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

  SEARCH FOR LIFE

  Inspired by the revelations from Mariner 9 that Mars could once have been habitable, NASA dedicated the Viking missions to the “search for life on Mars.” For the most part this search was carried out by means of high-resolution photographs of large areas of the planet’s surface, analysis of the structure and composition of the atmosphere, and chemical tests on soil samples gathered by the landers.

  We saw in part 1 that the soil samples gave a number of positive results and that Dr. Gilbert Levin, one of the scientists who devised the experiments, remains convinced to this day that there is—at the very least—bacterial life on Mars. This is quite contrary to NASA’s official view as it was recently put to us by Dr. Arden Albee, the project scientist for Mars Global Surveyor:

  I would say that none of the experiments indicated evidence of life. Several came out not exactly the way we expected because during the design of the instruments it wasn’t understood that oxidants would be on the surface of Mars—and so they did not get results that were neat and clean as predicted, but they did not indicate the presence of life.2

  CHOICE SITES?

  Viking 1’s lander had originally been scheduled to touch down on Independence Day, 4 July 1976, but the date was set back as scientists on Earth scanned live television pictures of the Martian surface transmitted by the orbiter. The preferred landing site looked dangerously rugged.3 After some weeks of searching for a safer location, Chryse Planitia was chosen, and a successful landing was made there.

  Now attention shifted to finding a suitable site for Viking 2’s lander. This is how Carl Sagan tells the story:

  The candidate landing latitude for Viking 2 was 44 degrees north. The prime site, a locale named Cydonia, was chosen because, according to some theoretical arguments, there was a significant chance of small quantities of liquid water there, at least at some time during the Martian year. Since the Viking biology experiments were strongly oriented toward organisms that are comfortable in liquid water, some scientists held that the chance of Viking finding life would be substantially improved in Cydonia.4

  Sagan and his colleagues were about to come literally face to face with something that looked very much like a sign of life—but not the kind of sign, nor the kind of life, they had imagined. Indeed, what they found was so beyond their comprehension that it was immediately dubbed an illusion and was not allowed to influence the final choice of a landing site for Viking 2.

  ILLUSION

  The discovery was made on 25 July 1976 by Tobias Owen, a member of the Viking imaging team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California. He was examining frames of the Cydonia region for possible landing sites when he was heard to mutter, “Oh my God, look at this!”5

  The frame that he was inspecting, reference number 35A72, showed an area of the Martian surface that was roughly split into two geological zones—an extensive plain, slightly cratered, with a handful of raised mesas, side by side with a rocky area of immense blocks of angled stone. Toward the center lay what appeared to be a gigantic humanoid face staring blankly up from the dead planet—serene, perhaps even imbued with pathos—a mute sentinel on the barren landscape.

  Just hours later, Gerry Soffen, a spokesman for the Viking project, gave a briefing to the press about progress so far in NASA’s self-proclaimed search for life on Mars. Somehow an image of the newly discovered Face had reached him, and he showed it to the journalists. “Isn’t it peculiar what tricks of lighting and shadow can do,” he commented dismissively. “When we took a picture a few hours later it all went away. It was just a trick, just the way the light fell on it.”

  Soon afterward JPL issued a press release making essentially the same points about the Face:

  Photo Caption: This picture is one of many taken in the northern latitudes of Mars by the Viking 1 orbiter in search of a landing site for Viking 2.

  The picture shows eroded mesa-like landforms. The huge rock formation in the center, which resembles a human head, is formed by shadows giving the illusions of eyes, nose, and a mouth. The feature is 1.5 kilometers (1 mile) across, with the sun angle at approximately 20 degrees. The speckled appearance of the image is due to bit errors, emphasized by enlargement of the photo. The picture was taken on July 25 from a range of 1,873 kilometers (1,162 miles). Viking 2 will arrive in Mars orbit next Saturday [August 7] with a landing scheduled for early September.6

  UTOPIA

  The next development was a decision from NASA that Viking 2 would not, after all, land at Cydonia.

  Apparently the site was now deemed “unsafe.” According to Carl Sagan:

  44 degrees north was completely inaccessible to radar site-certification; we had to accept a significant risk of failure with Viking 2 if it was committed to high northern latitudes…. To improve the Viking options, additional landing sites, geologically very different from Chryse and Cydonia, were selected in the radar-certified region near 4 degrees south latitude.7

  All this notwithstanding, it is an extraordinary fact that Viking 2 was finally set down at a latitude even higher than Cydonia. It landed—and was almost overturned by boulders—on the distinctly unpromising rock-strewn plain called Utopia, at 47.7 degrees north latitude, on 3 September 1976. Thus—for no obvious reason says James Hurtak—“a multimillion-dollar effort may have overlooked ‘paydirt’ and may have become a trivial event…. A poor selective factor had been used to choose an area of minor geological and biological significance. It was like choosing the Sahara Desert as a suitable landing site on our own planet.”8

  THE LADY DOTH PROTEST TOO MUCH

  Why choose Utopia over Cydonia when NASA’s own criteria mark both sites as equally “unsafe,” and when the former is bland and uninteresting while the latter has rumors of water and the mystery of the Face? The question is a nagging one, because even if we accept Gerry Soffen’s instant dismissal of the Face as a trick of light and shadow, Cydonia still looks like a far more interesting site than Utopia.

  Frankly we find the decision to land at Utopia baffling. But we are even more perplexed by the abrupt way that Cydonia was dropped as the preferred site so soon after the discovery of the Face on frame 35A72. It could be a coincidence. But on the other hand, we find it odd that NASA was in such a hurry to write off the Face as an illusion. In a way spokesman Gerry Soffen was perfectly correct to state that the image vanished within a few hours. This did not happen, however, because of tricks of light and shadow, but because night had fallen. No image of the Face was acquired a few hours later.

  Quite simply, the much-vaunted photograph that proves the Face is an illusion does not exist.

  So why, then, did NASA spread this strange story around?

  8

  Jesus in a Tortilla

  ON 4 July 1997, Pathfinder, the first of a new generation of NASA probes, landed on the rust-red surface of Mars at Ares Vallis (19.5 N, 32.8 W), bounced in its protective gas-filled airbags, and came to rest intact on an alien world.1 Then, as though in a scene from a science-fiction movie, the airbags deflated and three triangular solar panels opened like the petals of a futuristic silver flower. A ramp rolled out and the Sojourner rover was deployed. The world watched in awe as this tiny six-wheeled robot, the size of a shoe box and just 10.5 kilograms in weight, crept out from its protective metal flower and edged onto the Martian soil to find itself marooned on that rock-strewn world, under a salmon pink sky—millions of miles from home.

  MARS OBSERVER, PLEASE PHONE HOME

  Pathfinder was hailed as a roaring success by all those involved on the project. NASA could now breathe a sigh of relief after the patchy record of the previous decade, which had started with the horrendous inflight explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1987 and had included the loss in 1993 of the Mars probe Mars Observer.

  Launched on 25 September 1992, Observers mission was to re-map the surface of Mars—essentially duplicating the photographic work of the Viking orbiters, but at much higher levels of resolution. It c
arried a camera that could obtain images at 1.4 meters per pixel—a vast improvement on the 50 meters per pixel for which the Vikings were capable.

  But Observer failed just before going into orbit. A NASA press release describes what happened:

  On Saturday evening, August 21st [1993], communications were lost with the Mars Observer spacecraft as it neared to within three days of the planet Mars. Engineers and mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, responded with a series of backup commands to turn on the spacecraft’s transmitter and to point the spacecraft’s antennas toward Earth. As of 11:00 A.M EDT on Sunday, August 22nd, no signal from the spacecraft had been received from tracking stations around the world.2

  CONSPIRACY THEORIES

  What exactly happened to Mars Observer?

  Though there was almost no specific evidence on which to make judgments, an independent NASA review board was set up to answer this question. After deliberations the board suggested that a rupture in a line in the propulsion system during the start of fuel-tank pressurization somehow blacked out the spacecraft’s communications with base.

  But there was more to it than that, and a few days later it became clear that there had been a huge breach of procedure. What had really happened was that Observers radio link (telemetry) to Earth had been deliberately shut off by the controllers during the period that the fuel tanks were pressurizing. This was bizarre and unprecedented. They must have known how vital it is that communication between spacecraft and base should be maintained at all times—once lost it is hard to retrieve. This is precisely what happened to Observer: having been cut off, its telemetry could not later be reestablished.

  At the very least the loss of the probe was stupid. But as we report in chapter 15, some NASA analysts were convinced from the beginning that there may be more to it than that. They point out that Observer was supposedly ready to start its mapping orbit when the telemetry was shut down. Why, they ask, would such a risky procedure even have been contemplated at such a crucial juncture—unless NASA had actually wanted to lose the spacecraft.

  The motive?

  Conspiracy theorists are convinced that the whole mystery is connected to the growing publicity around the issue of the Face during the decade prior to Mars Observer. After all, in the run-up to the September 1992 launch, there had been vociferous public demands that the probe should rephotograph Cydonia.3

  Maybe it went into orbit a few days earlier than the public were told? Maybe it did photograph Cydonia? Maybe the powers in NASA didn’t like what they saw there? Maybe they decided to pull the plug not wishing to disclose to the volatile masses the potentially disturbing news of the reality of extraterrestrial life?

  DIPIETRO, MOLENAAR, HOAGLAND

  NASA has done much to fuel such paranoia by dissembling about the Face since the moment Tobias Owen first spotted it in Viking frame 35A72 on 25 July 1976. Cleverly worded snippets of official disinformation fixed it in the public imagination as nothing more than an illusion of light and shadow. Scientists en masse instantly lost interest in it. And for the next three years it lay buried in NASA’s deep-space archive at Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland.

  The Face was rediscovered in 1979 by Vincent DiPietro, a Lockheed computer scientist on contract at Goddard. Working with his colleague Gregory Molenaar, he developed a process of image enhancement to create more detailed images of the Face. On their own initiative, as we shall see in chapter 9, the two researchers also combed the archives and found another Viking frame in which the Face, although photographed from a different angle, was clearly visible. In this frame a second enigmatic structure could also just be made out—a mysterious five-sided pyramid (subsequently named the D&M Pyramid) within 10 miles of the Face.

  DiPietro and Molenaar at first naively supposed that NASA would be interested in their discoveries. Predictably, they were soon disappointed. Here were two scientists, employed by NASA, holding immaculate qualifications, who were effectively claiming that they had found evidence of intelligent design on another world. Yet no one would listen to them.

  In 1981 they gave up trying to push the matter through official channels and published their own book, entitled Unusual Mars Surface Features. Among those who picked up a copy at the launch party was a science writer, Richard Hoagland, who by coincidence had been among the gaggle of press members at JPL in July 1976 in whose presence Gerry Soffen had so glibly explained away the Face.

  Hoagland, a veritable jack of all trades in the scientific and space world with a prodigious CV, would become, in time, the main publicist and controversial figurehead of the early Cydonia researchers. Referred to by his own editor as “a curious combination of Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry and Mr. Spock,”4 this maverick was to bring DiPietro and Molenaar’s discoveries into the public eye—and in the pre-millennium Zeitgeist there was a ready audience interested in such a stark challenge to conventional scientific thought.

  INDEPENDENT MARS INVESTIGATION

  As well as stirring up a storm of publicity, Richard Hoagland made a number of pioneering discoveries of his own among the Viking frames. These included what he termed the “City,” the “Fort,” and many small mounds within a few miles of both the D&M Pyramid and the Face.

  With anthropologist Randolpho Pozos, Hoagland established the Independent Mars Investigation (IMI) in 1983. They set up a computer conference—named after the Ray Bradbury book The Martian Chronicles—in which Hoagland, Pozos, DiPietro, and Molenaar were joined by plasma physicist John Brandenberg and artist Jim Channon (who would provide an artistic evaluation of the Face). Other members of the conference included Lambert Dolphin and Bill Beatty, both scientists from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the world-famous California think tank. Dolphin, a physicist, had for some time been involved with remote sensing surveys around the pyramids and the Great Sphinx on Egypt’s Giza plateau.

  The Independent Mars Investigation was taken seriously enough to be granted $50,000 from the President’s Fund at SRI—though it soon became apparent that the think tank did not want to give further assistance, allowing only Dolphins spare time and some technical support. Moreover, even this limited backing looked as though it might at any time be withdrawn. In desperation Hoagland formed a second group—the Mars Investigation Group, with Thomas Rautenberg, of Berkeley, California. Meanwhile, in March 1984 the IMI conference folded and the Martian Chronicles came to an abrupt end.

  IMI’s main conclusions were presented by John Brandenburg at the Case for Mars Conference II held at Boulder, Colorado, in the summer of 1984.

  CARLOTTO

  In 1985 the independent researchers were joined by a computer programmer, Mark Carlotto, who was a specialist in imaging techniques. As we shall see in chapter 10, Carlotto worked on the original Viking images, enhancing them and finally concluding that the Face is a three-dimensional object with many characteristics that appear to be artificial.

  Carlotto is an impressively qualified scientist, and his work has never been anything other than scientifically rigorous. Nevertheless, he was to find that his conclusions and observations were, from the outset, utterly rejected by Mars experts.

  THE McDANIEL REPORT

  Some academics from other disciplines who have looked into the findings of independent scientists such as Carlotto, DiPietro, and Molenaar believe that the “expert” reaction to them has been ill-considered.

  For example, Stanley McDaniel is professor emeritus and former chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Sonoma State University. He first heard about the Face controversy as early as 1987. In 1992, spurred on by the impending launch of Mars Observer, he began his own independent evaluation of the Cydonia debate:

  My initial approach was one of considerable skepticism … but over the course of the investigation my appreciation of what the researchers had done, and the underlying scientific integrity of their work, began to grow. I found that the occasional faults in their work were far outweigh
ed by the solidity of the data and their responsiveness to the needs of what is, after all, the first study of its kind in history.

  I became aware not only of the relatively high quality of the independent research, but also of glaring mistakes in the arguments used by NASA to reject this research. With each new NASA document I encountered, I became more and more appalled by the impossibly bad quality of the reasoning used. It grew more and more difficult to believe that educated scientists could engage in such faulty reasoning unless they were following some sort of hidden agenda aimed at suppressing the true nature of the data.5

  A slight, energetic man, Stan McDaniel is a brilliant orator and a quick thinker—a personal affront to the theory that the “Artificial Origins at Cydonia” (AOC) hypothesis is only supported by “unscientific” types. The subtitle of his report, which was published in 1993, spells out its central conclusions: “The failure of executive, congressional and scientific responsibility in investigating possible evidence of artificial structures on the surface of Mars, and in setting priorities for NASA’s Mars exploration program.”6

  The McDaniel Report sets out to analyze not only the artificiality argument, but also NASA’s countermeasures against it. Foremost among these is the standard defense—much promoted by Carl Sagan—that the Face is just a trick of light and shadow. Then there is a so-called technical report (McDaniel claims it is nothing of the sort) that criticizes Hoagland’s Monuments of Mars, as well as the work of Dr. Michael Malin, the designer and operator of the cameras carried by the probes. A staunch opponent of artificiality, Malin holds the power to choose what on Mars will be photographed on any mission involving his cameras as well as a strange legal privilege—a six-month “probationary” period during which he is permitted to view the images before they are released to the general public.7