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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 more missing grey levels. A Malin 

engineer concludes "If it doesn't look like a face, it isn't 

because gray levels are missing."