My Trip to Mars
The Face, the Pyramids - A Lost Civilization?
My wife Kathy says that some men go hunting or fishing, but her husband goes to Mars.
It all started in 1984 when I got involved with a group of scientists and engineers who were looking at NASA Viking images of Mars. In particular, they were studying objects in the Cydonia region of northern Mars which looked like an upward looking face, close to pyramids that were aligned with it on the shore of a long vanished ocean. The group was interested in looking at the images. Of course, I am not an archaeologist, but I was interested in the broader social and cultural issues posed by the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence.
In 1986 I published The Face on Mars - Evidence of a Lost Civilization? (Chicago Review Press). My conclusion in the book is that there was not enough resolution in the images to make a definitive judgment. In the book I presented the text of one of our conversations. The conference was unusual because we did this pre-Internet, using a very early form of email called asynchronous messaging, on dumb terminals that had a cradle for the telephone receiver. The messages were printed on thermographic paper. Our data was flying at a mind boggling speed of 300 baud.
Of course, the easiest explanation for these features is that they were natural land forms and that light and shadow seemed to make them look like the creation of intelligent life. The images had been singled out in 1984 by two imaging scientists, Vincent DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar, while they were reviewing images of Mars from the 1976 Viking Mission. They were working on ways to enhance the shadow of images to derive their actual 3 dimensional structure. Almost immediately, they contacted their colleague Dr. Mark Carlotto, who had also been working on using algorithms to work out shapes from the shadows they cast. The whole story, which has taken more than 40 years, is recounted by Dr. Carlotto at his website MarkCarlotto.com.
The consensus was and still is that these unusual surface features on Mars are not artificial. They are the products of natural forces on the planet. However, Dr. Carlotto presents digital evidence to the contrary.
Earlier this year, I was approached by a young independent film maker, Brian Cory Dobbs, who wanted to do a documentary on Mars. He had been intrigued by the “Face” and the controversy surrounding it. The documentary is Blue Planet Red. The theme comes from the fact that Mars was more Earthlike in its early phase and is now a red desert.
Per usual, a lot of content in film and video production is never used. A couple of weeks ago Brian sent me a link to his YouTube channel which featured my conversation with him on a lot of issues relative to the “Face” and to broader questions of whether we are alone in the universe.
There are the standard questions and I present my views on them in this interview from an anthropological perspective. I also draw on the large body of thought experiments we have, which is more commonly known as science fiction.
Are we alone in the universe? - Both possible options are terrifying.
If we aren’t alone, how come other intelligent life forms have not shown up? - Perhaps it is because it would be too destabilizing for us or perhaps our planet is not a suitable habitat for them.
If they come, will we collapse? We can get a clue from the encounter of indigenous people with Europeans.
Will they come in peace? It depends on whether they are like us and come for natural resources or if they come for more enlightened reasons.
Could first contact with extraterrestrials unite us? Yes and no. Humans are very status conscious and even the United States and Britain in World War II had their own conflicts as allies.
I also point out that Mars is a cautionary tale of how a planet can go from blue to red due to a planetary catastrophe. We know that the planet suffered a huge impact from a meteor that changed its surface early in its history. Mars lost its oceans and atmosphere and went from a blue planet to a red one. John Brandenberg a well respected plasma physicist in a 2015 eposter presentation for Universities Space Research Institute presented 3 possible cases that can account for isotopes created by natural nuclear reactors and a possible nuclear explosion on Mars. According to Brandenberg the evidence that nuclear warfare or a nuclear event on Mars cannot be ruled out. Brandenberg brought up this topic in the mid 1980s and almost 30 years later presented a concise and convincing presentation.
We face a climate crisis which could eliminate a large part of our species. However, our real threat of our extinction does not come from extraterrestrials or severe climate change. Our main risk as a species is from ourselves and nuclear weapons.
How come NASA and academia have not taken the land forms on Cydonia and other anomalies seriously? NASA has its own agenda of managing expectations and budgets. The topic is radioactive for scientists who want to keep their funding. Later images of Cydonia tend to bear out the conservative explanation that they are tricks of light and shadow. It is an example of pareidolia - a psychological term - that describes the human tendency to see familiar images in unusual places such as cloud formations that look like animals. It is the human tendency for the mind to assign meaning wherever it can.
Why is a search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), a scientific topic dating back to the 1950s, regaining interest? In part, the term UFO has been placed within a broader scientific range of unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs. Reports of UAPs including UFOs have garnered renewed interests among scientists because of the release of decades of government data on UFO sightings and more current and credible encounters with UAPs. NASA coined the term UAP in 2022 to reduce the stigma associated with UFO sightings, so that scientists could work on all types of aerial phenomenon.
There are many types of aerial phenomena, including lens clouds, lightning strikes, and satellite configurations, that are worthy of study and often explain UFO sightings. Removing at least some of the stigma makes it possible for people on a commercial plane saw high altitude Chinese surveillance balloons. Using the broader scientifically inclined term UAP makes it easier for pilots and people in general to report sightings with out fear of being labelled as undependable, irresponsible, or just plain crazy.
Powerful personal computers, the internet, and social media have made it possible for regular people “citizen scientists” to study these unusual land forms and a myriad of other space exploration topics. One of the advantages of creating narrowly focused groups with their “silos” of interest and data is that a whole new generation of people like Brian Dobbs can take up these topics and enrich longstanding debates with new perspectives.
Ahh, so many questions and such few answers. When you asked why did Mars go from a blue planet to a red one, I asked myself why did some states go from blue to red? In our case people are looking for change that is for the better (in their opinion) and in my opinion due to fear. I know… no connection to the change in Mars. Interesting read, thanks! Stay well.