The Mars Mystery Read online

  A typical Alexander multiple-choice question begins with a proposal and asks respondents to categorize their reactions to it. For example:

  Official confirmation of the discovery of an advanced technologically superior extraterrestrial civilization would have severe negative effects on the country’s moral, social, and religious foundations.

  a) strongly agree

  b) agree

  c) neither agree nor disagree

  d) disagree

  e) strongly disagree.

  It is notable that 77 percent of the respondents either disagreed or strongly disagreed with this particular proposal. Their answers to 10 other questions convey the same mood:

  The results conclusively demonstrate that the religious leaders surveyed believe that the faith of their parishioners is both sufficiently strong and flexible to accommodate this information. Contrary to the belief widely held in the UFO community, it is highly unlikely that such news would yield a religious crisis.16

  Some conspiracy theorists believe that the public’s changed attitudes are themselves engineered by the authorities through information management. The suggestion is that we are all the victims of a billiant propaganda campaign designed to acclimatize us, slowly, to the reality of intelligent extraterrestrial life. The notion is probably fanciful. Nevertheless, we cannot deny that movies like Independence Day, Stargate, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, TV programs such as The X-Files or Dark Skies, and NASA’s decision to release information about possible “primitive” life in Martian meteorites have all contributed to the present relatively open-minded state of public opinion concerning ET contacts.

  PROPAGANDA WAR

  Our own impression is that NASA has attempted to manipulate public perceptions concerning the issue of artificial origins at Cydonia and that it does seem to be covering something up. We cannot say what it is covering up—perhaps only its own bungles—but the agency appears to have acted dishonestly from the beginning.

  The lies began on 25 July 1976 when the first Viking photograph of the Face, frame 35A72, was released to the press. As the reader will recall, NASA claimed at the press conference that there was a second photograph, at a different sun angle, proving the Face to be just a trick of light and shadow. More than seventeen years passed before officials finally admitted that such a disconfirming photograph does not exist.

  We then see the misfiling of images, so that a confirming photograph—frame 70A13—was not in the correct file. This threw researchers off the trail for several years. They also had to deal with certain forms of censorship, as Stan McDaniel recounts:

  The first paper on the subject [of artificial origins at Cydonia], authored by a group called the Independent Mars Investigation Team, reporting for the most part the work done by Vincent DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar, was inexplicably expunged from the published papers of the first Case for Mars Conference in 1984. Subsequent attempts to publish papers on the topic, by scientists with impeccable credentials and a long list of published scientific papers, were uniformly refused consideration by the primary American journals of planetary science. These scientists were forced by this censorship to turn to publishing their work in books for the general public, whereupon NASA characterized them as seeking personal gain and running “cottage industries.”

  Over the course of time, as individual citizens, having read such publications, began to ask questions of NASA, a long string of spurious arguments were put forward against the idea that the Face on Mars might be artificial. The services of that powerful propagandist, Carl Sagan, were evidently engaged in this task. Sagan went about writing and talking about psychological aberrations that make people see faces everywhere, whipping out a deformed eggplant at lectures and claiming it looked like Richard Nixon, thereby proving that the Face on Mars was natural. An amazing scientific feat.

  Then, in 1985, Sagan published an article in Parade magazine debunking the Face, characterizing anyone who took it seriously as a kind of a “zealot,” and including a doctored version of one of the Viking frames that used false color to make it look as though the Face is actually not there.17

  If NASA is so sure that the Face is merely an illusion or aberration of nature, then why resort to blatant fraud in order to convince the public of this? The doctoring of frame 70A13 in the Parade article—by overlaying the image with a color filter to obscure details that corroborate frame 35A72—is a particularly unscientific and indeed barbaric act. One cannot even defend Sagan by saying that this frame was supplied to him already doctored by NASA, for Richard Hoagland had personally shown Sagan the original frame prior to the publication of the Parade article.18 Sagan was well aware that 70A13 confirmed 35A72 and had earlier told Hoagland that he found this intriguing.19

  So why did Sagan lie?

  Whatever his motives, he appears later in life to have regretted his actions. In his last book, The Demon-Haunted World (1996) he actually praised the Cydonia researchers and said that the Face deserved a closer look.20 Was he here voicing a personal truth, now unrestricted by the laws of NASA?

  THE IMPORTANT MAN

  Sagan’s role as chief scientific critic of the AOC hypothesis has been inherited by Dr. Michael Malin, head of Malin Space Science Systems. Malin, the private contractor who supplied and operated the camera systems for the failed Mars Observer mission (1992–1993), is also the supplier and operator of the camera systems onboard Mars Global Surveyor. Dr. Malin has published an image of the Face on his World Wide Web page claiming to show “how the face got its teeth.” This is supposed to be a jeering dismissal of teeth-like features identified by Mark Carlotto.21 Yet instead of addressing those features, Malin singles out what McDaniel describes as “deliberately induced pixel errors.”22 By such tactics the suggestion is conveyed that the idea of the Face having something like teeth derives from “amateurs using extremely poor image enhancement and publishing their defective results in American tabloid magazines.”23

  As we will see in the next chapter, Dr. Malin is the most important man in the world where Mars is concerned. He alone decides where the cameras of Mars Global Surveyor will point. And he enjoys another amazing privilege: the right to an exclusive six-month preview of Surveyors images before they are shown to the public.

  If there is not a conspiracy, then how can it be good for one man to have so much power? How can it be good for one man to be given such a monopoly over knowledge that he becomes the sole amanuensis for the story of Mars?

  On a matter of such seminal importance surely we should be hearing other voices.

  15

  Camera Obscura

  SWINDON: What will history say?

  BURGOYNE: History, Sir, will tell lies as usual.

  GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLE, ACT 3 (1901)

  IN the early 1900s, in the English village of Cottingly near Bradford, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffith took photographs of fairies at the bottom of their garden. Even great intellectuals such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, fell for this hoax, which the aging Elsie and Frances revealed the photos to be some sixty or so years later.1 They got away with it because photography was in its infancy at the beginning of the twentieth century and people lacked the skill to spot an obviously doctored image.

  Things changed and people today are very aware of the fact that cameras, especially when linked to computers, can lie and do lie. Hollywood special effects teams such as Industrial Light and Magic prove to us again and again that the impossible can easily be made possible on celluloid. Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park was able to mix live acting with digitally produced dinosaurs so spectacularly that the join was imperceptible. This is good news for the box office but it has its disadvantages. Imaging has come such a long way since the Cottingly fairies that it is now impossible to tell a doctored photograph from an undoctored one.

  In which case we all could have been taken in many times without even knowing it.

  CRYING WOLPE

  I
n 1992, shortly before the launch of the doomed NASA probe Mars Observer, Congressman Howard Wolpe (D-Mich) claimed to have discovered an official two-page document titled “Suggestions for Anticipating Requests under Freedom of Information Act.” The document dealt with ways that NASA could circumvent this act and thus withhold from members of the public information which by law they were entitled to see.

  Wolpe wrote to Admiral Richard Truly, then head of NASA, saying:

  This NASA document instructs governmental employees to: 1, rewrite or even destroy documents to “minimize adverse impact;” 2, mix up documents and camouflage handwriting so that the documents’ significance would be “less meaningful;” and 3, take steps to “enhance the utility” of various FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] exemptions.2

  Soon after Admiral Truly began his own investigation of this matter he was sacked by President (and former CIA director) George Bush, and replaced by Daniel Goldin who, as we saw in part 1, has a background of secret operations experience. No investigation into NASA’s allegedly routine efforts to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act has since been authorized. All this was done, comments McDaniel,

  apparently not to confound enemy spies, but to make it difficult for private citizens, or agencies, or Congress, or the press, to obtain information to which they have a right under the Freedom of Information Act.3

  With regard to the forthcoming Mars Observer mission, McDaniel expressed doubts that NASA would honestly share all new photographic images with the public—particularly any images of Cydonia.4 Indeed, he pointed out, the agency seemed to have entirely relinquished its control over those images to Dr. Michael Malin, a man known for his implacable hostility to the hypothesis of artificial origins at Cydonia.

  MALIN AND OBSERVER

  Michael Malin graduated from Cal Tech in 1976 with a doctorate in planetary sciences and geology. From 1975 he had been a member of the technical staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, until he became assistant professor of geology, working his way up to professor in 1987 at Arizona State University. In 1990 he became a research professor and dedicated his time to setting up Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS), of which he is the president and chief scientist.

  With the Mars Observer mission in 1992–1993, NASA, for the first time in its history, handed responsibility for imaging to a private individual—Michael Malin. Previously, NASA itself had designed, operated, and set targets for its imaging systems. But for Mars Observer it contracted MSSS not only to build but also to operate, and be responsible for, all of the imaging done of the Red Planet—including absolute control over any images of Cydonia. As Dr. Malin himself claims:

  No one at NASA has ever attempted to dissuade me from acquiring images in the Cydonia region. No one has ever encouraged me to take such pictures, either, but this is because the choice of areas to photograph has been mine from the start.5

  We were astonished to learn that even the mission manager at JPL had no authority to tell Malin what to do. But most astonishing of all was the revelation that Malin’s Mars Observer contract not only gave him absolute authority over where to point the spacecraft and its cameras but also gave his corporation “exclusive control of images obtained from the spacecraft for a period of six months, with no clear statement of accountability.”6

  Understandably this was a state of affairs that worried many AOC researchers. They saw a system ripe for abuse, which appeared almost to have been designed to facilitate the doctoring or suppression of information. For this reason, both before and after the launch of Mars Observer, a growing clamor called for Malin’s powers to be curbed. For this reason too the AOC lobby continually sought assurances from NASA that the alleged monuments of Cydonia would be reimaged by Observer and that the undoctored results would be speedily made public.

  To the end NASA never gave such assurances, maintaining a policy that Stan McDaniel describes as “reluctance to assign an appropriate level of priority to rephotographing the AOC objects, coupled with an ambiguous, shifting policy regarding the prompt return of information to the public.”7

  NASA’s position was neither a popular nor a defensible one and it seemed to be losing the argument over the mission priorities of Mars Observer. The one thing that the public really wanted to know was, would NASA re-image Cydonia and, if so, could we be confident that we would get back original, unaltered pictures?

  Or would we get back the reverse of the Cottingly fairy photographs, with evidence of other life removed from the images?

  The debate was heating up. As we reported in part 2, it even seemed possible that mission priorities could be changed in response to public pressure. Then, at 6:00 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time on 21 August 1993, all contact with the spacecraft was lost and could not subsequently be restored.

  Just like that, just at the crucial moment, Mars Observer officially “disappeared.”8

  LOSS

  Dr. David Williams at Goddard painted us a picture of the sense of personal disappointment felt by NASA scientists over the loss of Observer:

  Well, that was very shortly after I started working here as a matter of fact, and it was pretty devastating—I mean, to have this thing which was right at Mars, and everyone geared up for it, we had spent a lot of time, doing the spacecraft records and experiment records, getting it all set for us to start receiving the data and archiving it, and then it just disappeared. And so it was disappointing to hundreds of people who had invested years and years. I knew some of the people who were investigators on instruments and things for that and it was personally a really bad thing, and even worse for NASA. It was a horrible black-eye; it was a very unfortunate mistake, and it looked bad. It certainly did change, completely turn around, a lot of things about NASA.

  Readers will remember the disconcerting fact that this devastating loss occurred during a very risky act—the deliberate switching off of telemetry (contact between Observer and Earth). This loss of telemetry was supposedly effected to stop the spacecraft’s transmitter tubes from being shocked by the pressurization of the fuel tanks.

  When the valves [that open to allow the helium pressurant to flow to the propellant tanks] actuate, a small mechanical shock wave is set off that travels through the spacecraft’s structure and is felt by all the electronic components…. One such component is the amplifier tubes in the spacecraft’s radio transmitter. The effect is much like causing a hot electric lightbulb to burn out by sharply jostling it while it is on and hot. So, we turned off the radio transmitter to keep it cool so as not to damage it. This is an event that has been done many times previously during the flight of Mars Observer …. We watched the initial events occur on schedule and the transmitter turn off … but we never heard the spacecraft’s signal again.9

  And so, when NASA attempted to regain telemetry, nothing happened. Moreover, the fact that the telemetry had been switched off when the fatal loss occurred meant no record existed of the exact circumstances of the loss (as there would have been with the telemetry on). Many have noted that this communications blackout would have been the ideal window for an act of sabotage—or for a myriad of other scenarios to unfold.

  Mars Observer was alone—450 million miles from home. Did it really just suffer an accident, as NASA claimed? Had it found something on Mars that others did not want us to see, necessitating a pulling of the plug? Or was it, and is it even now, orbiting Mars, sending back information … to someone?

  RESCUE

  An official committee, known as the Coffey Board after its chairman Dr. Timothy Coffey (director of research at Washington’s Naval Research Laboratory), was set up to investigate the loss of Observer. According to Michael Malin, in a note posted on the MSSS website:

  The Coffey Board Report stated that the most probable cause of the loss of communications with the spacecraft … was a rupture of the fuel pressurization side of the spacecraft’s propulsion system, resulting in a pressurized leak under the spacecraft’s thermal blanket. The gas and liquid would most likely have leak
ed from under the blanket in an unsymmetrical manner, resulting in a net spin rate. This high spin rate would cause the spacecraft to enter into the “contingency” mode, which interrupted the stored command sequence and thus did not turn the transmitter on.10

  Such spinning could also have caused “the main antenna to be torn off. Eventually, because the solar arrays would no longer be pointed at the sun, the spacecraft’s batteries would be depleted and unable to power the transmitter.”11

  REBOOT

  How hard did NASA fight to reestablish communication? It ought to have fought desperately, yet records show that it delayed a number of vital initiatives for many days—such as mounting a search for Observer with the Hubble telescope, for example, and sending the commands to activate the craft’s backup computer.

  Mars Observer carried two central computers with exactly the same software packages. If the fault had been in the primary computer, then rebooting the secondary computer might have fixed the problem. Even as late as 3 September, however, more than a week after the initial loss of contact with the spacecraft, this obvious remedial action was still being debated.