The Mars Mystery: The Secret Connection Between Earth and the Red Planet Read online

  DELICATE ISSUES

  In our questions to Dr. Malin we turned next to the delicate issue of the loss of the Mars Observer. What did he make of widespread allegations that he himself had pulled the plug—or even that images were being secretly relayed back as we spoke?

  Malin’s reply was bitter and direct. The loss of Observer had been a horrible disaster for him, forcing him to fire half his staff and to move those remaining into temporary buildings. If he had sabotaged his own mission, he argued, where were the benefits? While the AOC researchers lined their pockets from writing and lecturing about such issues, he had suffered the loss both personally and financially. He then turned the question back on us: How would we respond to such cruel allegations?

  As for the six-month validation period, Dr. Malin argued that this was not in any way sinister but simply a practical necessity when operating on such a small budget, allowing time to process all the images into a workable format. There were just no resources to assemble a massive team to do this instantly, as the information came in. Press releases would show important results quickly, but that was a different process—one not budgeted for in Malins contract. The rest of the hard slog of image retrieval would take most of the six months, and whatever time was left over would be used for evaluation and interpretation.

  COVER-UP, OR JUST MONEY?

  The whole issue, in other words, seems to boil down not so much to secrecy as to money.

  And this, in the final analysis, is why Malin says that he is so unhappy about the Face controversy—and also, more generally, about the search for biological life on Mars. In the Viking missions, he reminded us, looking for life on Mars had led absolutely nowhere at great expense. Money that could have been spent on bona fide scientific investigations—for example, assessing the possibilities for future human habitation of the Red Planet—had been, in his opinion, squandered on biological experiments that were insubstantial. He sees the quest for life as little more than an ego trip for scientists wishing to be the first to make a sensational discovery.

  Malin, it seems, is content just to be a scientist, not a celebrity—a point that rings true in the light of his reluctance to talk on this issue, and his failure to exploit his situation for personal financial gain. As he told us, he could earn a fortune were he to be the man who found life on Mars.

  Portraying himself as a conscientious scientist who knows the limitations of NASA’s budget, he says that he simply wishes to be pragmatic and get the best out of what he has rather than tilting at windmills. This is a cautious approach, and one that could be faulted for its lack of pioneer spirit—but NASA is not endowed with limitless funds. Realistically this means that Malin, who knows from personal experience that the space program is financially flimsy, is effectively constrained from the start.

  On balance it is our conclusion that NASA is not really a secretive cabal like the CIA and the FBI but a body made up of scientists and enthusiasts whose zeal for their subject is as admirable as it is infectious. A pervasive sense of something being “covered up” does, nevertheless, infect the organization, but if there is a conspiracy involving the Mars monuments and other “extraterrestrial” issues we are fairly sure that it is not at grassroots level—where there would be great excitement and interest if evidence of extraterrestrial life were ever to be found.

  In any rational appraisal of the whole problem it should not be forgotten that NASA’s own enthusiasts are kept in check by government and must operate within parameters established by government. Moreover, as we have shown, the agency has been closely linked throughout its history to national defense and security. Indeed, it must be remembered that documents like the Brookings report advise that as far as possible even the scientists themselves should be kept in the dark if evidence of extraterrestrial life is ever confirmed.

  So we cannot entirely rule out a high-level conspiracy—one way over the heads of ordinary scientists but thriving on their dogmatic, narrow-minded, and unadventurous attitudes and sustained by ferocious competition for scarce resources. Even in a conspiracy such as this, however, it might be difficult to prevent leaks of information about Mars emanating from our ancestors in the distant past.

  Far-fetched though it may sound, we will show in the next two chapters that there are merits to this scenario.

  16

  Cities of the Gods

  REMEMBER latitude 19.5 degrees north—the landing site in July 1997 of the tetrahedral Mars Pathfinder—and the discovery of the mathematical values phi, pi, e, and t, as well as sqrt 2, sqrt 3, and sqrt 5, in the pyramids and mounds of Cydonia? Several AOC researchers do not believe it can be an accident that identical geometry (and identical latitude preferences to within 2 arc minutes—that is, two-sixtieths of a degree) are found at several archaeological sites on Earth.

  In the Valley of Mexico, ancient Teotihuacan, “the place where men became Gods,” sprawls near latitude 19.5 degrees north, close to modern Mexico City. A wonder of antiquity—of unknown origins and of uncertain age—its four-kilometer-long Way of the Dead is overlooked by three monstrous pyramids: the Pyramid of the Sun, the Pyramid of the Moon, and the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl.

  In 1974 Hugh Harleston, Jr., a civil engineer obsessed with Meso-America since the 1940s, presented a controversial and revolutionary study of the city of Teotihuacan at the forty-first International Congress of Americanists.1

  After thirty years of calculation, and more than 9,000 on-site measurements, he stumbled across the hitherto unknown system of measurement used at Teotihuacan—which he named the STU, the Standard Teotihuacan Unit.2 This unit is equivalent to 1.059 meters. John Michell, an authority on ancient metrology, has this to say about the STU:

  [Harleston] also recognized the geodetic significance of that unit; 1.0594063 meters is equivalent to the “Jewish rod” of 3.4757485 feet, the same unit which represents the width of the Stonehenge lintels, a six-millionth part of the Earths polar radius, and one part in 37,800,000 of its mean circumference.3

  THE CODE

  Harleston found that the measurements of structures in Teotihuacan, and also the distances between specific structures, are governed by a distinct sequence of numbers in STUs—notably 9, 18, 24, 36, 54, 72, 108, 144, 162, 216, 378, 540, and 720 STUs. Thus, for example, the length of one side of the Pyramid of the Sun at the base is 216 STU, the length of one side of the Pyramid of the Moon at the base is 144 STU, and the center of the Pyramid of the Sun lies 720 STU south of the center of the Pyramid of the Moon.

  What is interesting about this sequence of numbers, as science historians Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend have shown in their masterwork, Hamlet’s Mill, is that it recurs continuously in ancient myths and sacred architecture all around the world.4 These authorities have also demonstrated that the sequence is derived mathematically from an astronomical phenomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes.

  To summarize briefly, it is sufficient to remind the reader that there is a minute wobble on the axis of the Earth and that this wobble has a cycle of 25,920 years. Since the Earth is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars, it is inevitable that these minute changes in Earths orientation in space will alter the apparent orientations of stars as they appear when viewed from Earth.

  The best-known effect of precession is observable on the spring equinox, 21 March in the Northern Hemisphere, and manifests as an extremely slow revolution of the twelve zodiacal constellations against the background of which the sun is seen to rise on that special day. This revolution proceeds at the rate of one degree every 72 years (and thus 30 degrees in 2,160 years). Since each of the twelve zodiacal constellations has traditionally been allocated a 30-degree segment of the ecliptic (the perceived annual path of the Sun), it follows that each will “house” the sun on the equinox for a period of 2,160 years (12 × 2,160 = 25,920 years, the complete precessional cycle).

  These numbers and calculations form the basic ingredients of an ancient code. Let us call it the “
precessional code.” In common with other esoteric numerological systems, the code is one in which it is permissable to shift decimal points left or right at will and to make use of almost any conceivable combinations, permutations, multiplications, divisions, and fractions of certain essential numbers (all of which relate, precisely, to the rate of the precession of the equinoxes).

  The ruling number in the code is 72. To this was frequently added 36, making 108, and it was permissable to divide 108 by two to get 54—which could then be multiplied by ten and expressed as 540 (or as 54,000, or as 540,000, or as 5,400,000, etc., etc.). Also highly significant is 2,160 (the number of years required for the equinoctial point to transit one complete zodiacal constellation). This could be divided by ten to give 216, or multiplied by ten and factors of 10 to give 216,000 or 2,160,000, etc., etc. The number 2,160 was also sometimes multiplied by two to give 4,320—or 43,200, or 432,000, or 4,320,000, and so on.

  We have demonstrated in other works that the code occurs in the architecture of Angkor in Cambodia and the pyramids of Giza in Egypt.5 At Giza we have shown that it is the key that unlocks a precise mathematical scale model of the northern hemisphere of the earth. Thus, if you multiply the height of the Great Pyramid by 43,200 you get a precise printout of the earth’s polar radius, and if you multiply the measurement of the base perimeter of the Pyramid by the same figure you get a precise printout of the earths equatorial circumference.6

  The same sort of thing happens at Teotihuacan. For example, as Harlestons survey demonstrates, the distance in STUs along the boundary buildings of the Pyramid of the Moon—378—and the distance in STUs of one side of the base of the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl—60—produce interesting numbers when multiplied by 100,000. The former gives the circumference of Earth and the latter the planet’s polar radius.7

  Harleston established his data by 1974, two years before the first Viking photographs of Cydonia were taken. We were therefore interested to learn another mathematical secret revealed by his measuring survey: the builders of Teotihuacan went out of their way to relate structures to one another through ratios of pi and phi and e.8 Harlestons conclusion was that they must therefore have possessed knowledge comparable to that of modern-day geographers and astronomers:

  Here was a design whose dimensional configurations provided accurate universal mathematical and other constants with a minimum of shared points … laid out … to incorporate the values of pi, phi, and e. Perhaps the pyramid complex was an intended hint to latecomers to expand their consciousness for a clearer view of the cosmos and of mans relation to the whole.9

  IT KNOWS WHERE IT IS …

  The reader will recall that the D&M Pyramid at Cydonia was shown by Erol Torun to be located at latitude 40.868 degrees north, the tangent of which is the equivalent to e/pi. Thus he concluded that it was intelligently founded on that latitude, and self-referencing. Harleston was to discover something very similar when he measured the Pyramids of the Moon and Sun at Teotihuacan. In brief, the angle of the fourth level of the Pyramid of the Sun is set at 19.69 degrees—the exact latitude of the pyramid itself (which stands at 19.69 degrees north of the equator).10 It is, therefore, a self-referencing monument that makes use of geometry to tell us that it “knows where it is”—that is, it knows its own latitude—just as the D&M Pyramid does. What’s more, the angle of the corresponding level of the Pyramid of the Moon, the fourth level, is set at exactly the t constant of 19.5 degrees so favored in the overall design of Cydonia.11

  Such figures have suggested to some researchers that Teotihuacan may contain a “message”—perhaps identical to that of Cydonia—based on tetrahedral geometry and the pi, phi, e, and t constants. Nor is Teotihuacan the only object of such exotic suspicions.

  MEGALITHOMANIA

  Stonehenge, the great ring of megaliths that dominates Salisbury plain in Wiltshire, England, is thought to have been built between 2600 and 2000 B.C.—although with some much earlier, and some slightly later stages. It is not our purpose to embark on an exploration of this most intriguing of sites, whose astronomical and geodetic qualities would call for a book in themselves, but to review some of the comparisons to Cydonia that the Mars researchers have made.

  According to Carl Munck, for example:

  The very angle off true north of [Stonehenge’s] famed northeast avenue (as opposed to the current azimuth of the rising solstice sun) is, astonishingly, another key “Cydonian angle”—49.6 degrees. Identical not only to a key theoretical “tetrahedral” angular relationship [to within 0.2 arc seconds] … but also identical to another specific angle, expressed twice in the internal geometry of the D&M Pyramid itself!12

  This angle is none other than e/pi when expressed in radians.

  Avebury, also in Wiltshire—dated to approximately the same period as Stonehenge, perhaps even a little earlier—is the largest stone circle in the world, containing a village and two smaller stone circles within its environs. What levels of coincidence are called for to explain the fact that centers of the two inner circles of Avebury are offset from true north at an angle of 19.5 degrees?13

  Because the angle of 19.5 degrees has no intrinsic meaning save as t, the circumscribed tetrahedral constant, we can only assume that its repeated reappearances in ancient and sacred terrestrial sites must be deliberate and must be derived from sophisticated tetrahedral geometry. But how do we explain the fact that it also occurs repeatedly in the “monuments” of Cydonia, millions of miles from Earth, on the ruined Red Planet, Mars?

  NUMBERS ON THE NILE

  We have seen that what seems like a specific mathematical code involving tetrahedral geometry and numbers derived from the precession of the equinoxes lies hidden in the measurements of many of the world’s ancient sites. Paramount among these sites is Egypt’s remarkable Giza necropolis, containing the Great Sphinx and the Pyramids of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure.

  Mars, the Red Planet: At present a bleak and barren hell, but mystery surrounds its past. (NASA)

  The northern polar cap of Mars is formed from frozen water and carbon dioxide—perhaps the remnants, scientists believe, of a once carbon-dioxide-rich Martian atmosphere that would have warmed the planet, allowing the now frozen water to flow freely—providing a suitable climate for the formation of life. (NASA)

  The southern polar cap of Mars consists entirely of frozen carbon dioxide. (NASA)

  Olympus Mons: At 700 kilometers in width, it is the largest volcano in the solar system—some three times higher than Mount Everest. (NASA)

  (ABOVE AND BELOW) The Tharsis Bulge surmounted by three gigantic shield volcanoes—Arsia Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Ascraeus Mons—known collectively as the Tharsis Montes. (NASA)

  The immense canyon of the Valles Marineris is up to 7 kilometers deep, with a maximum width of 200 kilometers. (NASA)

  The breathtaking immensity of the Valles Marineris is shown in this computer-generated reconstruction of the Candor Chasm, one of the deepest parts of the Valles. (NASA)

  “Dendritic” channels such as these, resembling terrestrial river tributaries, give tangible evidence that barren Mars may once have been as abundant in water as Earth is today. (NASA)

  Were these channels in the Chryse Planitia formed from the movement of great bodies of water? (NASA)

  Teardrop-shaped islands in the Chryse Planitia strongly suggest that Mars may once have experienced floods of biblical proportions. (NASA)

  The Isidis Planitia’s ridged plain—1,000 kilometers across—was caused by a devastating head-on collision with an object 50 kilometers wide. (NASA)

  The Hellas Planitia’s ridged plain, here swathed in carbon dioxide frost, was also formed by the impact of an object one hundred kilometers in size. (NASA)

  The internal distress caused by the impact of subsequent fragments may have resulted in the formation of the Tharsis Bulge in the opposite hemisphere, causing Mars to burst its seams along one-quarter of its circumference to form the chasm of the Valles Marineris.

  This mi
croscopic image of a Mars meteorite shows possible fossils of bacteria-like organisms found in Martian meteorite ALH84001. (NASA)

  Phobos—the largest of Mars’s two moons. (Internet)

  The world’s first view of “the Face” on Mars as released in 1976 by the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. NASA immediately dismissed it as a “trick of light and shadow.” (NASA)

  Even before computer enhancement, the haunting image of the Face clearly stares up from Viking frame 35A72. (NASA)

  Frame 70A13, discovered by Vincent DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar, confirms evidence of frame 35A72 by revealing that the Face is not a trick of light, but actually face-like in form, as this latter frame was taken from a different position and with a different sun-angle from the first. Had it been just “a trick of light and shadow” as NASA claimed, then the Face would have disappeared when viewed from a different position. (NASA)