though they originate in the constellation Taurus.15 The stream sprawls completely across the Earths orbit—a distance of more than 300 million kilometers—cutting it in two places so that the planet must pass through it twice a year: from 24 June to 6 July and again from 3 November to 15 N
ovember.16 Since Earth travels more than 2.5 million kilometers along its orbital path every day, and since each passage takes approximately 12 days, it is obvious that the Taurid stream is at least 30 million kilometers wide, or thick. Indeed, what Earth encounters during these two periods is best envisaged as a sort of tube or pipe of fragmented debris.

  Even though it is one of the most intense of all the annual meteor showers,17 the encounter from 24 June to 6 July (which peaks on 30 June) cannot normally be seen with the naked eye—only with radar and infrared equipment—because it occurs during daylight hours. But the encounter from 3 November to 15 November is visible at night. The Collins Guide to Stars and Planets tells amateur astronomers where to look in the constellation of Taurus:

  The meteors radiate from a point near epsilon Tauri, reaching a maximum of about 12 meteors per hour on 3 November.18

  The reader will recall from chapter 23 that in the ancient Egyptian sky-ground plan the two pyramids of Dashur, supposedly built at around 2500 B.C., correlate with the positions of two stars in Taurus—the Red pyramid with Aldebaran and the Bent pyramid with epsilon Tauri. We note that the date of 2500 B.C. was toward the end of the astronomical Age of Taurus (when the Sun on the spring equinox rose in the constellation of Taurus, roughly from 4490 B.C. to 2330 B.C.). We have seen that the Sphinx serves as an astronomical marker for the Age of Leo (10,970 B.C. to 8810 B.C.)—the epoch that experienced the gigantic impacts that ended the last Ice Age. We have seen that Earth appears to have been shaken by another series of bombardments during the period 2500 to 2000 B.C.—the epoch of pyramid construction in Egypt. And we saw in chapter 17 that the Benben stone, the sacred cult object of the Heliopolitan priests who served the pyramids, was almost certainly an “oriented” iron meteorite.

  Could there be a connection among (a) the bombardments and the Taurid meteor stream and (b) observations of Taurid meteors at around 2500 B.C.—which must have been spectacular as Earth neared the core of the stream—and (c) the construction of the pyramids of Egypt?

  STONEHENGE

  We have no doubt that the pyramids—and other ancient megalithic structures all around the world—were religious and spiritual buildings; nevertheless we do not object to the notion that they might also have had a number of more practical, or even scientific uses. The ancients did not make the distinction between science and spirit that we do today, and we suspect that the Heliopolitan cult required its initiates to cultivate what can only be described as a scientific knowledge of the sky. We therefore see no contradiction at all between the practical observational and mathematical functions of a monument and its overriding spiritual and transformational purpose.

  Nor are we the first to suggest that among the complex motives in the long-term development of certain mysterious ancient sites there may have been a special interest in meteor showers.

  Dr. Duncan Steel is the director of Spaceguard Australia.19 We have referred to his work and discoveries frequently in these pages. It is his theory that the primary axis of Stonehenge in England, which lies 33 degrees of longitude west of Giza, was not originally designed to target the summer solstice sunrise (the most widely accepted view) but was targeted instead on the rising of the Taurid meteor stream.20 This was done during the “preliminary” period, which archaeologists refer to as Stonehenge I—roughly from 3600 B.C. to 3100 B.C.—and the great megaliths that we see today were laid out to conform with the same axis. The period of megalith construction is well dated at 2600 to 2300 B.C., when the bluestones and the sarsens (the famous “goalposts”) were erected21—a period that overlaps curiously with the pyramid age in Egypt and with the worldwide episode of bombardment in the second half of the third millennium B.C. But such bombardments are by their nature recurrent—at unpredictable intervals—and can be sustained over centuries on each occasion. Steel has produced evidence that an earlier episode occurred at the time of Stonehenge I, in the second half of the fourth millennium B.C.22

  Steels case, which is solidly based on dynamical studies and backtracking of trajectories within the Taurid stream, is that the disintegrating giant comet that has shadowed Earth like a vampire or a ghoul for the past 20,000 years underwent one of its spectacular fragmentations some time in the fourth millennium B.C. This was when the Taurid meteor stream was spawned and sent swarming through space on its Earth-crossing orbit—a swarm, as we shall see, that consists not only of meteorites and dust but that also incorporates an inert, near-invisible mass of asteroids and several active comets. One of these, periodic comet Encke, still well-known to modern astronomers, was highly violatile and would have been spectacularly visible with a fully developed “coma” and tail by about 3600 B.C. At the same time, as other fragments worked their way down to Earth, humans would have witnessed “intense meteor storms” and would almost certainly have been subjected to sustained periods of heavy bombardment by massive lumps of debris resulting in “multiple Tunguska-type events.”23

  In a nutshell, what Steel is claiming is that the Stonehenge axis, with its distinctive northeast orientation (he believes only coincidentally close to the rising point of the sun on the summer solstice) was laid out as a kind of “early warning system for cosmic impacts”24:

  From Stonehenge I … as the comet neared the earth it would have appeared to rise in the evening with a huge bright stripe [the Taurid meteor trail] crossing much of the sky, originating in the northeast. Passage through the trail would then have resulted in celestial fireworks (and maybe worse); afterward the comet and trail would have passed in the direction of the Sun, partially blocking sunlight for a few days…. It is suggested that Stonehenge was built … to allow the prediction of such events.25

  ENCKE

  Shooting stars are harmless—nothing more than tiny meteors burning up in the atmosphere—so why should anyone be afraid of a meteor trail?

  In the case of the fifty or so distinct and separate meteor streams that have now been discovered by astronomers—the Leonids, the Perseids, the Andromedids, etc.—the answer to this question is that in most cases there is probably no danger and nothing to fear.26 As most of the particles they contain are indeed tiny, they represent no threat to Earth.

  But it is quite a different matter with the Taurids. As Steel, Asher, Clube, Napier, and their colleagues have demonstrated, the reason is that the Taurid stream is filled to overflowing with other much more massive material, sometimes visible, sometimes shrouded in clouds of dust, and all of it flying through space at tremendous velocities and intersecting Earths orbit, regular as clockwork, from 24 June to 6 July and again from 3 to 15 November. Year in, year out, for a period of more than 5,000 years, comet Encke and all the other contents of the stream were spawned from the continuing disintegration of the vastly larger interstellar giant.

  The gradual revelation of the truly dark and horrendous character of the Taurid stream results from the work of astronomers going back over half a century—work that members of the public remain largely unaware of, although it raises question marks over the future of civilization.

  The fundamental discovery was made in the 1940s when the American astronomer Fred Whipple was the first to point out the intimate relationship between the Taurid stream and the comet Encke, which lies at the heart of Steels Stonehenge theory. It has a highly elliptical Earth-crossing orbit of just 3.3 years—a shorter orbit than any other known periodic comet27:

  Encke is about five kilometers across…. It may, therefore, be correct to think of it as the parent of the stream. On the other hand, there may well be one or more dormant comets in the stream that we have yet to identify and that may exceed Encke in size.28

  By 1998, as we shall see in the next chapter, increasingly sophisticated astronomical surveys involving radar and the radio telescopes at Jodrell Bank, the Spacewatch telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona, and the highly successful Infrared Astronomical Satellite had begun to reveal the full extent of the problem.

  26

  Dark Star

  IF th
e overall climate of our globe should once again improve,” warn Victor Clube and Bill Napier, “as it is doing during this century, and has done every few centuries since the end of the last Ice Age, there may be only the dimmest perception of an approaching nadir. We may be unaware that the cosmos is simply delaying the next input of dusty debris, alarm, destruction, and death. A great illusion of cosmic security thus envelops mankind, one that the establishment’ of church, state, and academe do nothing to disturb. Persistence in such an illusion will do nothing to alleviate the dark age when it arrives. But it is easily shattered: one simply has to look at the sky.”1

  After everything that we have learned while writing The Mars Mystery we are frankly baffled that organizations like NASA that receive public funds to “look at the sky” are using so little of that money to investigate the dangers of serious collisions with objects on Earth-crossing orbits. While disposing of a budget of $13.8 billion annually, NASA spent less than a million dollars during 1997 supporting near-Earth asteroid and comet surveys.2 Britain in the same year spent just £6000—about $10,000—making it clear when it did so that this was a one-shot grant that was unlikely to be repeated.3

  “Such a singularly myopic stance,” comment Clube and Napier, “may place the human species a little higher than the ostrich, awaiting the fate of the dinosaur.”4

  Or, as Sir Fred Hoyle sees it:

  It could be seen as curious that society would seek to investigate distant galaxies while at the same time ignoring all possibility of serious impacts with Earth, surely a clear example of amnesia in action.5

  The minimum response, says Hoyle, and only a first step, would be “to compile a catalogue of all objects of appreciable size in Earth-crossing orbits. For this a space telescope is needed. But not as large or expensive as the Hubble telescope. One with an aperture of a meter should be adequate, at any rate initially.”6