The Stargate Conspiracy

by Lynn Picknett

Hoagland is now firmly of the opinion that the Cydonia monuments were built by a civilisation from elsewhere in the galaxy, who visited Earth in the remote past, having revised his estimate of the Face’s age from half a million to several million - perhaps even a billion — years:

  For, if ‘the Martians’ hadn’t come from Earth ... or Mars ... then there was just one place left they could have come from ...

  From beyond the solar system ... and bearing a humanoid image either in their ‘genes’ or minds.26

  In other words, Hoagland is implying that these putative extraterrestrials actually created the human race, and this idea, odd though it may appear, is rapidly gaining currency throughout the world. Hoagland and his colleagues have been invited several times to present their findings to NASA itself, which is rather odd, because over the years Hoagland has become increasingly strident in his accusations that NASA - or rather, a highly placed cabal within it - is part of a conspiracy to prevent the truth about Cydonia reaching the public. For example, he has taken the lead in promoting the theory that the Mars Observer, which was officially lost in space in August 1993, was actually continuing to send data back to Earth in secret. He has also suggested that NASA are either deliberately ‘fudging’ the facts by withholding data from the latest Mars Global Surveyor images, making the publicly issued pictures look less like a face. It is therefore very strange to find Hoagland being actively courted by NASA in 1988 and 1990, with several invitations to address in-house audiences on the subject of Cydonia. Clearly, in some way it suits NASA — or certain people within that organisation — to have Hoagland at the centre of attention.

  The first address was at NASA’s headquarters, NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center, in August 1988. According to Hoagland, at a presentation at NASA-Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio in March 1990, the director, Dr John Klineberg, introduced him with these portentous words: ‘[This is] the man who managed to convince the President to state that a return to Mars is one of our major goals.’27 Perhaps significantly, Hoagland claims that Klineberg’s introduction disappeared from the video that NASA distributed after the event, because of ‘simultaneous equipment failure’ in two cameras — which hardly inspires confidence in NASA’s technical competence - though the opening words were captured on audio tape by Hoagland’s team.

  Hoagland also gave a lecture to a meeting at the United Nations in New York in February 1992, which was enthusiastically received by a capacity audience.28 Apparently they had no problem with his — admittedly well-presented and authoritative-theory that by then almost automatically linked Mars with ancient Egypt. Presented as it was with wonders and mysteries by a man who seemed to know, they lapped it up. Hoagland’s conviction and enthusiasm were contagious; almost certainly as a result of his influence, two countries - Sierra Leone and Grenada — featured the Face on Mars on their official postage stamps.

  Hoagland is also one of the most regular guests on Art Bell’s nightly radio show, which is devoted to weird and wonderful paranormal, psychic and New Age topics and has an audience of 15 million listeners. By any standard, that is a huge number of people, who are presumably sympathetic to what has been described as Art Bell’s ‘blend of conservative political views and New Age credulity’.29

  Through the Enterprise Mission website, a series of videos, and Hoagland’s book The Monuments of Mars (first published in 1987, and already in its fourth, revised, edition), as well as regular media appearances and lecture tours, Hoagland has become the main source for the dissemination of information about the Martian enigmas, eclipsing much more solid, but unappealingly cautious, work by other researchers. A sign of this phenomenon is the title of the video series: Hoagland’s Mars.

  Facing facts

  One of the main objectives of Hoagland’s Mars Mission was to lobby NASA for a commitment to rephotographing Cydonia. For much of that time NASA either refused point-blank or issued contradictory statements. Then, in April 1998, they effectively wrong-footed the pro-Cydonia lobby by announcing that the Mars Global Surveyor, which had just begun to orbit the Red Planet, would be photographing Cydonia, achieving far better resolutions than the Viking mission. The results would be disseminated on the Internet almost immediately, as soon as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) had completed the necessary processing of the digital information.

  When these images — of the Face and the City - were finally issued by NASA to huge disappointment and even incredulity, there was considerably less to suggest a Face. The many erstwhile enthusiastic proponents of the buildings on Mars theory who had second thoughts included Stanley V. McDaniel - another leading advocate of the Cydonia structures, although he parted company with Hoagland on many points — and even Mark Carlotto. McDaniel now says that the City’s apparent pyramids and other structures ‘appear consistent with a natural geological interpretation’.30 In particular the four mounds making up the City Square, which plays an important part in Hoagland’s line of reasoning, are not symmetrically placed or uniform in size and shape. The City Pyramid, McDaniel admits, now looks more like a mountain than a building. And Mark Carlotto, while not dropping all claims of artificiality, said: ‘In the 1976 Viking images, the impression of a face was unmistakable. But illuminated from below, the Face looks less remarkable.’31

  Hoagland, however, is as adamant as ever that the Face exists, and - characteristically blunt - dismisses the new images as ‘crap’.32 He insists that the Mars Global Surveyor pictures show more, not less, evidence of artificiality, even claiming that ‘room-sized cells’ can be distinguished within the main City Pyramid. Just as there were claims that the Turin Shroud’s carbon-dating tests were tampered with, many still sympathise with this view, claiming that NASA deliberately fudged the data by extracting some portions of it before issuing the new images, so that, for example, certain parts of the contrast were missing.

  Hoagland’s Enterprise Mission website proclaimed that the new images showed that ‘It is a Face!’. Within days it had produced its own ‘rectified’ version of the new NASA pictures, this time looking more like the original Viking ones, which was only to be expected because they had filled in the ‘gaps’ in the new data with the relevant parts of the original images.33

  Hoagland clearly believed NASA was lying, and was furious. If there were no Face on Mars, then there was nothing on which to hang a ‘Message’. But, for Hoagland and those who share his views, there had to be a Face and a Message: it is all part of a much wider and more insidious agenda, which includes the ‘Message’ - and legacy - of ancient Egypt.

  NASA’s marked lack of interest in pursuing the Cydonia enigma might, as many have suggested, conceal the fact that the US government is fully aware that the Face and the pyramids are artificial and want to withhold this information from the public.

  Given the way that politics works, it is virtually certain that, should the US government even suspect that there is any truth in the claims of artificial features on Mars, it would want to make its own evaluation before deciding whether to disclose or conceal this knowledge.

  There remain features on Mars — in Cydonia and elsewhere — difficult to reconcile with the natural processes of erosion and geology. For example, there is the so-called ‘Crater Pyramid’ in the Deuteronilus Mensae region, about 500 miles north-east of Cydonia.34 Viking images of this area had shown an object, close to the rim of the crater, that cast a long, thin spirelike shadow. The object itself is hard to make out, as the camera was directly above it, but based on the shadow and angle of sunlight, it is calculated to be around 600 metres tall - hardly the pyramid Hoagland was swift to dub it, once again apparently seeking above all else to link Mars with Egypt, no matter how inconvenient the facts.

  Such features continue to raise questions, although in the future they may be explained in some prosaic way. The only truly valid conclusion at the moment is that — as far as most people are concerned — there simply is not enough data to go on. We do not know enough to state categorically that there
was not a civilisation on Mars in the distant past. On the other hand, much more investigation of the anomalies on Mars is needed before they can be positively identified as being man- (or rather, Martian-) made. Every drop of data has been wrung from the available images, and it still isn’t enough to tell us definitively one way or another.

  Our own view is that the Martian anomalies are very much a subject for investigation. Although so far we have concentrated on Hoagland and his team, other independent researchers have conducted a great deal of excellent work that, even within the frustrating confines of available data, has raised important questions.

  For example, in 1993 Stanley V. McDaniel published an analysis of the Mars situation in The McDaniel Report (as it is known for short).35 Initially intended as a critique of NASA’s close-minded attitude to further investigation of Cydonia, McDaniel reviewed the evidence for the artificiality of the features and concluded that, at the very least, there is a case for further investigation. More recently, McDaniel and Monica Rix Paxson edited The Case for the Face (unfortunately published in 1998, just weeks after the new NASA images were released), which presents a series of much more soberly scientific papers on the enigma. Another independent group was the Mars Anomalies Research Society, founded in 1986 by former NASA astronaut Dr Brian O’Leary, whose members include Vincent DiPietro and John Brandenberg.

  Many independent researchers reject the attempts of Hoagland’s Enterprise Mission to construct additional wonders on the shaky foundation of the data so far available, in particular questioning the claims of geometric alignments and sophisticated mathematical ‘codes’ so crucial to their interpretation. McDaniel organised the Society for Planetary SETIa Research (SPSR) in 1994, which is in effect a rival to the Enterprise Mission. DiPietro and Molenaar, whose original work inspired the whole field, have themselves criticised attempts to go beyond the known facts:

  For the record, we do NOT support the work of those who have intertwined inventions of their own fantasy with excerpts of our work with the Mars data.... conjecture about alignments, which some writers have added are their own inventions, have nothing to do with the data as we have interpreted it.36

  Mark Carlotto is careful to be fair in his assessment of Hoagland’s ‘geometric code’, saying: ‘It’s hard to disprove, but it’s also hard to prove. I try to stick to the things I can prove. I approach the matter as a scientist while Hoagland approaches it as a writer.’37 But Carlotto does admit that ‘Hoagland tends to process images until he gets what he wants.’38

  The question is open. Some of the data may be intriguing, but it is too limited for any conclusions to be drawn as yet. Although Mark Carlotto sensibly points out that there is no rush to find the meaning of the Face — after all, it is going nowhere — there are others who seem to be in an unseemly haste to come to a hard-and-fast conclusion, those who want to build the Mars mystery into their own agenda, centred on the year 2000.

  Worlds apart

  What particularly interests us is why Hoagland and others in his project have tried to promote the Message of Cydonia idea, its connection with Earth’s ancient past and its importance for our immediate future. Hoagland has effectively hijacked the mystery of Cydonia, making it very much his own, or at least the ‘property’ of his Mission. But what drives him and his colleagues to seek to convert us all to these ideas?

  Central to Hoagland’s own ‘mission’ is his emphasis on the (alleged) connection between Cydonia and ancient Egypt. But is there a connection other than the — arguable — observation that they both have pyramids?

  The Cydonia enigma has recently been given a very significant boost in the form of an endorsement by Hancock, Bauval and Grigsby in The Mars Mystery. Although mainly concerned with the possibility of the Earth being hit by an asteroid or comet, the authors accept not just the reality of Cydonia and other Martian anomalies, but also its encoded mathematical Message and connection with the ancient civilisations of Earth, particularly ancient Egypt. Once these alleged connections are scrutinised, though, great flaws appear in their logic. The basic argument is that, because there are pyramids and a Sphinx in both Giza and Cydonia, the two are connected. But of course that depends on the Face on Mars being a Sphinx. The Cydonia clique describe it as being Sphinx-like; indeed, James Hurtak was using such emotive language even before it was officially discovered.

  This eagerness to call the Face a Sphinx is very odd. Even if the Face were genuinely artificial, the fact remains that it is just a face, not a lion’s body with a man’s head. Besides, the Face only ‘works’ because it stares out into space — the only angle from which we could recognise it - whereas, of course, the Sphinx can only be perceived from a position on Earth. This is no good for the Hoagland camp. They have to devise increasingly unlikely scenarios to fit their Face/Sphinx correlation, requiring some extremely tortuous reasoning. Hoagland states that, if the Face on Mars is divided down the middle, and each half is mirror-imaged on to the other, we achieve two, distinctly different new images. One, he claims, is ‘simian’ in appearance, the other ‘leonine’ — an anthropoid and a lion. The Great Sphinx at Giza is a man’s head on a lion’s body. Conclusion: we have two Sphinxes - in close proximity with pyramids — on both worlds!39

  Serious problems are raised by this interpretation of the Face, and not merely the fact that the ‘simian’ looks, to us at least, much more like a cartoon dog, and the lion is similarly hard to see. One of the main problems with analysing the Face is that one half of it lies in deep shadow. Some of the image-enhancement techniques have been claimed to bring out certain details on the shadowed side, such as a second eye socket, but such claims are themselves controversial. There is no way in which the shadowed side can be reconstructed to show any fine detail, and certainly not half a lion’s face!

  The argument about the Face may be extremely shaky, but the situation worsens when the clique tries to use linguistics to reinforce their case. Hoagland, and others such as Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval, make much of the fact that the name Cairo, in Arabic Al Qahira, means ‘Mars’.40 Hancock, Bauval and Grigsby go so far as to describe the naming as ‘inexplicable’.41 But in fact it is very easily explained. Al Qahira literally means ‘the Conqueror’, which was the Arab name for Mars.42 Cairo/Al Qahira was founded in 969 CE by the Fatimid general Jawhar al-Siqilli, following his conquest of Egypt. When the site of the new city was established it was noted that Mars was at an astrologically propitious point in the sky — and this, together with the fact that it was built to honour a conqueror, explains the choice of the name.43 It has no connection with any putative relationship between features on Mars and those on the Giza Plateau. In any case, Cairo was not always the capital of Egypt: until the time of the Crusades it was merely a satellite town of the more important city of Al Fustat.44 The populous suburbs of Cairo have only begun to nudge up to the Sphinx in the last fifty years. Before that, Giza was completely separate from Cairo, 6.5 miles (10 kilometres) out in the desert, effectively undermining the theory that connects Giza and Cairo/Mars.

  Hancock, Bauval and Grigsby also point out that ‘Horakhti’, meaning ‘Horus of the Horizon’ — a name of the Sphinx - was also a term used by the ancient Egyptians for Mars. Their central argument in Keeper of Genesis was that Horakhti was a representation of the constellation of Leo, though. Which one is it to be?

  Another linguistic ‘fact’ cited by Hoagland, Hancock and Bauval is that the original Egyptian name for Horus, Heru, also meant ‘face’, so Horakhti can, according to those authors, be translated as ‘Face of the Horizon’.45 Hoagland claims that, from the City of Cydonia, the Face would be seen on the horizon, so here we have a remarkable parallel. Two faces on the horizon, on two worlds ... But this is a highly contrived game: according to Wallis Budge’s An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary the two words, meaning ‘Horus’ and ‘face’, may sound the same phonetically (although as ancient Egyptian vowel sounds have to be guessed at, no one knows for certain), but that is as far
as it goes.46 They are two entirely different words. It is like claiming that the English word ‘knight’ is interchangeable with the identical-sounding ‘night’. And in hieroglyphs the two words are ‘spelled’ entirely differently and represent totally different concepts. Besides, heru is plural, meaning ‘faces’, which significantly alters the hypothesis of Hoagland et al.

  The advocates of the Mars — Egypt connection seem to be enthusiastically incestuous in their adoption of each other’s ideas and theories to prove their points and convey their message. Hoagland has eagerly taken up the New Egyptology, including that of John Anthony West, in support of his claims of a Mars — Egypt link. For example, he reports Robert Schoch’s redating of the Sphinx from water erosion, claiming that, like Hancock and Bauval, it is evidence for a much older date of construction than 7000 BCE.47

  Hancock and Bauval based most of their arguments on Hoagland’s work and interpretation of the Mars material, which they seem to accept as if scientifically proven. Hoagland is given an especially warm acknowledgement in Keeper of Genesis, and it can therefore be assumed that the three had a close working relationship even at that relatively early stage in the development of Bauval and Hancock’s hypothesis.

  Hoagland, too, had his much-admired source: Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, which he has absorbed into his own belief system, lock, stock - and errors. For example, he often quotes the ‘fact’ that arq ur means ‘Sphinx’.48 This mistake - arising from that incorrect reading of Wallis Budge’s An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary — finds its way into the work of many of the Mars-Egypt proponents.

  Suspicions about Cydonia

  During his lecture at the United Nations in New York in February 1992 Hoagland stressed the significance of ‘radical new technologies’ that could be derived from the decoded Message of Cydonia. These claims rely on the challenging concept of hyperdimensionality.