Physicists today believe that the universe encompasses far more dimensions than just the four (three of space, one of time) we know about and perceive with our senses. The only way we can begin to visualise the concept of a multidimensional universe is by analogy. One of the best is that of an imaginary world called Flatland, a two-dimensional place inhabited by two-dimensional beings, where there is only length and breadth, no up or down - something like a sheet of paper.49 Imagine how Flatlanders would perceive a three-dimensional object that interacted with their world. For example, if a sphere passed through, the Flatlanders would only see it in cross-section; first a dot would appear, which would then become a circle that grows until the middle of the sphere passes through, and then it would decrease in size to become a dot again, and vanish. (No doubt such a ‘paranormal’ phenomenon would cause much consternation among Flatlanders and probably be hotly debated by learned Flatland societies as well as dismissed as a delusion by their ‘Skeptics’.) This analogy with the hypothetical Flatland enables us to understand that events taking place in the higher dimensions now acknowledged by theoretical physicists would have visible effects in our three-dimensional world, although the cause would remain beyond both our senses and even our most sophisticated instruments.
Physicists deal in such ‘extra’ dimensions because of certain phenomena associated with nuclear physics, although there is some debate about how many dimensions make up the universe. These hyperdimensions cannot be observed directly, since we and all our measuring devices are stuck in the three-dimensional universe, but they can be understood mathematically. Hoagland’s contention is that certain geometrical relationships in the Cydonia Complex are references to such hyperdimensional mathematics. The geometrical key is the repeated use of the angle of 19.5 degrees. For example, two sides of the D & M Pyramid are found at 19.5 degrees to Mars’s lines of latitude, and this angle recurs in the position of the small mounds in the same region.50
According to Hoagland - and others of like mind — 19.5 (more precisely, 19.47) degrees is significant because it is the tetrahedral constant, which means that it relates to the tetrahedron, the simplest of the regular solids, with four sides of equilateral triangles, including a triangular base. If this shape were put inside a sphere, for example a planet, with one point touching one of the poles, the other three points will each touch the surface at a latitude of 19.5 degrees on the opposite hemisphere. This is a fact.
It has been observed that on all the planets in the solar system where it is possible to see the surface — Venus, for example, is always covered with clouds — there is invariably some great disturbance caused by an upwelling of energy at either 19.5 degrees north or 19.5 degrees south of the equator. The great Red Spot of Jupiter is located at this position. On Mars, Olympus Mons, the largest known volcano in the solar system (350 miles across), lies at 19.5 degrees north. On Earth, it is the location of the heavily volcanic islands of Hawaii, and the largest volcano on the planet, Mauna Loa.
The phenomenon of 19.5 degrees is thought to result from the rotation of the planets, being in effect a ‘shadow’ of highly potent forces of higher dimensions. In other words, the site of 19.5 degrees is a point where the other dimensions break through, becoming manifest in the three-dimensional world as a revelation of hyperdimensional forces.
This, claims Hoagland, is why the 19.5-degree angle recurs so often in Cydonia. It is a clue intended to lead us to an understanding of the hyperdimensional cause of the planetary upwellings of energy responsible for Jupiter’s Red Spot and Mars’s Olympus Mons. This in turn enables us to appreciate hyperdimensional physics. Hoagland argues that if the energy generated by higher dimensions can be tapped, we will have an unlimited source of power as well as the ability to develop such technologies as antigravity propulsion devices and interstellar space travel. These technologies, he believes, will solve many of the world’s problems and bring about, in his words, a ‘new world order’.
There are problems with this. Even in Hoagland’s lecture to the United Nations, where he talks at length about the importance of 19.5 degrees and tetrahedral geometry, he admits that the upwelling of planetary energies at these points had already been worked out years before by mathematicians dealing in hyperdimensions. The Message of Cydonia, in fact, merely repeats what very terrestrial scientists have known for years.
More importantly, Hoagland and Erol Torun drew a number of significant conclusions from Cydonia’s latitude. One of their key claims is that the latitude of the D & M Pyramid — 40.868 degrees north — was not only chosen because it embodied important mathematical concepts (being the tangent of the exponential constant e divided by pi), but also because the same concepts appear in the geometry of other features of Cydonia. The complex is therefore, they concluded, ‘self-referencing’, which means that the mathematics in the ‘buildings’ relate to the Complex’s position on the planet, proving that none of it is a mere coincidence.51
A difficulty arises as the co-ordinates for surface features based on the Viking survey have a marked margin of error. They are certainly not precise enough to fix a feature’s latitude to three decimal places of a degree. New, and more accurate data from Mars Global Surveyor suggests that all the previous figures should be revised so that the features are in fact slightly closer to the Martian equator, meaning that the D & M Pyramid stands at 40.7 degrees north.52 This is not particularly significant in itself (it represents an error of approximately 17 kilometres on the ground), but it is enough to invalidate the precise mathematical relationships of Hoagland’s theory.
In addition, other researchers, such as Tom Van Flandern of the US Naval Observatory, have pointed out that it is accepted that the Martian poles have shifted significantly over millions of years, so Cydonia has not always been located at that latitude.53 (Interestingly, Van Flandern has calculated that, before the pole shift, Cydonia would have been on Mars’s equator.) There is also evidence that Mars’s crust has ‘slipped’ several times because of ‘crustal displacement’, again changing the position of the Cydonia region.54
Even the theoretical harnessing of the energy generated by hyperdimensional forces - as hypothesised by Hoagland — is nothing new, although there are no known ways to actually do so — and the Message of Cydonia does nothing to enlighten us about this. Neither does it even hint how workable technologies might be developed from harnessing this energy. The ‘amazing’ geometry of Cydonia has added nothing to our understanding — of Mars, Martians or of mankind.
The Hoagland camp’s confident theorising does not stop there. When Hoagland’s colleague David Myers claims that a line running from a particular mark on the D & M Pyramid to a ‘teardrop’ on the Face measures exactly 1/360th of the diameter of Mars55 (thus ‘proving’, incidentally, that the builders must have used the same system of measuring angles as ourselves), he is truly on a slippery slope. There is no justification for choosing to join these two insignificant points up except that they are, for Myers, the required distance apart. One would eventually find two points that would oblige somewhere in Cydonia.
The angles Erol Torun claimed to have found in the D & M Pyramid provide most of the basis for the decoding of the Message of Cydonia. What he claims to have found is in itself highly debatable: a five-sided pyramid that he managed to discern from an enhanced image of a partly eroded feature half in shadow. All the measurements have to be treated with caution, so any conclusions based on them must, at the very outside, be highly speculative. (The Mars Global Surveyor has not, unfortunately, re-imaged the D & M Pyramid yet.) In fact, Torun himself admits that there is an unknown margin of error in the Viking images - which makes his whole case for precise geometric relationships completely redundant.56
Another prime mover in the Mars Mission is the British award-winning film photographer David S. Percy, who was appointed European director of operations by Hoagland (although they have since had a disagreement and no longer work together). In this capacity Percy enthusiastically pro
moted the Message of Cydonia in the United Kingdom and other European countries. He also produced the video of Hoagland’s address at the United Nations. Percy has lectured widely in Britain on the Cydonia — Mars connection, using state-of-the-art computer graphics to illustrate his points. Like Hoagland, whose media background enables him to present his ideas in a relaxed and professional manner, Percy uses his skills as a film producer to excellent effect. His images of Cydonia surpass even the earlier enhancements for clarity and sharpness. In particular, the all important D & M Pyramid — so crucial for the ‘decoding’ of the alleged geometrical and mathematical message - appears as a clearly defined feature, with the original blurred edges now in such sharp focus that they almost seem to be etched into the Martian landscape. In his lectures, Percy describes these images as being Mark Carlotto’s - but he adds vaguely that they have undergone ‘further enhancement and rectification in London recently’.57 He gives no details of this process, but when we asked what he had meant, he admitted that he had done it himself.58 Although professionals who have worked with the images of Cydonia — such as DiPietro, Molenaar and Mark Carlotto — have published detailed technical descriptions of the process they used, Percy has not obliged.
Percy added a new connection to the enigma. Hoagland had already noted the similarity between Silbury Hill — the largest manmade mound in Europe, which lies just south-west of Avebury in Wiltshire in England - and one of the Cydonian features called the ‘Tholus’, or Spiral Mound. In the library of his luxurious London flat, while looking at an aerial photograph of Avebury, Percy then experienced a great revelation, which he describes (somewhat mysteriously) as ‘far memory’.59 His newly inspired eye suddenly noted that the great circle of ditch and earthen rampart that encloses its standing stones was a representation of nothing less than the large crater in Cydonia! He went on to demonstrate that the Avebury circle and Silbury Hill lie in the same relative positions as the Cydonia crater and Martian Spiral Mound — if the latter is scaled down by a factor of 14:1.
Percy and David Myers (the Mars Mission’s director of operations, and later co-author with Percy of a book called Two-Thirds), worked on this correlation and concluded that the Avebury complex had been deliberately laid out, some 5,000 years ago, as an ‘analogue’ of Cydonia. Percy claims that maps of the two areas, appropriately scaled up or down, can be superimposed over each other to reveal a perfect match.
Perhaps not unexpectedly, problems arise with this hypothesis. The only real correlation between Avebury and Cydonia is the relative position and size of two features, the crater/Avebury circle and the Spiral Mound/Silbury Hill. Even then the match is not perfect. When scaled down and superimposed, the crater is smaller than, and not the same shape as, the Avebury circle. Percy also claims correlations between other features that are even less persuasive. For example, the D & M Pyramid’s Avebury analogue is a certain tumulus surrounded by a grove of trees. In fact it fails totally to match its alleged Martian counterpart, not corresponding in size, shape or relative position with the D & M Pyramid. In any case there are many similar tumuli in the area. No other Cydonian features are ‘analogued’ at Avebury, although Percy makes much of odd indentations, lumps and bumps in the ground that he finds at the approximate position of the City on Mars. None of these are at all convincing. But there is one spectacular omission: there is no analogue of the Face at Avebury. Could it be that nothing could be found at Avebury - even by forcing the data to fit - to even vaguely remind us of the location and features of the Face, so it has been quietly forgotten?
In fact, only two features of Avebury correspond to any at Cydonia: the earthwork circle and Silbury Hill. It seems odd that an analogue of Cydonia, built on Earth, should centre on reproducing a natural feature of Cydonia - the crater - while not including the many supposedly artificial features. Finally, many landmarks of the Avebury complex have no analogue in Cydonia, the most obvious being West Kennet Long Barrow. Yet despite all these discrepancies and convoluted hypothesising, Hoagland incorporated Percy’s ‘discovery’ of the Cydonia-Avebury connection into his United Nations lecture.
Another area that greatly excites Hoagland, Percy, Myers and their colleagues is the vexed subject of crop circles. They maintain that these ‘transtime crop glyphs’, as they prefer to call them, contain geometrical and mathematical ‘codes’ that duplicate, and reinforce, the Message of Cydonia. By linking the builders of Cydonia with this very visible, yet enigmatic, modern phenomenon, Hoagland is effectively saying that the Martian builders are still around, and are active on Earth now. He describes ‘the fact that someone - demonstrably not from Earth — is now attempting to drive home the “Message of Cydonia” as a “message in the crops”, before our very eyes right here on Earth!’60
One particular crop formation is given pride of place in the work of Hoagland and Percy because it incorporates tetrahedral geometry: the Barbary Castle formation, which appeared in a Wiltshire field in 1991. This ‘crop glyph’ was even featured in Hoagland’s UN lecture because, he claimed, it includes geometrical features that match some of the code of Cydonia. If this were true, it would confirm not only the terrestrial connection, but also the return of the builders of Cydonia. Hoagland in particular invests great personal belief in the ‘They’re Back’ interpretation of this formation, in which he and his team claim to have identified some of the same key angles they detected in the plan of Cydonia. David Percy goes even further, managing to overlay the Barbary Castle pattern on Avebury, to demonstrate how its geometry was used as the. plan for the layout of the roads!
Whatever the truth about crop circles in general, there seems little doubt that this one is a hoax or - as many of the circlemakers themselves tend to think of it - a work of art. The inspiration for the design is actually known. It is not a specially constructed design to encode some of the secrets of hyperdimensional physics, but is based on a design in a sixteenth-century alchemical treatise by Steffan Michelspacher, Cabala, speculum artis et naturae in alchymia.61
The identity of the makers is well known among the confraternity of circlemakers, and the modus operandi has already been described by Rob Irving, a writer, photographer and occasional circlemaker. Irving told us:
There’s really no mystery about it... In the context of 1991, this was the most complex of its time. But compared to what’s being done now - fractal patterns five times bigger, which have been filmed being made — it’s very primitive... It would be sniffed at now.62
With just a few simple implements and the application of some basic geometrical rules, such a formation could be made ‘within a couple of hours’, he said.
The formation wasn’t even executed with any finesse: there are kinks in some of the lines and mistakes in the geometry. Significantly, Hoagland and Percy actually use the errors in their reconstruction of the grand design of this pattern!63
So what is the Message of Cydonia, according to Hoagland? He says:
Cydonia turns out to be: nothing less than an architectural affirmation of the fundamental physics of the Universe — the ultimate embodiment of a grand, ‘Universal Architecture’ ... at the most archetypal level ... This message is identically ‘coded’ elsewhere in the solar system ... including, here on Earth!64
The emerging picture
It seems, certainly in Hoagland’s case, that data - itself by no means conclusive - has been forced to fit his preconceived ideas that somehow involves both Martian anomalies and the monuments of ancient Egypt. The most significant part of this scenario is the idea that there is a ‘Message’ somehow essential to mankind’s present and immediate future. But why? Where does this belief originate?
There are only two possible reasons for these ideas: entirely spurious notions have been superimposed on a genuine mystery in order to give them an apparent feasibility; or the proponents of these ideas somehow knew, or thought they knew, in advance that these connections exist.
Perhaps the release of this information is an exercise in d
eception, or in ‘softening up’ the public to accept certain ideas, even to the point of promoting those ideas when the facts (as currently known) do not support them. There seems to us to be an air of desperation to make us believe, whether we want to or not and whether the evidence fits or not. And that is worrying.
With all of its monumental implications for our understanding of Man’s recent past and our immediate future — the ‘radical new technologies’ it promises and the implicit suggestion that the builders of Cydonia are about to return, if they have not already — the Message of Cydonia promoted primarily by Hoagland is not supported by the evidence. Clearly, it has been deliberately grafted on to what is, admittedly, a very intriguing enigma, in much the same way that Hancock and Bauval have grafted the date of 10,500 BCE on to the genuine ancient Egyptian mysteries.
The way that the Martian enigmas are being promoted by the likes of Hoagland presents a striking parallel to certain investigations of ancient Egypt. The common features of both are:
(1) At the core lies a genuine mystery. The achievements of the ancient Egyptians in, for example, building the Great Pyramid, and the unmistakably advanced knowledge of the Pyramid Texts, do not conform to the accepted view of history. Likewise — even given the most recent crop of images — with currently available information it is not possible to dismiss the notion that there might well be artificial structures on Mars.
(2) On to the genuine mystery has been grafted a series of ‘solutions’ and explanations that simply do not stand up to objective scrutiny — for example, Hancock and Bauval’s case for a 10,500 BCE date, and Hoagland et al’s extrapolation of the Message of Cydonia.
The Stargate Conspiracy Page 16
