The Mars Mystery

by Graham Hancock

  We were not alone in this oversight. Throughout most of the twentieth century, Western science as a whole has resolutely ignored the role of impacts in Earth history, only gradually and reluctantly waking up to their significance in the light of the irrefutable evidence of a cometary collision at the K/T boundary (not fully accepted until 1990) and such dramatic events as comet S-L 9s breakup into 21 fragments and subsequent bombardment of Jupiter in 1994. When the fragments struck, humanity was offered a glimpse through the gates of hell. Since then, after being almost dismissively ignored for two decades, the theories of catastrophist astronomers such as Clube, Napier, Hoyle, and Wickramasinghe have achieved rapid acceptance among the vast majority of their peers.31

  Fingerprints of the Gods went to press early in 1995. During the lengthy investigation that underlies The Mars Mystery we became aware of the growing catastrophist consensus within astronomy. It is a grave consensus, involving many eminent scholars, and it has profound implications that have not yet been properly communicated to the public. We find ourselves today in more or less complete agreement with this new consensus, which holds, as Clube and Napier put it,

  that great impacts, occurring within bombardment episodes as the solar system moves through spiral arms, have been a major controlling factor in the evolution of life, being responsible for catastrophic mass extinctions of species. Fundamental geological phenomena such as frequent sea-level changes, the occurrence of Ice Ages and plate tectonic episodes, including mountain building, may also have been triggered by impacts.32

  More specifically, although we do not rule out a crustal displacement as a complicating factor in the terminal Ice Age cataclysm that took place between approximately 17,000 and and 9,000 years ago, we are now persuaded that the astronomical theory of impacts connected to the decay and fragmentation of a giant comet provides not only the most plausible but also the clearest and simplest explanation for all the events and enigmas of those crucial 8,000 years.33 Because this was precisely the period in which humanity emerged from the darkness of the Ice Age and onto the threshold of modern history, and because, as we will see, there have been other impacts much more recent than 8,000 years ago, we agree with Hoyle and Wickramasinghe:

  The history of human civilization bears witness to the most recent chapter in a series of cosmic events that controlled our planet in a decisive way.34

  THE TESTIMONY OF BEETLES

  Looking into the geological record, and such arcane matters as the carcasses of temperature-sensitive beetles (the presence or absence of particular species in given strata provides a precise temperature chart for the epochs in which those strata were laid down35), Hoyle and Wickramasinghe have produced a revealing chronology of key Ice Age events.

  They have shown that although melting of the ice sheets did begin at around 17,000 years ago, proceeding sporadically from there in a series of advances and retreats—perhaps as a result of a parallel series of small impacts—the most spectacular temperature rises occurred in two isolated incidents, one somewhere between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago and the other somewhere between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago.36

  Here is Fred Hoyle’s account of the whole process:

  Thirteen thousand years ago, New York was covered by several hundred meters of ice, as it had been for most of the preceding 100,000 years. Then with startling suddenness the glaciers all over Scandinavia and North America disappeared. In Britain the temperature shot up from a summertime value of only 8 degrees Celsius to 18 degrees Celsius, and it did so in a few decades—in a flash, from a historic point of view.37

  But the temperature quickly began to fall, and not much later than 11,000 years ago:

  The glaciers were back but not yet to their full extent. In northern Britain they covered the mountaintops but did not extend down into the valley bottoms…. Then [about] 10,000 years ago there occurred a second warm pulse. Once again within a human lifetime the temperature shot up spectacularly by 10 degrees Celsius, all in a moment from a historic point of view. And this second pulse did the trick. It brought the earth’s climate out of the Ice Age of the last 100,000 years into a warm interglacial period which has been essential for the development of history and civilization.38

  Following the first pulse, “the emergence from cold to warm conditions took only a few decades.”39 And following the second pulse the even more dramatic—indeed, conclusive—warming was accomplished as we have seen, within a human lifetime.

  It was therefore natural for Hoyle to investigate what could have caused such sudden and profound changes to global climate:

  My main concern … is not so much with the genesis of an Ice Age as with its ending. What, all in a moment, can destroy a situation with a longevity running into tens of thousands of years? Evidently only an exceedingly catastrophic event of some kind, something that would wash out high-level haze, increasing the water-vapor greenhouse sufficiently to send the temperature up almost instantaneously by 10 degrees Celsius…. But more still, for unless there was a change from a cold ocean to a warm ocean, the situation would soon return to where it was before. The difference between a warm ocean and a cold one amounts to about a 10-year supply of sunlight. Thus the warm conditions produced by a warm water-vapor greenhouse must be maintained for at least a decade in order to produce the required transformation of the ocean, and this is just about the time for which water, suddenly thrown up into the stratosphere, might be expected to persist there. The needed amount of water is so vast, 100 million million tons, that only one kind of causative event appears possible, the infall of a comet-sized object into a major ocean.40

  In strong support of Hoyle’s reasoning, scientists working completely separately from him have recently reported unambiguous evidence not of one but of two major oceanic impacts at around 10,000 years ago—the first in the Tasman Sea, off southeast Australia, and the second in the China Sea near Vietnam.41 The indications are that these impacts could, between them, have been responsible for the dramatic global warming that took place at that time.

  Chandra Wickramasinghe, Hoyle’s former student who is now professor of applied mathematics and astronomy at Cardiff University, fully supports the notion of oceanic impacts. In 1998 he told us:

  The natural condition of Earth is one of glaciation, and there’s no question about that…. Some huge amount of water had to be added in a catastrophic fashion in order to terminate the protracted period of glaciation that existed before 20,000 years ago…. I think there’s no question that there have been collisions—that Earth’s geological record is punctuated by collisions going back to 65 million years ago and earlier.42

  AGE OF LEO

  It is obvious to Hoyle that the impacts that ended the last Ice Age must have been “pretty large, say 10,000 million tons.”43 He admits he was surprised when he first understood that only an episode of this size could explain all the evidence—the surprise coming, as he notes, because there is a habit of mind among scientists to set all such violent events millions of years in the past, and never as recently as 13,000 years ago. In addition, in the 4.5 billion years during which we know that Earth has existed, isn’t it odd that fragments of a giant comet should have “chosen” to collide with the planet in exactly the period when anatomically modern human beings belonging to the extremely recent species Homo sapiens—by then the only surviving species of the genus Homo—that is, people exactly like us—should be around to witness it? Then, Hoyle recounts:

  I saw that the answer to this question lies in what is now called the anthropic principle, which says that the fact of our existence can be used to discount all improbabilities necessary for our existence. If history and civilization were caused by the arrival of a periodic giant comet, all accident is removed from our association in time with such a comet. The arrival of the comet was random but our association with the effects of the comet is not.44

  What Hoyle means by the comet “causing” history and civilization is that by ending the Ice Age it created the necessary
conditions for human culture and all its achievements to emerge. We, too, see the force of the anthropic principle, but we reach a very different conclusion. In our view civilization does indeed have a dramatic association with impacts from a fragmenting giant comet, but it was not in any way “caused” by those impacts; on the contrary, we suggest that it was nearly destroyed by them. We stick with our scenario of an advanced antediluvian culture that flourished during the last Ice Age—in areas of the world that were then hospitable and that are now under as much as 100 meters of water. Our hypothesis is that this great prehistoric kingdom was first massively weakened and then utterly destroyed—leaving only a handful of survivors—by the twin impacts that brought Earth so conclusively out of its long glacial slumber.

  As Hoyle and Wickramasinghe have rightly observed, the impacts took place respectively in the eleventh millennium B.C. (between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago) and in the ninth millennium B.C. (between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago). What immediately strikes us about these dates is how closely they coincide with the astronomical Age of Leo, when the constellation of Leo housed the Sun on the spring equinox—generally taken as the period of 2,160 years between 10,970 B.C. (12,970 years ago) and 8810 B.C. (10,810 years ago).45 As we have seen, this is the “age” that appears to be marked by the lion-bodied, equinoctial Sphinx of Giza—which at the same time draws our attention to Mars through its association with Horus the Red.

  The Sphinx has been eroded by long periods of heavy rainfall and may actually date back to the eleventh millennium B.C.—as increasing numbers of geologists are now prepared to contemplate.46 Could its construction have been triggered in some way by the first of those two great cometary bolides that struck Earth in the Age of Leo?

  And why should there be a connection with Mars?

  25

  Bull of the Sky

  FRED Hoyle’s evidence of what happened to Earth at the end of the last Ice Age fits Clube’s and Napier’s theory of a disintegrating giant comet as snugly as the slipper fits Cinderella’s foot. To restate the chronology, it is believed that the comet—and there is no known upper size limit for these terrifying objects1—settled into an Earth-crossing orbit around 50,000 years ago. For the next 30,000 years it remained relatively intact. Then, about 20,000 years ago, it underwent a massive fragmentation event somewhere along its orbit. From about 17,000 years ago occasional multimegaton fragments may have collided with Earth—causing some gradual reduction in glaciation—but two especially large and cataclysmic oceanic impacts, one in the eleventh millennium B.C. and one in the ninth millennium B.C., raised global temperatures so much that the Ice Age was brought decisively to an end. These impacts both took place during the astronomical Age of Leo—an epoch, we believe, that is deliberately signaled and symbolized by the Great Sphinx of Giza.

  But in its alter ego as Horus the Red, the Sphinx also speaks of Mars, and Mars seems to have its own pyramids and Sphinx—the latter gazing upward from the ravaged and cratered surface of the Red Planet like a veiled human skull.

  SIGNAL?

  At the end of the previous chapter we asked why there should be a connection between Giza and Mars.

  The obvious geometrical and numerical similarities between the “monuments” of Cydonia and the monuments of Giza, and the other strange mythological and cosmological links between the two sites and the two worlds we have reviewed in this book do not, under any circumstances, prove a connection.

  NASA’s fumbling cover-ups, its sustained misinformation campaign, and its generally suspicious behavior concerning the hypothesis of artificial origins at Cydonia do not prove there is more going on here than meets the eye.

  The work of the AOC (Artificial Origins at Cydonia) researchers has not proved that the Cydonia structures are artificial.

  Moreover, we ourselves are far from certain—and have remained dubious throughout—about the true provenance of the Martian monuments. They could just be weird geology. They really could. Or they could have been intelligently designed. The only sure way to find out is to do the science, and in our view this means nothing less than a manned mission to Cydonia. Improved orbiter photographs are unlikely to settle the controversy—one way or the other—and may just provide more fodder for both the opponents and the supporters of the AOC hypothesis.

  Surely the resolution of this matter—on which hinges man’s understanding of his place in the cosmos—is too important to be endlessly delayed by such silly shenanigans? Surely it is obvious that if the mathematical data expressed in the Cydonia monuments had turned up in a radio signal from deep space, scientists working on SETI programs would have had a field day (and everyone would have agreed with them), proclaiming they had finally been proved right. Such a clear, coherent extraterrestrial signal would also certainly have been rewarded with a massive investigation involving huge official resources and the concentrated attention of the best scientific minds as humans tried to discover where the aliens were and what they were saying to us. And the investigation would go on even if some skeptics continued to have lingering suspicions that the signal had somehow been generated “naturally” (by freak radio emissions from a star, for example).

  We believe that the same sort of response, at the national and international levels, is justified by the Cydonia “signal” even if, on close empirical investigation, it ultimately does prove to be natural. Equipped with radio telescopes and space probes, rapidly evolving technology but a stunted spirituality, our species stands today at what the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts call the “portal of the abyss”2—literally, on the threshold of the cosmos. If we survive, which is by no means certain, then it is possible that the centuries and millennia ahead will offer us the opportunity of an unparalleled journey of discovery across the galaxy. How can we possibly hope to take advantage of such a fabulous opportunity unless we keep our minds and our imaginations open? How can we possibly learn what the galaxy has to teach if we are not willing to risk disappointment, loss of face, wasted funds, and wild-goose chases?

  We therefore repeat that the science really does need to be done at Cydonia. It will be expensive, but the funds most certainly can be found. And it is worth doing, irrespective of the final outcome, simply to affirm that we do regard the cosmos with reverent wonder—as our ancestors did—and that we are ready to launch ourselves with curiosity, intelligence, and hope into the deepest mysteries of the galaxy.

  But still, why should there be a connection between Giza and Cydonia, between Earth and Mars, and between the comet impacts that ended Earths last Ice Age with global floods and the massive-impact damage that stripped Mars of half its crust?

  We do not know that there is any connection at all between the cataclysmic histories of the two planets, and ultimately this is another matter that can only be resolved by empirical tests. We believe, however, that such tests are urgent, necessary, and in the obvious self-interest of humanity, whether or not the remains of some sort of lost civilization are to be uncovered at Cydonia. Indeed, they do not even directly concern such a hypothetical and presumably alien civilization—although they may tell us what fate befell it. All that is required is for the first manned landing on Mars to obtain a sufficient variety of rock and dust samples from Martian craters and return them to Earth for analysis. Then radiometric dating and other reliable tests could be carried out that would determine exactly when the terminal Mars cataclysm took place.

  HYPOTHESIS

  As we have indicated several times, we think it is possible that this great disaster, which flayed the planet Mars of its skin, may turn out to have been a much more recent event than scientists have yet imagined. In brief, we propose as a hypothesis for further testing that the giant comet that sprayed the inner solar system with deadly shrapnel around 20,000 years ago did so because it made an extremely close approach to Mars on one of its orbits—closer than Shoemaker-Levy 9 passed to Jupiter in 1994—trespassed the planet’s Roche limit and literally exploded into a million pieces.

&nbs
p; This would have happened right on top of Mars, perhaps at a height of no more than a few thousand kilometers. And the effects, as a vast fusillade of world-killing missiles slammed all at once into the formerly dense atmosphere, the oceans and rivers, the mountains, valleys, and plains of Mars, would have been unspeakably dreadful. Many of these objects, perhaps most of them, would have been larger than 10 kilometers in diameter—each one of them, therefore, packing as much punch as the single fragment of an earlier giant comet that caused Earth’s K/T Boundary Event 65 million years ago by making a crater 200 kilometers wide on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. In addition, since some of the Martian craters exceed 1,000 kilometers in diameter and Hellas has a diameter of 2,000 kilometers, we expect that several of the fragments would have been much larger.

  Our theory, therefore, is not so different from the Astra theory outlined in chapter 4. However, Patten and Windsor’s work contradicts basic laws of physics when it tries to explain how a former “tenth” planet could have migrated from a stable, circular orbit between Mars and Jupiter into an unstable, elliptical Mars-crossing orbit. Our theory, on the other hand, concerns an object—a periodic giant comet—that one would naturally expect to find in such an orbit, one which has no known upper size limit, which belongs to a class of objects that have been seen to fragment explosively in close proximity to planets, and which has already been implicated in the series of great impacts that ended the last Ice Age on Earth.