After the Martian Apocalypse

by Mac Tonnies

  But McDaniel excluded mention to the much larger (if somewhat difficult to see) “moat” that surrounded the triangle, which cleanly intersects a small crater. Hoagland has argued that the crater is not natural, but part of the foundation for an erstwhile architectural ecology. Regardless of what the triangle and its surrounding “ditch” really are, they constitute a faint but nagging blip on the anomalistic radar. Like the bright, comb-like tines beneath the so-called “Dolphin Mesa,” the Pictogram is but part of a subtle, underlying layer of secondary anomalies not visible on the original Viking images.

  Devoted skeptics denounce such potentially confirmatory details as the “will to believe”—creating seeming order out of random pixels. But how does the will to believe influence the results of fractal analysis, or shape-from-shading topological rendering? Unless one is prepared to accuse our computers of harboring an innate will to believe (an accusation that would likely thrill artificial intelligence researchers), dismissing Cydonia’s residue of secondary anomalies constitutes nothing less than intellectual escapism. Lingering oddities cannot be made to go away on command, even when subjected to high-tech distortion and expert debunking.

  Even before the Surveyor mission, occasional protesters would congregate in Washington, D.C. armed with placards showing the shadowy mask of the Face on Mars, requesting officialdom to “Face the Facts.” But the problem has never been a matter of acknowledging irrefutable data. Rather, it’s the frightening scarcity of data that makes Cydonia research so difficult.

  Statistical analysis conducted by Mark Carlotto suggests that the prospect of intelligence on Mars outweighs the case for fossilized nanobacteria in a Mars meteorite ALH 84001. Yet faced with purely circumstantial evidence, NASA wasted no time revealing its case for bacteria to a jaded (and suspicious) public. In this sense, the controversy over the Face is far less scientific than it is sociological.

  Cydonia research is forced into unique evidential constraints due to its extraordinary nature. Short of fossilized Martian corpses plummeting to earth amidst a flurry of white-smocked exobiologists and whirring DNA sequencers, the chances of the Face escaping the clutches of tabloid headlines and ascending to the scientific sphere are low.

  Cyberspace may be teeming with fresh thinking on the topic, as witnessed by the online journal New Frontiers in Science, edited by Mark Carlotto and Holladay Weiss, but the entrenched science establishment appears genuinely paralyzed. There are so many features in Cydonia and elsewhere on Mars that beg further study.

  The City:

  Implications of Martian Urban Design

  If the City complex once bordered a sea, as new evidence from the Mars Odyssey’s Thermal Imaging System strongly suggests, then the City Pyramid may have enjoyed a waterfront view: to the immediate north is an odd rectangular depression that prompted nearly as much online discussion as the pyramid itself. By selectively tracing the borders extending from the depression, one can produce a vague, dolphin-like profile, with the depression serving as the nose.

  Some independent researchers maintain that the dolphin likeness is intentional, that this area once functioned as a massive “reflecting pool.” The image conjured by the very debatable dolphin is sublimely corny, epitomizing a New Age lost city. One can almost imagine bronze-skinned Martians sunning themselves on the City Pyramid’s terrace, watching the Sun glow like an incandescent heart as it passes over the still waters. The dolphin pool is not a fanciful diversion from the hard science of Martian geology, however. In recent years, a plethora of alleged geoglyphs—nearly all of them seen in profile—have been advanced as evidence of artistically inclined Martians. Ironically, Michael Malin, proprietor of the Surveyor’s camera, has used an obviously natural formation bearing the likeness of Kermit the Frog to ridicule this sort of geoglyph research. Malin also delights in showing his audience the “Happy Face Crater,” a crater with ejecta scattered in such a way as to produce a passing resemblance to the classic yellow happy face. While JPL may view this as heavy ammunition in the war against Cydonia believers, anomaly researchers interpret Malin’s Happy Face as so much chiding, and quietly wonder how much time and effort is spent acquiring such images instead of helping to unravel real mysteries.

  The “Cydonia Hilton”

  The “Cydonia Hilton,” known alternately as the “Dragon’s Teeth,” is a ruler-straight collection of approximately five rectilinear shapes carved into a mound in the vicinity of the City Square. Perhaps more than any other anomalous formation on Mars, the Cydonia Hilton’s band of discreet structures is reminiscent of a strip mall or self-storage shelter. But the Hilton’s geological context precludes naive terrestrial analogy. The feature’s elevation and proximity to proposed arcologies such as the Main City Pyramid and Fort argue for a contextual interpretation in which the Cydonia enigmas are viewed as a complex, rather than as a collection of unrelated features.

  While it’s tempting to consider the Hilton in architectural terms, natural explanations should obviously be evaluated. What geological process could produce the Hilton? It doesn’t seem to be a fault in any recognized sense. Even if the individual cubes are ice deposits, one must explain how they came to be arranged so precisely.

  As the first such strip mall-like anomaly discovered on Mars, the Hilton’s function (if artificial) is fascinating to consider from an engineering perspective. The cubes could be large doorways designed to allow the hypothetical Martians access to the planet’s surface. The obvious implication—that portions of the City area are at least partially hollow—is supported by evidence such as the possible deep chasm on the Face’s damaged eastern side as well as the Fort’s unusual imploded appearance, suggestive of an inward collapse.

  It’s likely that the Hilton’s high elevation has spared it from being completely obscured by airborne dust. Features of comparable size, if they exist at lower elevations, may well have been eroded into invisibility or else hidden under a cloak of Martian soil in the millennia since their construction.

  Speculation aside, the Cydonia Hilton offers its own mute challenge to planetary SETI: natural or artificial, what is it doing in “downtown” Cydonia? And if by some chance it is artificial, what are its archaeological implications?

  Maps and Legends

  Prior to the Surveyor mission, architect Robert Fiertek produced a pentagonal arrangement that can be neatly traced over the City, with points corresponding to the City Pyramid. But unlike the crisp lines of his architectural schematic, the City itself offers no obvious markers. The relationships between the various structures remain subjective constructs. Detractors will, of course, compare this to our constellations, named after a pantheon of mythic heroes and animals. While the stars are real enough, the lines connecting them inhabit a twilight realm between fact and fiction, tracing human sentiments and aspirations across the interstellar landscape.

  I suspect that far too much effort has been invested in locating connecting theoretical “patterns” instead of focusing on their constituent “points” (i.e., individual features at odds with geomorphological interpretation). Those investigating Mars anomalies face the same problem as astronomers trying to detect a new planet based on circumstantial evidence. Many astronomers think there is a tenth planet in our solar system, although it has yet to be directly observed. Only tidal effects on the outer planets hints at its presence. Similarly, black holes cannot be observed directly, but their catastrophic effects on neighboring stars can be used to locate them.

  Instead of looking for “points,” many would-be Mars anomaly researchers simply assume the existence of meaningful patterns and go about forcing anomalous formations into them. Surprisingly, these patterns needn’t be confined to Mars. Points of interest include—but are by no means confined to—Washington, D.C., the Kennedy Space Center, and Stonehenge. The primary inspiration behind this strange logic is cartographer/esoteric researcher Carl Munck. Munck’s elaborate mathematical symbolism tends to either frighten away onlookers or else convinces them due
to its sheer complexity. Not surprisingly, a spin-off online microculture devoted to Munck’s theories has developed, seeking a definitive cartographic link between Earth and Mars.

  The product of this prodigious attempt to find seemingly acausal connections between pertinent sites is a holographic model of Earth and Mars that promises an esoteric link between the two worlds—nothing less than a crypto-cybernetic reincarnation of Ancient Egypt’s concept of the Duat, the ancient Egyptian underworld. The Egyptians believed the Nile was a microcosmic representation of the heavens, and associated both with their quest for immortality; “up” and “down” were immaterial.

  As Above, So Below

  As Mars and Earth are virtual planetary twins, this fevered attempt to join the two via mathematics has a certain bizarre logic. And the possibility that there might be an authentic connection hidden among the noise can’t be written off. What if artificiality in Cydonia is verified and it’s found that it shares a nonrandom cartographic link to the Giza Necropolis in Egypt? Though far-fetched, there is a burgeoning research community convinced that the Face and the Sphinx share more than a passing similarity. Both monuments, about which we know disturbingly little, may in truth represent the same mythological entity viewed in different contexts.

  Like the possibility of biological cross-contamination between Earth and Mars, the assumption that a single intelligence has played roles on both planets is deeply upsetting, burdened with existential baggage. But if new insights into the nature of intelligence and the likelihood of extrasolar intelligence tell us anything at all, then it’s that the universe has room for extreme and unthinkable weirdness. In a universe governed by common sense-defying quantum acrobatics and subject to the strange logic of synchronicity, a Mars-Earth connection is conceivable. But any proposed connection is likely to remain unproven until a manned exploration of the Cydonia region is launched.

  The enigma of the Face is certainly demanding enough without arcane theorizing. The City begs discovery. In some sense, the City Pyramid and Fort, apparent outcroppings of a once-flourishing civilization, are certain to tell us about ourselves as surely as they will tell us about Mars. Accepting the reality and implications of extraterrestrial intelligence, assuming its works are on Mars waiting for us to explore and discover, will likely be hard-fought, and the growing number of online Cydonia researchers, known among themselves as “anomalists,” is driving this process in the only way it can—from the inside out.

  The D&M Pyramid

  Along with the Face, the D&M Pyramid has attracted the lion’s share of attention from skeptical geologists and Artificiality Hypothesis sympathizers alike. Its emphatically triangular shape makes it one of the most striking features in the region. Viking data suggested the feature was five-sided, prompting sophisticated mathematical analysis in an attempt to discern possible meaning behind the D&M’s placement on the Cydonian landscape. Cartographer Erol Torun led the first serious geometric appraisal of the D&M after coming to the conclusion that no known natural forces were responsible for its formation.

  Together with Richard Hoagland, Torun produced what some researchers interpret as a grand mathematical scheme designed to be seen from above. In the 1992 edition of his seminal book, The Monuments of Mars, Hoagland suggested that he had cracked the message encoded by the D&M and its placement relative to other anomalies. The result was Hoagland’s so-called hyperdimensional physics, which quickly became one of his central pursuits.

  According to Hoagland, the layout of the various features in Cydonia is embodied in the D&M Pyramid, which serves as a “mathematical Rosetta Stone” of bewildering complexity and redundancy. The features in Cydonia not only appeared artificial, argued Hoagland, but comprised nothing less than a message to humanity.

  One cannot help but think of the scenarios advanced by advocates of radio SETI, who theorize that extraterrestrial radio signals will arrive with an embedded “primer,” allowing relatively easy decoding of the message. Carl Sagan’s novel Contact epitomizes the SETI perspective. What at first seems to be a simple television transmission is in fact a multilayered “email” containing plans to build a machine capable of tunneling through space-time.

  Hoagland’s assessment of Cydonia, catalyzed by trigonometric anomalies contained in the D&M, is eerily similar to Sagan’s vision. Substitute signals from interstellar space with geometrically arranged objects on a planetary surface and the basic challenge to science is the same.

  Of course, Hoagland’s hyperdimensional theory has been heatedly contested among Cydonia researchers, and new images of the region have dispelled some of Hoagland’s early assumptions. For example, the so-called tetrahedral rim pyramid allegedly found near the Cliff looks less than geometric when seen in high resolution; this casts severe doubt on one of Hoagland’s cartographic overlays. While new and better images certainly don’t mean that Hoagland’s hyperdimensional claim is baseless, they demonstrate that the relatively grainy Viking photos can lend themselves to erroneous interpretation. For example, long before the mysterious Cliff was photographed in high resolution, I was convinced it was a second Cydonian face, as originally proposed by filmmaker and reseacher Daniel Drasin. The vague face-like features visible on the Viking image turned out to be spurious—leaving me a bit disappointed but better equipped to discern actual features from low-resolution imaging “artifacts.”

  Several of Hoagland’s proposed mathematical connections seem to be essentially arbitrary. Others, such as a proposed line linking the D&M with the Face, appear sound and await future photos to verify proposed connections.

  The D&M’s morphology is a study in strangeness. Its eastern facet is distended and uneven, riddled with fine-edged cracks and dusted with a dark “soot.” It’s easy to imagine that this portion was once molten or otherwise violently displaced. A dark, tunnel-like opening into the pyramid’s eastern side supports the idea that the D&M was deformed in some sort of sudden encounter.

  Rather than a deliberate opening, the tunnel may be a hole punched through the pyramid’s outer shell by some sort of projectile. The prospect of finding war-ravaged ruins on Mars is sobering, but deserves to be entertained. Other Cydonia anomalies hint at aggressive action, notably the Fort, which appears to have collapsed under a hail of meteors.

  Intimations of ancient conflict on Mars have launched countless speculative scenarios. The ancient astronaut theories of scholar Zechariah Sitchin, for instance, have proven wildly popular. Sitchin argues that humans are a genetically engineered servant race created by alien visitors in antiquity, and cites Sumerian mythology as a retelling of actual celestial events. While many of Sitchin’s theories seem to be little more than updated versions of space age cliches (e.g., Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed by nuclear weapons), his intimate knowledge of the ancient Sumerian and Egyptian cultures grants him a rather more sophisticated audience than his predecessor, Erich von Däniken.

  This 2003 mosaic of the D&M Pyramid, assembled from Surveyor data, reveals extensive erosion and wasting, especially on the western side. Despite damage, the feature retains a high level of bilateral symmetry. Courtesy of NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology/Malin Space Science Systems.

  Sitchin’s ancient astronaut scenario is interesting in that his extraterrestrials aren’t necessarily that much more sophisticated than humans today. His depictions of their craft and technologies are lifted directly from texts on our own manned space program. His aliens ascend to orbit in blazing rockets, encumbered in bulky flight suits and hysterically retro wraparound goggles. Evidently, Sitchin’s aliens (the “Annunaki”) never developed global positioning systems; landing on Earth requires a painfully crude “landing corridor” composed of megaliths including (you guessed it) the Great Pyramid.

  Sitchin has no tolerance for metaphor. His reconstruction of human history relies on quasi-literal interpretation of ancient texts, in which gods become egotistical alien warlords. In The Wars of Gods and Men, Sitchin chronicles warring
factions of extraterrestrial monarchs who relentlessly intervene in human affairs, often interacting with human allies as near-equals. This theme, which recurs throughout Sitchin’s work, is particularly ironic and unlikely. In his first book, The Twelfth Planet, Sitchin describes how Homo sapiens was created as a servant race, used as so much genetically engineered muscle in the endless quest for gold. That a civilization capable of casual planet-hopping would need to engineer a race to mine for gold seems like so much dated space opera.

  Even more outlandish is the Annunaki’s home planet—an as-yet undiscovered tenth planet that swings by the Sun in a wildly elliptical orbit that takes it from the vicinity of Mercury to the outer limits of the solar system. The prospects of even simple life developing on such a planet—let alone an advanced civilization—are nil.

  Sitchin’s cosmology is further complicated by his translation of the Sumerian names for the planets: sometimes they designate celestial bodies, but more often they represent individual gods. While names can be interchangeable—and frequently are in ancient languages, as Sitchin repeatedly demonstrates—gods cannot be planets and planets cannot be gods.

  Even his most skeptical detractors admit that Sitchin’s attempt to reconstruct humanity’s lost legacy is fraught with exhaustive research. Yet the model he arrives at is a contorted, contradictory chimera. Strangely, despite its technical implausibility, Sitchin’s revisionist appeal has its share of attractions. If nothing else, his original premise—the sudden appearance of Sumerian civilization—encompasses one of history’s most profound enigmas.

  Sumeria seems to have formed virtually overnight, with none of the incremental progress that has typified Western civilization. Sitchin’s pantheon of extraterrestrial tyrants just might provide a framework for future discourse. The Sumerians themselves attributed their civilization to a nonhuman entity who emerged from the sea to impart knowledge. Carl Sagan, justifiably intrigued by this account, once wondered if it could reflect extraterrestrial contact, and recommended that a careful study of folklore and mythology might unveil further evidence of ancient visitors.