The Mars Mystery

by Graham Hancock

  We showed in chapter 17 that precisely the same logic is expressed in the enigmatic figure of the Sphinx—painted red because of its association with the Red Planet Mars and lion-bodied to mimic the sky image of the constellation of Leo rising at the spring equinox. No civilization that understands precession should have any more difficulty than ourselves in working out that Leo last “ruled” the equinox between approximately 13,000 years ago and 10,000 years ago. We are sure that the builders of the Sphinx intended this connection to be made. This is why we wonder if it is possible that part of the “message” of the Sphinx may simply be: “consider Mars when the spring equinox was in Leo.”

  The fact is that when we do consider Mars we find the following:

  It once had rainfall and running water and could have supported life. We do not know when this was. There are some indications that it could have been extremely recently.

  It has upon its surface an object that looks very much like the face of a Sphinx set among a conglomeration of other objects including several that greatly resemble pyramids. We have seen that these Martian “structures” are set at a geodetically significant latitude and incorporate many of the same mathematical properties as the monuments of the Giza necropolis.

  The Martian surface has been devastated by collisions with a gigantic swarm of cosmic debris—including three huge world-killing projectiles up to several hundred kilometers in diameter that caused the Hellas, Argyre, and Isidis craters. We saw in part 1 that this cataclysm need not necessarily have happened in some remote geological period, as scientists have tended to assume, but could have occurred quite recently, perhaps less than 20,000 years ago—perhaps even in the same period in which Earths last Ice Age was suddenly and mysteriously ending amid planet-wide extinctions of animal species.11

  Is it possible, in other words, that “the terminal Mars cataclysm” and the lesser but still very severe cataclysm that brought Earth out of the last Ice Age could both have occurred at more or less the same time—and perhaps even have been caused by the same agent?

  If we think as the ancient Egyptians did, seeing the cosmos, the earth, the planets, and all the stars as the constituent parts of a continuous interconnected matrix, then we will find it easier to understand what modern science has only recently proven to be true—namely that the solar system and all the planets are profoundly influenced by the galaxy and that these influences flow in toward us from deep space like tides.

  THE JOURNEYS OF RA

  The ancient Egyptians depicted the Sun—the god Ra—as a voyager upon the waters of the abyss:

  Men praise thee in thy name of Ra…. Millions of years have gone over the world; I cannot tell the number of those through which thou hast passed…. Thou dost pass over and dost travel through untold spaces requiring millions and hundreds of thousands of years to pass over…. Thou steerest thy way across the watery abyss to the place which thou lovest … and then thou dost sink down and make an end of hours.12

  Although the text is from the Book of the Dead, the ideas it expresses are the territory of modern astrophysicists, who have learned that everything in the universe is in motion and that as the Sun makes its way around the galactic nucleus, it is indeed a traveler through “untold spaces” that require “millions of years to pass over.”

  In fact, a number of different motions are involved. Here are the basics:

  (1) Drawing with it the entire solar system, including of course all the comets of the Oort cloud and the Kuiper belt, the Sun is locked in a vast orbit around the galactic nucleus, completing each revolution in a period of approximately 250 million years.13 Traveling at a speed of 225 kilometers per second, it has recently passed through the Orion spiral arm on the inner edge of which it now stands.14

  (2) The Sun orbits the galactic nucleus faster than some stars and slower than others—in general stars distant from the nucleus travel at lower speeds than those closer to it, and the Sun is located relatively far from the nucleus.15 “It’s a complete muddle,” explains Victor Clube:

  Everything passes through everything else. I mean a star doesn’t pass through another star. But space in general is so empty that all these features that we talk about sort of interpenetrate…. So the Sun is actually moving in its particular orbit. And it happens to be going at a different speed from any old spiral arm or any old molecular cloud. So it passes through these things.16

  (3) The Sun does not always travel in the flattish (although light years’ thick) horizontal plane of the galactic disk. Instead it’s motion is better understood as wave-like (astronomers have compared it to the motion of a carousel horse,17 or a porpoise18). The effect of this slow undulation is that the Sun in its orbit periodically swims up above the dense central plane of the galaxy, then dives down again into it, then emerges beneath it, then swims up once more—and so on, endlessly, as it pursues its circuit. The rhythm of these movements is regular and cyclical with the Sun rising from its lowest point beneath the disk to its highest point above it in a period of just over 60 million years and falling again to the lowest point after a further 60 million years. It is only at the halfway points in this journey, therefore—roughly every 30 million years—that it passes through the galaxy’s dense central plane.19

  (4) Superimposed on the Sun’s predominantly circular (albeit up-and-down) trajectory about the galactic nucleus there is also what astronomers refer to as the “peculiar” solar velocity.20 According to the calculations of Mark Bailey, Victor Clube, and Bill Napier:

  This may be represented as a vector directed respectively toward the galactic center, parallel to the circular velocity and perpendicular to the galactic plane. In galactic coordinates this corresponds to a motion toward [a point] roughly 30 degrees out of the plane toward the north galactic pole. This direction, incidentally, can be viewed from the northern hemisphere on any summer’s evening, as it lies … roughly halfway between the bright stars Vega and Ras Alhague, almost exactly opposite the molecular clouds in Orion [author’s emphasis].21

  We remind the reader that the pyramids of Giza, which model the belt stars of Orion, are located at 30 degrees north latitude on Earth—or, to put it another way, at a point “roughly 30 degrees out of the plane of the equator toward the north geographical pole.” Moreover this place in the galaxy toward which the Sun is vectored (“thou steerest thy way across the watery abyss to the place which thou lovest … and then thou dost sink down and make an end of hours”) is located opposite the molecular clouds of the Orion nebula. As the Hubble space telescope conclusively demonstrated during the 1990s the nebula is a star-forming region—literally a place where new stars are being born.22 Lying in a region of space through which the Sun and Earth are estimated to have passed roughly 5 to 10 million years ago,23 it forms the feature of the Orion constellation, beneath the belt stars, which the Greeks depicted as a sword but the ancient Egyptians saw as the phallus of Osiris, the god of rebirth.

  AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

  The ancient Egyptians believed that events on Earth are governed, conditioned, and directly affected by events in the sky and that “all the world which lies below” is

  set in order and filled with contents by the things which are placed above; for the things below have not the power to set in order the world above. The weaker mysteries, then, must yield to the stronger … the system of things on high is stronger than the things below … and there is nothing that has not come down from above.24

  This is literally true of comets. Not only do they “come down from above” in the sense of belonging to the sky, occasionally colliding with planets, but they are also, as astronomers now know, periodically propelled toward the inner solar system by even more distant forces at the level of the galaxy. Such influences from “on high” are governed largely by the character of the different deep-space environments that the Sun encounters as it pursues its immense circular and undulating course around the galactic nucleus and are felt most strongly during passages through the galaxy’s dense
central plane.25

  Two key factors are involved, both of which, in reality, interpenetrate. These are the galactic “spiral arms” and the massive nebulae—found often but not exclusively within spiral arms—that are known as gigantic molecular clouds.

  COMET FACTORIES

  A degree of controversy exists among astronomers as to what spiral arms actually consist of, but most would agree with Victor Clube that they are relatively transient features, ejected from the galactic nucleus, and that the galaxy is constantly generating new ones: “So it kind of grows leaves, seasonally, if I can put it that way…. I see lots of comets condensing out of the hot gas that’s originally in spiral arms. And it’s these comets which aggregate to make the stars.”26

  We are reminded of electrifying spectroscopic evidence reported by the astronomer Lagrange-Henri in 1988, of “a swarm of small cometary-like bodies falling at high velocities toward Beta Pictoris, a relatively young star around which planet formation is either occurring now or has just been completed.”27

  Condensing in the hot gas of spiral arms, such comets may reach gigantic sizes. Clube and Napier report that truly massive examples have been identified “in the vicinity of two well studied and exceedingly active stellar associations, namely the so-called Gum Nebula and the Orion Nebula.”28 These comets are

  vast compared to solar system examples, the tails being up to a million times longer…. The tails are not only pointing away from the center of the parent association where most of the local radiation originates, but the heads seem to be in highly eccentric orbits moving away from the central source…. It is supposed that the heads may comprise huge assemblages of interstellar comets or planetesimals…. We thus have an indication that we may be dealing here with large, loose aggregates of cometary material which are either about to be or are in the process of forming new stars.29

  As well as being the nurseries of gigantic interstellar comets, spiral arms are thought to contain a mass of other material varying in size from the tiniest gas and dust particles up to objects “as big as the moon”30:

  The galactic evidence favors spiral arms containing planetesimals or comets in all their variety of forms. It is inevitable then that the solar system interacts with such material as it passes through the spiral arms.31

  The Sun can take anywhere from 50 million years to 100 million years to make a complete horizontal passage across a spiral arm.32 Since spiral arms tend to be located at or very near the galactic plane,33 the Sun’s porpoise-like up-and-down motion means that it will spend most of its time either above or below the arm, only diving into the arm itself at cyclic intervals of approximately 30 million years.34

  MONSTER CLOUDS

  The second periodic “hazard of the galactic plane”—the flattened zone where most loose cosmic material tends to gravitate—is the possibility of encounters with gigantic molecular clouds (GMCs). As noted, these can be found as complicating factors within already “lumpy” spiral arms, or can exist in isolation, lying in the interstellar medium between spiral arms.

  GMCs are typically about 100 light years across and have a mass (as distinct from diameter) estimated to be about half a million times that of the Sun.35 The basic matrix of these cold, massive concentrations consists of molecules of hydrogen gas and more complex compounds, mixed with dust.36 In addition, they often contain dense concentrations of young stars and, Clube and Napier believe, “enormous numbers of newly formed comets as well … circulating freely within the nebula.”37

  “Confined within the flat plane of the Milky Way,” it is estimated that “a few thousand” GMCs orbit the galaxy.38 Inevitably, there will come times, again governed by the 30-million-year periodicity with which the Sun’s own orbit oscillates in and out of the galactic plane, when it must penetrate GMCs:

  Close encounters between the Sun and such nebulae, say to within a few light years, have probably occurred more than fifty times during the lifetime of the solar system. Actual penetration has probably occurred more than a dozen times, several involving passage of the Sun to within about a light year of the cloud center.39

  GALACTIC CONTROL

  We now have all the pieces in place to understand that comets find their way into the inner solar system, and can threaten the destruction of worlds, not because of some nearby “local” event but because of the distant and almost unimaginable influence of the galaxy. In other words, in the purest sense, what happens down here “below,” on Earth—or on Mars—when a comet approaches closely, can indeed be traced back far “above” to the cycles of the cosmos.

  Astronomers have shown that passage through a GMC has a profoundly destabilizing effect on the Oort cloud (the hollow sphere of 100 billion comets that surrounds the outer reaches of the solar system) and that occasional passages past exceptionally dense, concentrated “substructure” within the GMCs has a “relatively more damaging effect.”40 At one and the same time, the GMC “strips away” the outer layer of the shell of comets and carries it off while its immense gravitational tides propel other comets inward toward the Sun.41 Embarking on a journey that will take millions of years to complete, these fallen angels gradually spiral down through remote space. Some enter a kind of limbo in the Kuiper belt where they may remain for as much as 3 million years before beginning to fall in again toward the center. Others take a more direct route and eventually find themselves within the gravitational influence of one of the giant planets, which whirls them around like pinballs and projects them on new courses toward the inner solar system.42

  Passage through a spiral arm has equally dramatic effects. Here the Oort cloud is replenished with new interstellar comets and other “large, solid bodies” that have grown in the spiral arm.43 Indeed, it is estimated that “the solar system, acting as a gravitational scoop, captures billions of such bodies when it crosses spiral arms.”44 As these bodies swarm into the Oort cloud they propel other comets out of the cloud and toward the Sun, leading to increased cometary activity in the inner solar system.45 Eventually “episodes of planetary bombardment occur,”46 sustained over long periods with “profound biological and other consequences.”47 At each episode, huge quantities of material are unleashed within the solar system, representing a lingering threat that can strike any time, or repeatedly, over many thousands of years.

  In both cases—GMCs and spiral arms—the cycle of disturbance that leads to the planetary bombardments is primarily governed by the porpoise-like up-and-down motion that takes the Sun through the galaxy’s dense central plane at intervals of about 30 million years. Astronomers also recognize a second, longer rhythm at work—a cycle of around 250 million years, linked to the period of the Suns orbit around the galactic nucleus.48

  In other words, the entire comet flux into the inner solar system is controlled at the galactic level, and the comets themselves represent fragments of the galaxy flung upon the planets. During severe encounters with GMCs, or particularly bumpy spiral-arm passages, it is to be expected that waves of potential impactors, some of them in the world-killing 200-kilometer-plus range, will be released to work their way down toward the Mars-Earth-Moon realm; these waves, moreover, will follow earlier waves released by previous galactic encounters and will be followed by further waves from future galactic encounters.49 The inner planets, in other words, will continue to face periodic bombardments that we may expect to be both heavy and sustained. So long as the Sun still shines and comets continue to be manufactured in spiral arms, the process can go on forever.

  PULSE

  The heartbeat of the process is that pounding 30-million-year cycle—modulated by a 250-million-year cycle—produced by the Suns oscillations through the galactic plane. As a result of tenacious detective work, multi-disciplinary teams of scientists, including astrophysicists, astronomers, mathematicians, geologists, and paleontologists, have been able to establish a close statistical correlation between these great comet-multiplying cycles of galactic disturbance, the dates of known craters on Earth, and mass extin
ctions of animal species50

  with major extinctions occurring every 250 million years or so, due to the passage of the solar system through a spiral arm of the galaxy, and lesser extinctions occurring approximately every 30 million years as the solar system crosses the galactic plane…. The fact that interstellar clouds are not all found exactly on the mid-plane of the galaxy would explain why not all extinctions seemed to have occurred precisely on schedule, the standard deviation of each individual episode being 9 million years.51

  Sir Fred Hoyle and Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe of the University of Cardiff have firm opinions about the K/T object that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago:

  The evidence is that a giant comet plummeted into the inner solar system, passing close enough to Jupiter to fragment it into many pieces approximately 65.05 million years ago. Repeated passages by Jupiter over a 100,000-year period produced hierarchical fragmentation, and one such fragment (of normal comet size) came close enough to Earth to crash onto the planet’s surface.52

  As Hoyle and Wickramasinghe also point out, the mass extinction of 65 million years ago was not an isolated incident but part of a cycle that is hard to miss during the past 100 million years, with mass extinctions at 94.5 million years ago, 65 million years ago, and 36.9 million years ago.53 The sediments of these epochs “have been found to be associated with iridium enhancements, so a cometary connection is believed to follow.”54 In addition, studies of impact craters on Earth and of crater samples brought back from the Moon show that intense, sustained, and violent bombardments have taken place with approximately the same periodicity.55