NASA vs. Artificial Structures on the Surface of Mars

"Had I been in charge of the Mars Observer Program, the Cydonia region would have been one of my priorities for a high-resolution scan."

Arthur C. Clarke

It is a long-standing skeptical myth that the "Face on Mars" is nothing but a trick of light and shadow that created the appearance of a humanoid face in the Cydonia region of Mars in a frame taken by Viking Orbiter 1 in 1976. Supposedly, a picture taken several hours later under different lighting conditions no longer showed a face. The story of the "face on Mars" has been kept alive by the tabloids and UFO believers, who always see what they want to see, and disregard solid evidence to the contrary. Due to popular pressure, NASA wasted valuable resources by using the Mars Global Surveyor to take another picture of the formation in 1998. That picture once and for all revealed the formation to be a natural landform. No scientist takes the "face" seriously. So it is argued.

But NASA never investigated the question of artificiality of the formation in good faith. That the appearance of a face was a trick of light and shadow was an ad-hoc announcement by Viking scientist Gerald Soffen made in a press conference on July 25, 1976. That the face had disappeared in a second frame taken several hours later was a lie (an "unfortunate misstatement", according to Carl Sagan); no such picture was taken, and none could have been taken due to the fact that at the time the second picture was supposedly taken, Cydonia was already in the dark. Stanley McDaniel summarizes the situation as follows ("Missing" Images Misidentified, 1996)

Actually it is unlikely that the NASA scientists ever had any images in mind when this allegation surfaced. Upon the discovery of the Face in July 1976, a Viking Project Scientist held up frame 35A72, containing the Face, and announced to the assembled press corps that in a picture taken "a few hours later" it all "went away." (see Report, page 11). But he did not show this other picture. Actually there were no frames taken a few hours later: The spacecraft, with an orbital period of about 24 hours, would not return to the site for many orbits to come. (Frame 561A25, for example, was taken by the "A" orbiter on its 561st orbit -- 526 orbits later.) Thus the rumor that there was an image in which the Face "disappears" began with reference to a nonexistent frame. It seems likely that NASA simply picked up on this original misstatement and carried it along as "fact" for almost two decades without checking on it. In August 1993 I asked Mr. Donald Savage of NASA's Public Information Office to discover, if possible, what Viking frames the NASA scientists had been talking about. After a two-week search, Mr. Savage reported back to me that "Nobody here [at NASA] knows."

What is true is that Viking frame 35A72, received by JPL on July 25, 1976, shows a mesa in the Cydonia region of Mars that bears a striking resemblance to a humanoid face. It is also true that Viking frame 70A13, taken on August 29, 1976 under a different viewing angle and lighting conditions again showed a face, refuting NASA's "light and shadow" claim. But the second picture was not released to the public and went directly into the Viking archives, to be discovered by Goddard Spaceflight Center engineer Vincent DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar in 1979. According to DiPietro, the second frame had been misfiled.

Since then, independent analyses of the Viking pictures done by DiPietro & Molenaar and Dr. Mark J. Carlotto showed a very high degree of probability that the formation was artificial. Their work was completely ignored by NASA, which stubbornly clung to its discredited ad-hoc claim of "light and shadow". The turning point came in 1993, when Professor Emeritus of Philosophy Stanley McDaniel made NASA's failure to acknowledge and act on the new evidence the subject of a scientific study of the sociology of science, titled "The McDaniel Report: On the Failure of Executive, Congressional and Scientific Responsibility in Investigating Possible Evidence of Artificial Structures on the Surface of Mars and in Setting Mission Priorities for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program". In his report, Professor McDaniel states:

"As my study of the work done by the independent investigators and NASA's response to their research continued, I became aware not only of the relatively high quality of the independent research, but also of glaring mistakes in the arguements used by NASA to reject this research. With each new NASA document I encountered, I became more and more appalled by the impossibly bad quality of the reasoning used. It grew more and more difficult to believe that educated scientists could engage in such faulty reasoning unless they were following some sort of hidden agenda aimed at suppressing the true nature of the data."

The McDaniel Report was instrumental in forcing NASA to re-image Cydonia using the Mars Global Surveyor in 1998. The pictures obtained by MGS strengthened the case for artificiality, but NASA did everything it could to discourage this conclusion. On April 6, 1998, only hours after the first new data on the formation for 22 years had been acquired, NASA released a doctored image to the mass media that had virtually all three dimensional information removed by inappropriate filtering and showed what seemed like scratches on a flat plain. This image has become known as the "catbox".

It worked - the media headlines screamed "case closed", and a significant part of the public became convinced that there is "nothing there", and never was. NASA contractor Lan Fleming argues in two articles titled The Politics of Science and JPL's "Catbox" Enhancement of the Face on Mars and How To Make A Catbox that the 'catbox' was "a crude but very effective fraud" perpetrated to manipulate public opinion on the subject. Fleming's web site, VGL.org contains a wealth of information on the Martian and other planetary anomalies. He writes about the "catbox" stunt:

The "Catbox" is undoubtedly the shoddiest piece of image processing work released in the 40-year history of the space program. Why did they do it? Unless JPL permitted complete incompetents to run loose in their lab, the only reasonable conclusion is that the MGS image was deliberately doctored for public consumption in order to kill public interest in the subject of planetary SETI in general and Cydonia in particular. The rapid and broad distribution of the Catbox to the media would seem to confirm that interpretation of events. It was displayed on CNN, in local newspapers, US News and World Report, Astronomy Magazine, and most shamefully, in Scientific American (June, 1998, page 18).

Some time later, when a properly processed version of the image became available, the formation still looked like a face, with eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth and lips, resting on a strikingly regular platform or pedestal. But the damage had already become irreversible; the (un)scientific rush to judgement had already occurred, and the world press was no longer paying attention. Tom Van Flandern writes in his paper Proof that the Cydonia Face on Mars is Artificial

As a direct consequence of this act [release of the 'catbox' picture], it has become extraordinarily difficult to get material on this subject considered in the scientific community. For example, a technical abstract on the subject of Cydonia submitted by this author in the summer of 1998 for oral presentation to the Division of Planetary Science (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society was rejected. This was the only rejection of an abstract by a member in good standing at this meeting, with over 600 other abstracts accepted. Rejection of a member-submitted abstract is a rare event (unprecedented for this author) because presentation of papers before peers is the primary means of getting feedback before submitting written versions of papers to journals for peer review, and because justification of conclusions is not normally provided in an abstract. The DPS abstract review committee based its decision on the evidence they had seen with their own eyes in the image released by JPL-PIO to the media. On appeal, they reversed their decision and accepted the abstract for a late poster paper; but the damage had already been done. The subject matter of Cydonia and the “Face” on Mars was by then on a list of topics not suitable for consideration by certain mainstream technical journals such as Nature magazine. By editorial policy, papers on the subject of the “Face” can no longer receive peer review at that magazine.

The next installment in this saga of scientific obfuscation came in 2001. Finally, the Mars Global Surveyor had imaged both sides of the formation (not just the left one, as in all previous images) with high resolution, and the crucial prediction of symmetry could finally be tested against empirical data. The picture turned out to be a severe disappointment for those in the small Cydonia research community who had predicted that the right side of the structure would be a mirror image of the left side. The right side was more irregularly shaped, giving a feline appearance rather than a humanoid one. Anomaly researcher Richard Hoagland on the other hand, a highly controversial figure in this field due to his theory of a masonic conspiracy in the highest ranks of NASA and a mathematically questionable "Cydonia Geometric Relationship Model" appeared to have been right all along. In a presentation to the United Nations in 1992, Hoagland had predicted that the right half of the face would resemble a lion.

Despite its lack of lateral symmetry, the formation still looks strikingly artificial in the 2001 picture. The "platform" on which the face rests exhibits a high degree of regularity - straight, parallel lines on the left side, the parabolic arc of the "headdress" whose axis of symmetry is parallel to the straight sides and intersects the "nose" and whose lower perimeter is linear and orthogonal to the sides, an approximately linear outer perimeter on the right side that is parallel to the lines on the left and another arc at the bottom whose symmetry axis is once again parallel to the sides. How such features could be produced naturally is a mystery. Flowing lava spreads out radially and does not produce parallel straight lines on two of the sides and arcs on the two other sides orthogonal to that. The idea that wind or water erosion could have produced such geometry seems even more far fetched.

The McDaniel Report quotes engineering Geologist James Berkland, a former geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on this subject:

The so-called "Face on Mars" is unlike any natural feature I have ever seen or heard about it. To ascribe this feature of such symmetry and uniqueness to 'wind erosion' is to plead a special case for a geologic process with no supporting evidence.

But NASA was not interested in any serious discussion of these features. Release of the picture was timed to coincide with a PR campaign hawking a new (but actually scientifically worthless) 3D reconstruction from altimetry (MOLA) data that did not have the required resolution to resolve the features it was supposed to study to begin with, and from which NASA triumphantly concluded that the face was just another hill. Due to the meticulous timing, the two independent pieces of information were blurred into one by the mass media. The result were headlines like Space.com's The Face on Mars: Unmasked by New Images.

To add insult to injury, NASA's Jim Garvin told the media that

"We felt this was important to taxpayers. We photographed the Face as soon as we could get a good shot at it."

"[the face] reminds me most of Middle Butte in the Snake River Plain of Idaho. That's a lava dome that takes the form of an isolated mesa about the same height as the Face on Mars."

which was also accepted by the media on faith. No mass media outlets cared to acquire a satellite photo of Middle Butte in Idaho to check Garvin's assertion, or they would have noticed that that statement is complete, unadulterated hogwash. See The Unmasking of Middle Butte by Lan Fleming for details and a picture. In a nutshell, Middle Butte is elliptic in shape, looks nothing like a face and does not exhibit the straight edges of the Cydonia formation.

Garvin's claim that the "face" is just another mesa has become a mantra for the opponents of the artificiality hypothesis. I have personally debated a few of them, and the exchange always follows a certain pattern. At first, there is the usual ridicule, ad-hominem and accusations of complete ignorance of the laws of geology. Features like these are common, I am told. When I specify criteria for artificiality- parallel straight lines, right angles and arcs whose symmetry axes are parallel or perpendicular to the straight lines - and challenge my opponent to produce an image of any natural feature of roughly the same scale as the Cydonia "face" on any body in the solar system that exhibits these traits, I get is lots of excuses, but no examples. This is a problem that the artificiality pseudoskeptics in general have not overcome. They "know" that the solar system is teeming with hills just like Cydonia, but they're always too busy and can't be bothered to show a single example.

NASA's apparent policy of deliberate obfuscation continues to the present day. The April 13, 2002 release of a new image of Cydonia by Mars Odyssey's THEMIS instrument that once again clearly shows a face was accompanied by a fancy caption that suggests that the "face" is akin to such fantasies as the "Man in the Moon", or formations that suggest a sculpture when viewed from a specific angle, such as Phoenix's camelback mountain. It further states that

This face (seen here about halfway down the image and to the right) is really just a hill with slopes and ridges that are shadowed in a way that can sometimes resemble a face from far away.

(my emphasis). In other words, the THEMIS team is reverting to the tired old ad-hoc claim of "light and shadow", again, a claim that is inconsistent with the established empirical fact that the appearance of a face is independent of lighting conditions and viewing angles. Contrary to the suggestion implied in the caption, there is not a single image of the formation which has failed to look like a face, except the mythological one that Gerald Soffen mentioned in 1976, the one that was never taken.

The caption also states that the shape of the "face" is the result of erosion, which explains the amorphous shape of the mesa next to it, but fails to account for the aforementioned parallel lines and overall symmetry of the "face". Indeed, the direct visual comparison of the two mesas right next to each other (which were presumably exposed to the same forces) provides for a poignant illustration of the difference between the "face" and a natural formation. Furthermore, to argue for a natural origin of the formation by pointing out that close-ups show significant erosion is to demolish a mere straw man, because the artificiality hypothesis does not predict otherwise! An ancient artificial sculpture would obviously be subject to the same erosion as any natural formation. The pictures we have today are perfectly consistent with an eroded artificial sculpture.

Discussion

It is a good guiding principle of proper skepticism that something that is adequately explained by incompetence should not be attributed to malice. But conversely, when incompetence falls far short of a credible explanation, then honesty, logic and intellectual integrity demand that the competing explanation of malice be adopted. In the case of Cydonia, the "incompetence" theory would require us to accept the following:

1. That all the Viking scientists in 1976 were so completely lacking in natural curiosity that they dismissed the possibility of just having made the single most stunning discovery in the history of science because of a simple clerical error. The entire team found the idea that there could be a giant artificial statue on the surface of Mars so utterly boring that they took the word of some incompetent subordinate who had mistaken some other picture for a second frame of the "Face" and pronounced that there was nothing there at face value and never bothered to double-check.
2. Someone happened to misfile Viking frame 70A13.
3. Somehow, the scientific work of DiPietro, Molenaar and Carlotto never came to the attention of NASA scientists, even though it was covered in books and by the media and its authors made every effort to communicate it to NASA. And for some reason, NASA continued to dismiss the artificiality hypothesis using the "accident of light and shadow" claim throughout the 1980s and beyond, even though that claim had been refuted by a second image found in NASA's own archives.
4. On April 6, 1998, the day that the first new picture of the "face" was acquired and released to the public, NASA had hired a bunch of image processing interns who were so stunningly incompetent that they used high- and low-pass filtering to remove almost all the information from the picture that was released to the mass media. Somehow, NASA's seasoned imaging experts who had done a splendid job processing and enhancing pictures of bodies of the solar system for decades and who are certainly incapable of that level of incompetence were on leave that day. When they returned and found that that this kind of garbage had been released in their name, they did not mind and never issued a retraction.
5. When a team of NASA scientists used MOLA data to reconstruct the 3D-structure of the "Face", they never noticed that their instrument did not have sufficient horizontal resolution to resolve the features it was supposed to study in the first place. The public release of their study accidentally coincided with the public release of a new, high-resolution visual image and accidentally created the public appearance that the negative verdict had been reached based on the visual image. Fleming's rebutal which reached the conclusion that serious errors had been commited in the 3D reconstruction, and that possibly a wrong landform had been studied, never reached them, even though Fleming made an effort to contact them.

To claim that this chain of instances of incompetence of the highest order ("impossibly bad quality of reasoning", in the words of McDaniel) actually occured inside NASA stretches the definition of "incompetence" beyond the breaking point. To maintain that a documented pattern of deception, disinformation, withholding of key evidence, manipulation of public opinion through doctored images, stonewalling and refusal to investigate a legitimate scientific question in good faith spanning over a quarter of a century and several different NASA missions is likely the result of simple, honest errors can only be characterized as the psychological condition of denial.

Any rational observer must therefore confront the possibility that NASA's behavior regarding Cydonia is orchestrated- in other words, that NASA is engaged in a cover-up of the true nature of the "Face".

This is more than just an ultimately unverifiable conspiracy theory. There is hard, independent evidence in the public record that suggests that NASA is acting under a long-standing policy to conceil discovery of extraterrestrial artifacts in the solar system from the general public. This evidence is the Brookings Report, a study commissioned by NASA over 40 years ago concerning the social implications of the space program. Entitled Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs, the report recommends cover-up in case extraterrestrial artifacts were found in the course of NASA's exploration of space.

On page 215, it predicts that

"artifacts left at some point in time by these life forms [intelligent extraterrestrial life] might possibly be discovered through our space activities on the Moon, Mars or Venus."

It warns that

"Anthropological files contain many examples of societies, sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes and behavior."

On p. 216, the report asks whether such information should be presented to the public, or withheld. On p.225, it essentially suggests that the answer should be the latter, since discovery of alien artifacts indicative of highly advanced extraterrestrial science and technology could devastate their human counterparts.

"It has been speculated that, of all groups, scientists and engineers might be the most devastated by the discovery of relatively superior creatures, since these professions are most clearly associated with the mastery of nature, rather than with the understanding and expression of man. Advanced understanding of nature might vitiate all our theories at the very least, if not also require a culture and perhaps a brain inaccessible to earth scientists. "

Conclusions