After the Martian Apocalypse

by Mac Tonnies

But if meant for viewing only from the west, why bother with any facial likeness on the eastern half? Since the Face is highly bisymmetrical, it’s more likely that the Face was designed for viewing from above as well as from the ground.

  Pop mythology notwithstanding, the Face’s skyward visage is not evidence that the Cydonians were a spacefaring civilization. After all, terrestrial structures such as the Nazca lines in Peru were constructed for viewing from above, even though the Peruvians lacked aircraft. The Peruvians had an intimate interest in monitoring the night sky, and aerial gods populate their mythology. The architects of the fabled Nazca lines never actually saw their works from above; it was enough that they existed.

  The Face on Mars may be a similar attempt to appease unknown deities. Just because it’s a frontal portrait of a human (or humanoid) doesn’t necessarily mean that the culture that built it had conquered manned flight. The vast resources used to construct the Face could have been justified by the same metaphysical drive that spawned Stonehenge, the Pyramids, and other ancient sites.

  Alternatively, the Face could be a device to get our attention. Over the years astronomers have pondered ways to let possible alien civilizations know that we’re here. Today we routinely announce our presence to the galaxy by our electromagnetic chatter. In 1978, scientists sent the first purposeful transmission to a possible extraterrestrial civilization: an encrypted message showing a rudimentary human form and a diagram of the Sun’s retinue of planets. When Mars was considered habitable and Earth-like, a number of ingenious schemes flourished to let the Martians know they had intelligent neighbors. Suggestions ranged from setting massive geometric fires in the Sahara to building a huge symmetrical face in hopes of catching the eye of astromically inclined Martians. The latter proposal, made by megascale sculptor Isamu Noguchi in the mid-1940s, seems eerily prescient and more than a little ironic in light of the Martian Face.

  The “beacon” explanation poses at least as many fundamental questions as it answers. How did the Cydonians know we might be coming? And, more provocatively, why would they have cared enough to commit themselves to a massive architectural undertaking? The notion of extinct Martian altruists smacks of the 1950s “space brothers” from flying saucers, who preached peace and love via human “contactees.”

  The Face could be an astronomical marker, like the numerous earthworks and stone circles that dot the fields of England. Various researchers have attempted to determine when the Face was built, with results ranging from thirty thousand years ago to half a million. Even the relatively recent datings predate the human species as we know it; if the Face is an artifact, then it casts the human legacy in an almost unimaginable sprawl of time, just as photos of Earth from deep space show how vanishingly tiny our world is when seen in galactic context.

  The inherent threat to our understanding of history is obvious, posing questions with the potential to occupy sociologists for decades. How would the human race react to the revelation that it had once had mysterious neighbors?

  If Mars died a calamitous and sudden death, the existence of a prior technological civilization may provide the impetus we need to rearrange our own existential perspective. Earth swims amidst an orbital cemetery, narrowly avoiding collisions with planet-killing asteroids while its governments waste precious centuries honing weapons, dulled by solipsistic torpor.

  The solar system revealed by Pioneer and Voyager, enhanced by new understandings from contemporary space science missions, unveils a universe as indifferent and merciless as H. G. Wells’s marauding invaders in The War of the Worlds. Mars is a mute challenge. Although repeatedly likened to a sphinx, the Face on Mars may be more of a siren, luring the inhabitants of Earth with its fierce, intriguingly anonymous stare.

  Ultimately, as Ray Bradbury predicted decades ago, the Martians will be us.

  The Man Who Invented Mars

  In the 1890s, American astronomer Percival Lowell changed the way the world saw Mars by claiming that the planet’s surface was a confusion of intersecting “canals”—apparent proof that a Martian race was alive and well, albeit faced with a globe-threatening water shortage. Lowell fastidiously mapped the Martian canals, producing intricate diagrams showing straight lines emanating from the polar caps. Lowell reasoned that a Martian civilization, potentially far in advance of our own, was staving off dehydration by maximizing Mars’s compromised water supply.

  Lowell’s theory, with its dire cautionary implications, enthralled the public conscience and revitalized astronomy by turning Mars into a place rather than an abstracted mote in the night sky. Lowell’s idea was ultimately greater than his science; subsequent analyses by his peers revealed that Mars lacked the atmosphere to retain the large quantities of liquid water required by the canals. Still, the issue of what, precisely, Lowell was seeing through his telescope remained the subject of controversy. Not until Mars was visited by Earth’s first telerobotic probes and photographed in detail were the canals finally demolished; while Lowell’s painstaking survey wasn’t disingenuous, contemporary researchers now think that he was tricked into connecting disparate surface features into illusory lines—in other words, inadvertently connecting the dots created by large-scale formations seen from a great distance. Given the technology available to him, Lowell can hardly be blamed. Indeed, late-twentieth-century astronomers such as Carl Sagan have credited Lowell with popularizing planetary astronomy.

  Lowell’s impact on science fiction was especially formidable. If not for his research, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds would likely never have been written, resulting in a dramatic shortage of “invasion from space” yarns that have inspired the contemporary generation of alien hunters, or exobiologists. Though founded in error, Lowell’s legacy helped open the door for the possibility of intelligent alien life, whether on Mars or elsewhere in the depths of space.

  This Martian globe, created by astronomer Percival Lowell, shows apparent artificial canals on the Red Planet. Subsequent observation showed that Lowell’s observations were illusory, caused by combining disparate surface features into imaginary straight lines. Image courtesy Lowell Observatory.

  Not surprisingly, Lowell’s nonexistent canals have become imminently useful analogies for critics of the Artificiality Hypothesis as it pertains to the Face in Cydonia. Since it is possible to misinterpret planetary surface features, argue debunkers, the Face is certainly a latter-day example of attaching terrestrial sentiments to alien geology. But there are gross problems with this argument. First, Lowell’s observations of sketchy canals were made through the eyepiece of a Victorian telescope. The first images of the Face were acquired from spacecraft in Mars orbit, and while they were grainy enough to contest, new imagery shows that the salient face-like details remain unchanged, augmented by the discovery of secondary facial features.

  It is ironic that the Face and City of Mars recall Lowell’s vision of a postapocalyptic world. Sadly, it seems chances of communicating with living Martians are vanquished by millennia; if the Face is artificial, it’s far older than the canals chronicled by Lowell. If there ever were canals (or similar features) on Mars, they’ve long been consumed by the planet’s mysterious geology, leaving us with an assembly of relics. Cydonia researchers continue Lowell’s epic quest to confirm the existence of Martians, but their tools are better and their sense of context is rooted in the grim and wondrous realities unveiled by the space age.

  Percival Lowell’s Martian race might be dead, but his impassioned search for confirmation endures. In light of the degraded, mile-wide Face and nearby pyramids, the truth may well be far stranger than Lowell ever imagined.

  A Technological Interpretation

  of the Face

  The presence of a discernable humanoid eye on the Face on Mars invites comparison to terrestrial sculpture. The inclusion of a structured “eyeball” in a piece of megascale sculpture is not a trivial artistic element. If artificial, the Face is no exception. Close study just might reveal significance dulled by millen
nia of erosion.

  The anomalous rectangular cells surrounding the western eye may be more than an exposed structural mesh or tress work. Their orientation—surrounding the lower half of the eye—suggest a decorative intent. If the Face’s western side had been sandblasted for a long period of time, as posited by engineering geologist Ron Nicks, then one might expect to see similar “cellular” features elsewhere on the Face’s exposed surfaces. Instead, the cells appear only around the eye, suggesting that their placement may be part of an aesthetic design emphasizing the western side’s “simian” motif.

  The eye’s iris can be described as a “faceted cone.” Interestingly, the curved array of cells lining the eye’s underside (on the area perhaps corresponding to a “cheekbone”) seems centered on the protruding cone, as if functionally related. Could the empty cells forming the curved grid below the eye have once housed mirrors designed to capture sunlight and cast it on the elevated iris? This notion is consistent with an archaeological interpretation of the Face, and offers a visually pleasing solution to the cells’ conspicuous placement on the Face’s surface. The Face may have once literally glowered at the Martian night, implying not only Martian technological savvy, but the intention that the Face be viewed from above—either by Cydonians or us…or both.

  Solar energy plants use the same distinct radial method of “harvesting” and focusing sunlight, albeit for industrial purposes. Then again, could the Martian eye have served both as a brilliant ornament as well as a power-generating station of some kind? The Face is certainly big enough to have served as an architectural ecology (or “arcology,” for short) of the sort advocated by architect Paolo Soleri. Soleri’s intricately rendered arcologies—never actually built—elegantly enclose entire cities in environmentally friendly shells, minimizing urban sprawl. If the Face housed remnants of a civilization beneath a faltering ecosphere, a solar generator of this sort would have been desirable. At the same time, the illuminated eye would be fulfilling a metaphoric function, channeling light into the Face just as a real eye allows light to pass through the pupil to be decoded into images by the brain.

  Extremely high-resolution images of the anomalous cells could help in deciding if they are in fact artificial enclosures of a sort necessary to support a network of mirrors analogous to a terrestrial solar farm. The ridged feature dubbed the “teardrop” also awaits an archaeological explanation. I suspect its placement directly below the iris, exactly halfway between the eye and mouth, may not be coincidental.

  The Two-Sided Face

  Ten years ago investigator Richard Hoagland theorized that the Face on Mars encoded dual visages of hominid and feline forms instead of presenting a straight likeness of a human being or similar hominid. For evidence, he showed audiences a mirrored version of a “local contrast stretch” image produced by Mark Carlotto, which succeeded in bringing out the details of the shadowy eastern side (imaged in its entirety in 2001). The frame Hoagland worked with, 70A13, was marred by an annoying camera registration mark that tended to detract from a facial likeness, feline or otherwise. When Hoagland presented his unusual theory to the United Nations a decade ago, many felt that the feline aspect was probably a result of reading too much into the scant data. Only a new, high-resolution photo could properly frame the controversy.

  With confirmation available since 2001 from overhead images, the feline appearance discernable in the 1976 image may be a real phenomenon. The Face, while consistently face-like in a gross sense, does not appear to be a strictly human visage. Like many split-image motifs constructed by ancient cultures here on Earth, it seems to represent a fusion of humanoid and animal features.

  While it has been apparent from the beginning that the Face wasn’t perfectly bisymmetrical, it nevertheless retained a convincing face-like appearance under a wide variety of lighting angles, as demonstrated by Carlotto’s increasingly sophisticated shape-from-shading renditions. When the image of the Face arrived from Surveyor in April of 1998, Cydonia researchers immediately voiced disappointment in the angle and lighting, which made assessing the Face mesa in its entirety effectively impossible.

  Although attempts to orthorectify Surveyor’s substandard image provided tantalizing detail of the Face’s dark half, the overall facial appearance was still founded more on computer-imaging technique than actual geology. Multimedia artist Mark Kelly’s enhancement—an eerily compelling frontal rendition created by “stretching” the available detail on the first Surveyor photo and adding shadows to simulate Viking lighting conditions—remained the most definitive photographic reconstruction of the Martian Face until late May of 2001, when the Face was finally rephotographed by Surveyor.

  The final product of both Kelly’s enhancement and the properly contrasted Surveyor image is a peculiarly schizophrenic visage. Digitally mirroring the Face’s respective sides reveals an ape-like protohuman face complete with anatomically accurate eye, brow, lips, chin and nostril as well as a cat-like resemblance including a perfectly shaped feline nose (with nostril and an indication of anatomical structure near what might be an eroded mouth).

  Also plainly visible is a slitted eye (albeit with no visible internal structure) and sloping forehead. The strange semi-triangular groove seen on the eastern headdress in the 1998 Face photo begins to look more than a little like a stylized “ear.”

  As with the protohuman elements comprising the western side, the various features conspiring to form the feline visage appear in proper proportion and are not the result of selective choosing.

  The “harelip” feature, estimated to lie at the exact lateral center of the Face mesa, appears to serve as a dividing line for the split-image motif. When mirrored, a portion of the harelip neatly forms what looks remarkably like the indentation beneath the broad, feline nose. Similarly, a graceful arc on the eastern forehead terminates precisely at the mesa’s centerline, suggesting that it is an intentional component of the feline visage as well.

  Face advocate Ron Nicks, writing for Hoagland’s website, the Enterprise Mission, suggests that the eastern side may be the more well-preserved of the two, with evidence of a structural casing beginning to crack and peel away under millennia of eastward Martian winds. An identical phenomenon afflicts the Great Pyramid in Egypt, underlining the argument for the Face being an intentionally constructed work of art as opposed to a fluke of erosion.

  The archaeological/anthropological riddle posed by the Face on Mars smacks of strangeness, calling our planetary identity into question. Viewed from our frustrating vantage in Mars orbit, the Face appears to be an interplanetary chimera—a literal sphinx. Unraveling its riddle will be neither easy nor necessarily comfortable for those rooted in the slowly unraveling certainty that we are—and always have been—alone in the solar neighborhood.

  Two dominant and mutually exclusive theories have been put forth to account for the Face on Mars’s asymmetry, as seen in the 2001 Surveyor image. Hoagland is a major advocate of the feline hypothesis, in which the eastern side of the Face mesa represents a lion or similar animal. Although this explanation may sound dangerously post facto, remember that Hoagland made this observation ten years ago based on relatively poor-quality Viking data.

  I contend that the Face’s eastern half indeed looks somewhat cat-like (intentionally so or not). I tested the notion by presenting “blind” viewers with a mirrored photograph of the Face’s alleged feline side. In the words of one participant, unaware that he was looking at a formation on the surface of another planet, “It looks like a lion.”

  On the other hand, the feline resemblance may be fortuitous. Mark Carlotto has made a provocative case explaining the distorted eastern portion as the result of wasting and sand accumulation. Until ground-penetrating radar reveals whether Carlotto’s proposed accumulation is just that—or a deliberate protective “casing,” as argued by Hoagland and geologist Ron Nicks—the two-sided Face will remain controversial among advocates of the Artificiality Hypothesis.

  If it turns out that
the bifurcated Face is intentional, what is the message being conveyed? It’s doubtful a civilization would construct a mile-long face without a compelling cultural reason. Therefore, the symbolic aspect of the hominid/feline Face is presumably far from trivial, and may be a true message from an extraterrestrial intelligence.

  But what are hominids and cats doing on Mars?

  In the “Dawn of Man” sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a tribe of luckless protohumans is depicted living alongside predatory panthers. The protohumans’ social evolution is accelerated when an alien monolith appears, inspiring the use of tools and weapons; the hunted become the hunters. Humankind’s ascent as a tool-using species is dramatized by the famous scene in which a bone, thrown skyward by a triumphant ape-man, is juxtaposed with a space station placidly orbiting the Earth hundreds of thousands of years later.

  Perhaps the Darwinian saga of 2001 is retold by the hybrid Martian Face. The fusion of humanoid and feline forms results in an aesthetic friction between prey and predator; the Face might represent the advent of intelligence on Earth by drawing forth images from our evolutionary past.

  As an enfolded metaphor, the Face is a subtle but effective attempt to memorialize our species’ origins. If our ancestors hadn’t responded to the threat posed by carnivores, it’s doubtful that intelligence as we know it would have arisen. By remaining evolutionary spectators, early humans would probably have gone extinct. By taking an active role in ensuring their survival, early humans ensured that the challenges posed by predators (symbolized by the Face’s lionesque half) became catalysts for evolutionary change.

  That a human-built space probe took a picture of the Face on Mars is itself proof of our species’ tenacity and adaptability, as well as a mute reminder that our status as Earth’s dominant species is as fragile now as it was millennia ago, on the shores of the African savannah.

  Humanity has only recently acquired the technology to exterminate itself; the message of the Face—assuming it has one—comes at an important and perhaps crucial juncture.