Enigma Issue 2: The Face on Mars by Paul Vigay | Winter 1993/94

Mars - the bringer of war, inspiration for War of the Worlds and fourth planet in the Solar System.

"The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one", said the astronomer Ogilvy, in H.G.Wells classic science fiction story The War of the Worlds. How accurate was Ogilvy?

No life
Scientists agree now that there is no life on this remote barren planet, covered mainly by a reddish dust-filled desert. However, who can say whether Mars was once visited by passing extra-terrestrials? There is now a growing movement of people, especially in the U.S.A., who strongly believe that this is the case.

Richard Hoagland, a former NASA consultant and co-creator of mankinds first ever stellar message leaving the Solar System aboard Pioneer 10 argues the case after what appears to be a face was found on a video returned from the Viking mission back in 1976.

Images analysed
Frame 35A72, showing the Northern Martian desert region known as Cydonia clearly depicts a stone image closely resembling a face (see photo over page). The official response was that the image was probably a trick of light and shadow.

However, a second frame taken 35 days later also provides startling clarity. What is it, and, if it's not a natural anomaly caused merely by sand erosion, how did it get there?

Light trick!
The official response was that it was most probably a trick of light and shadow. However, Hoagland and his 'Mars Mission' team argue that there are many other factors to prove intelligent interaction.

The Case for...

There is not only a face on Mars but also a five sided pyramid (termed the D&M), a large mount (called the Tholus), a cliff and a group of polyhedral objects (named the City). What's more, these objects all appear to be mathematically aligned with each other. No - not by using complicated formulae, manipulated to give good results but simple sums using terms such as PI and e. The Face is positioned exactly 90° between the D&M pyramid and the Tholus.

The D&M itself is located at 40.868° North. This number is the tangent of e divided by PI. By projecting lines across the Martian landscape, Hoagland has been able to make a possible data of construction. If one was to have stood at the City centre a mere half a million years ago, one could have watched as the Summer Solstice sun rose over the face to the east.

If you project a line in the direction of this sun, past the face it will go on to the cliff, which lies at the other end of the line. In fact, this is how the cliff was discovered.

If you look beyond the cliff, there is a huge crater which seems to have a tetrahedral structure embedded in it's rim. If you now measure the angle joining the cliff to the crater through the Tholus, you find that it is 19.5°. In fact, this 19.5° is a number that keeps occurring in the geometry of the Martian landscape, but what is the significance?

The Tetrahedral link
If you take a tetrahedron and place it exactly inside a sphere so that it's apex touches the pole of the sphere, it's bottom three corners will always touch the edge of the sphere at 19.5°. This, Hoagland later discovered, seems to be a significant number.

What do you get if you place imaginary tetrahedrons inside some of the other planets? Well, on Earth the chain of Hawaiian volcanoes is situated at 19.5° latitude. Jupiter's Red Spot is at 19.5° and back on Mars, a giant shield volcano, Olympus Mons is at 19.5° latitude.

Using these findings Hoagland successfully predicted in July 1989, two weeks before the Voyager probe confirmed it, that Neptune too would have a giant spot similar to Jupiter's and it too would lie at 19.5° latitude. Tetrahedral geometry also seems inexplicably linked to Crop Circle analysis. For example, the Barbury Castle formation of 1991 is a mathematically perfect 'twin inverted hyper-tetrahedron' - two hyper-dimensional tetrahedrons superimposed over one another, one upright and the other upside down.

The bottom Cheesefoot head pictogram of 1993 also conforms to 3D tetrahedral geometry. (see research article)

The Terrestrial Connection
However, the most amazing (and difficult to comprehend) link is that made between Cydonia on Mars and locations, and objects, here on Earth. The parallel here on Earth is the Egyptian Sphinx located at approx 30° N. The cosine of 30 equals the tangent of 40.868 - the latitude of the D&M. While this link is somewhat imaginative, the three pyramids at Giza lie on the curve of an Archimedian spiral of which the position of the sphinx in relation to this is e divided by PI. (This curve also seems remarkably similar to the hyperbola plotted by a spacecraft accelerating to leave a planet's sphere of gravitational influence - Ed.)

Man and Beast
If, using a computer, you take the left half of the face and reflect it over the right half the image appears to resemble a hominid face. However, if you then take the right half and reflect it over the left half, it bears an uncanny resemblance to a feline face. Again, like the Egyptian Sphinx, the Martian face seems to depict some mythological fusion between man and beast.

The Wiltshire link
One of the Mars Mission's British members, David Percy has also discovered what appears to be another major terrestrial link, right in the middle of Crop Circle country. David superimposed a map of the Silbury Hill and Avebury area over a scaled down map of the Cydonia region. The match was exact!

Superimposing Silbury Hill over the top of the Tholus, the crater fits exactly over Avebury stone circle, even down to a mound on the rim of the Avebury circle corresponding to the tetrahedral marking on the crater.

So what?
Many people find it hard to imagine some sort of intelligence behind the Mars Face. However, this doesn't automatically mean that there was once a long lost civilisation on Mars. What if, our Solar System was visited, 500,000 years ago, by some intelligent beings from a distant galaxy?

Surely, if they possessed the technology to visit our Solar System, and Mars, it would be a mere galactic bus stop to continue on and visit Earth. Could they some how have influenced the primitive civilisations they discovered here?

Hoagland discussed even more links with ancient civilisations including the Atlantians and Mayans at a talk he gave to the United Nations in February 1992.

Confirmation denied
A single frame hardly seems justification to convert a sceptical mind, but Mars is within reach of Man's space exploration and in September 1992, NASA launched a probe - the Mars Observer, armed with a camera 50 times more powerful than the original Voyager one - confirmation at last!

Although at the time of launch, no one at NASA would confirm or deny if more photos of Cydonia would be returned; somewhat puzzling as any curious mind would seek to confirm or deny the allegations put forward. This of course gave many people reason to believe this was just another Government cover-up.

In December 1993 NASA announced that due to a fault developing onboard Mars Observer, they were unable to re-gain communications - just as the probe was about to enter Mars orbit.

For a project costing $1 billion, the whole project seems to have been forgotten rather quickly by the media. "An accidental failure by the probe would be an ideal way to prevent the release of new photographs", claim Martian enthusiasts. Is this another Government cover-up, or merely a failure of human technology to conquer space.

If there's one thing extra-terrestrials can teach us humans, it would be how to get past the end of the garden path in Galactic terms.

... or was it all just a trick of the light?

For further information, contact: The Mars Mission, 31-10 Skytop Gardens, Parlin, NJ 08859, USA. The Mars Mission also publish a quarterly journal, Martian Horizons.