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*                                                            *
*                         CYBERSPACE                         *
*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         *
*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   *
*                                                            *
* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer                                  *
* Free for online distribution                               *
* All Rights Reserved                                        *
* Direct comments and questions to:                          *
*   <kamamer@yahoo.com>                                      *
*                                                            *
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The Viking mission to Mars in 1976 returned over 60,000 
photographs of the red planet's surface. For a bit of levity, 
NASA released a photo of the Cydonia region, featuring a rocky 
mesa that looked like a face. NASA sometimes tries too hard to 
be cute. It once compared Voyager photos of a Jovian moon to a 
bubbling pizza. 
 
In 1979 two programmers working for a NASA contractor 
rediscovered the Mars face photos. With no training in geology, 
they pronounced the face artificial, ostensibly made by some 
long dead Martian race. 
 
The UFO crowd ran wild with the images and began searching for 
other structures near the face. They found a fort, a city, and 
pyramids in the murky gray scale images. 
 
Space scientists attributed the face to light, shadow, and the 
human mind. The photo was taken when the light was at a low 
angle. Humans are hardwired by evolution to see faces in the 
blurriest of images. When you're a baby, a face means your 
mother. Your mother means food. (See 
aspsky.org/html/tnl/25/25.html for an interesting overview as 
well as images of Henson muppets NASA has been covering up!) 
 
Believers in the Mars face cover up grew when science 
journalist Richard Hoagland took his theories about ancient 
artifacts on Mars and the Moon to the net in March 1996 (see 
www.enterprisemission.com). In a series of press releases 
posted to net.news, Hoagland promised to reveal suppressed 
evidence of structures on the Moon. His hidden evidence turned 
out to be Apollo photos that have been in the public domain for 
a quarter century. 
 
When NASA announced the Global Surveyor mission, Mars "facers" 
and skeptics hoped new images of the Cydonia region would put 
the matter to rest. Unfortunately, patience is not in the 
vocabulary of many facers. The Cydonia region was not high on 
NASA's target list. There are more interesting scientific 
targets. For example, Mars' Olympus Mons is the largest known 
volcano in the solar system. 
 
The Society for Planetary SETI Research (see the SPSR's web 
site at www.mcdanielreport.com) lobbied NASA to raise Cydonia's 
priority. In what seemed a remarkable turn of events, NASA 
complied with the wishes of the facers, raising the priority 
about as high as it could go. Some of the first pictures out of 
Surveyor would be of the face. Raw data would be posted to the 
net as soon as it came in. 
 
This isn't the first time NASA has met with and given voice to 
its kookier opponents. Shortly before the Apollo 11 moon shot, 
the space agency's chief met with Rev. Ralph Abertnathy, the 
leader of a populist anti-poverty/anti-Apollo group. Despite 
the many troubles Abertnathy had given NASA over the years, the 
reverend and some of his followers were given in-demand VIP 
seating for the historic launch. 
 
As promised, NASA posted the raw data within hours of 
acquisition. Hey, guess what? It looked nothing like a carved 
face. Matter settled? Nope. 
 
When a scientific theory in wrapped in a conspiracy theory, one 
can insert a conspiracy at any point to account for a lack of 
data. Shortly before Surveyor's launch, I posted to 
alt.alien.visitors a flow chart helping facers generate a 
typical conspiracy theory at ever turn of the mission (see 
www.netizen.org/arc-hive/UFO_0034.TXT). 
 
The SPSR, surprisingly, accepted the photos as tentative 
nullification of the face hypothesis. Richard Hoagland, 
however, was a different matter.  
 
Hoagland quickly reposted the NASA images on his site but 
offered little initial comment. Within days, he came out 
swinging. As my flow chart predicted, Hoagland accused NASA of 
releasing doctored photos as raw data. As proof of tampering, 
Hoagland claimed the photos were missing grey levels. No one 
was quite certain what information could have been 
surreptitiously deleted along with the "missing" grey levels. 
 
Malin Space Science Systems, the company that actually made 
Surveyor's camera (see barsoom.msss.com), applied Hoagland's 
own methodology to the face picture from the original Viking 
mission and found it was missing more grey levels. A Malin 
engineer concludes "If it doesn't look like a face, it isn't 
because gray levels are missing."