The many faces of Mars
Background: In 1976, the Viking Spacecraft sent back images from the Cydonia region of Mars. Many of these images contain features that looksurprisingly unnatural. These features include the "Face", the "D&M Pyramid" and the "City". Since these featureswere discovered, debate has raged as to their true nature- are they artificialconstructs, or are they natural geological formations?
The "Face", as seen by Viking.
On Monday, April 5, NASA released the first new images from Cydonia in over 20 years... and seemed to resolve the debate once and for all. The Facewas a trick of light and shadow, as NASA had claimed all along. Below is the image posted on the internet and shared with the news media.
The "Face", as seen by Mars Global Surveyor.
The media wasted no time in destroying the Face on Mars "myth".
From BBC News
Headline: 'Face' on Mars just an trick of Nature
Quote: "Mars Global Surveyor has finally settled the issue. Looked at in more detail the "face" becomes just a pile of rocks andsand."
From ABC News
Headline: Is the Hill a Face or Just a Hill? Face On Mars, Close-Up
Quotes: "So much for the face of Mars." and "the photos confirm the face is a mere trick of light and shadow falling on an unexceptional Martian hill."
From Reuters (and picked up by Newspapers everywhere)
Headline: NASA images show Mars "face" is just a hill
So the Mars Face has been settled once and for all, it's a natural formation,and the whole thing is a dead issue now?
Not quite.
What if I was to tell you, that rather than confirming that the face "is just a hill", NASA's new images are actually the strongest proof yet that the "Face on Mars" was artificially constructed by an ancient civilization?
Well, if you're a card carrying skeptic, no evidence I present is going to change your mind, so you might as well stop reading now. Similarly, if you are a "True Believer", you'd be wasting your time.. as you made up your mind a long time ago. However, if you are somewhere in betweenthe two extremes... if you believe that extra terrestrial life is probable, yet demand a certain amount of evidence.... READ ON!
The image Nasa released to the press on Monday was of very, very, low quality. It was grainy, edited (stretched), and taken at a low camera angle. All of these things combined to obscure nearly all traces of the "face"...though some symmetry can still be seen.
But tucked away on NASA's website is a much better image of the face. It is much sharper (though not nearly as sharp as photographs taken outside of the Cydonia region), and looks much more like a face than the image first released on Monday.
The original, full size image.
The image below left is the raw image, and the image on the right has been inverted to simulate the afternoon lighting of the Viking images. Both images have been cropped and scaled to 50% of their original size.
And once again, here is the original image NASA released to the press. Notice how flat and two dimensional it appears compared to the above images.
So, why does the original image look so bad?
From NASA's website:
"The image was then geometrically warped to meet the computed position information for a mercator-type map. This corrected for the left-right flip, and the non-vertical viewing angle (about 45° from vertical), but also introduced some vertical "elongation" of the image for the same reason Greenland looks larger than Africa on a mercator map of the Earth."
From the ABC Website:
The Viking photos were taken in the Martian afternoon when the light castslonger shadows. The Global Surveyor photograph was taken in the morning. "The lighting is coming under the chin, so to speak, which distorts the face," McDaniel says. The initial Global Surveyor picture released by NASA was also distorted because the spacecraft did not pass directly overhead, but the camera was instead tilted at an angle. The northern hemisphere of Mars was cloudy at the time, which also makes some details hard to pickout.
Why does the second image look so much better?
According to NASA, the original image was "cleaned up" to produce the second image. However, some Mars Face researchers believe there areenough differences in the images to suggest that they are NOT the same image, that the second image was taken at a slightly different camera angle, on a different day with better conditions. Personally, I'm not sure what to believe... though the cynic in me thinks the original image produced theeffect NASA desired... to squelch media speculation about the true natureof the Face. One wonders how the media would have reacted differently if the "cleaned up" image had been released first... "New Marsphoto inconclusive", or "New photo shows weathered face"?
"In ancient Egypt, Lions were considered to be the guardians of sacred places."
Before presenting further evidence, I'd like to briefly shift gears and present a hypothesis about the Martian Face.
Mainly, the "Face on Mars" is the original inspiration for the Sphinx (and it's Riddle).
The Sphinx is a massive, part man, part lion sculpture located near Cairo,Egypt. Strangely enough, Cairo means "Mars". New evidence is mounting that the Sphinx, long assumed to have been built during the time of the pyramids, is actually several thousand years older. Perhaps as old as 12,000 BC. If true, it's builders are unknown.
Riddle of the Sphinx:
What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?
Answer: Man.
(Crawls as a baby, walks as an adult, and uses a cane in old age.)
In the Riddle, the passage of the sun is an analogy for the development of man, the individual.
I believe the face on mars is not a single face at all, it is a collection of faces. As in the riddle, these faces (which include lion, proto-human, and modern man) change with the angle of the sun as well as the viewing angle of the observer. The faces may well represent the evolutionary development of man, the species.
The original, low quality image released by NASA is not totally worthless. Inverted and rotated on it's axis, a stylized lion emerges, complete with whiskers and mane.
A humanoid face is visible in NASA's second image (inverted), below. It resembles a lion when close up, but step back from your monitor 15-20 feet and you should see a face that looks very similar to the one photographed by the Viking spacecraft. Notice the caved in area around the "nose". At first I thought this might be a small impact crater, but now I think this is actually part of the design. Also notice the area to the lower rightof the "nose". This area looks very unnatural, as if someone has "scooped out" some of the surrounding rock. This feature is alsovisible in the original Viking photos.
To view a high contrast version of this image, clickhere. Notice what appears to be visible eyeballs in the "eyesockets", as well as the overall symmetry of the surrounding headdress / mane.
Still not convinced the face is artificially constructed?
The best evidence is yet to come.
I am not the first to suggest that the Face on Mars is it self a Sphinx, as other researchers have suggested this while studying the Viking images. I believe it was Richard Hoagland who discovered that if you take half of the "face" and mirror it, one side appears to be human (or at least a hominid) and the other side appears to be a lion. I'll admit, whenI first heard about this I thought it was just plain CRAZY. And the images produced to support this theory just weren't all that convincing, in my opinion. However, that has changed now that the Mars Global Surveryor has provided us with better images.
I decided to mirror each half of the new Face image myself to see what I'd come up with.
The results blew me away... (you should probably sit down first!)
And here is our Sphinx. Half human (well, proto-human) and Half Lion.
Simply incredible. Too incredible to be a product of mere chance, in my opinion. To appreciate all the fine details, make sure you check out the full sized version.
The hominid (kind of reminds you of bigfoot, doesn't it?) has a furry mane, a brow ridge, beady eyes, flared nostrils, visible teeth, and a pronounced chin. In the full sized version, individual "mustache" hairs are also visible.
A false color version of the hominid is also available.
The most impressive feature of the lion is the eyes (best seen in the full sized version). Not only do they contain pupils, they are shaped remarkably similar to those of a true lion. I'm also impressed by the wrinkled nose, common in angry lions.
But my version of the lion pales in comparison to the one pictured below. Perhaps my angles were slightly off. I found this at http://crop-circles.sip.fi/mars/mars7.html
My images have not been edited or retouched in any way save the following:
The original image was cropped to include only the face. The image was then rotated 45 degrees clockwise. The left side of the face was mirrored to produce the hominid. The Lion had one extra step: it had to be inverted to simulate lighting from the afternoon sun. The right side of the face was then mirrored to produce the Lion. The contrast was also increased in both images.
If you wish to reproduce these images yourself, visit my "How to make a face" page. It will give you all the details you need to reproduce them.
But couldn't this all be a trick of light and shadow?
I don't believe it's a "trick", I believe who ever created the Face on Mars intentionally incorporated the effects of light and shadow into it's structure. At a low viewing angle, illuminated with the morning sun, the left side of the face appears to be a hominid, an ancestor of man. At a low viewing angle, illuminated with the afternoon sun, the right side of the face appears to be that of the lion. At a high viewing angle, illuminated with the afternoon sun, the left side appears to be a modern man (perhaps a pharaoh), and so on.
Well, what about the human ability to see faces everywhere. Couldn't this be the equivalent of the Rorschach Inkblot Test?
I don't believe so, the faces are simply too detailed.
The Rorschach Inkblot Test
I see a flower, a bird, and even a man..
but certaintly not a detailed face.
But just to make sure, I tested the Martian mesa below.
The image on the left is the original image (after cropping and a 45 degree rotation). I chose this image because it shared the same orientation as the Face, and it does itself seem vaguely face like. The image in the middle was processed the same way as the "Hominid", the image on the right was processed the same way as the "Lion".
The results are about what you'd expect from a natural formation... no detailed pictures. If I look hard enough I can see "faces", but nothing anywhere near as clear-cut as the Hominid and Lion, even though this image is considerably sharper than the "Face on Mars". In the middle image, I can see: a dog sticking out his tongue, a skull (with eyeballs!), a baby on all fours, and the Starship Enterprise! In the right image, I see very little... a cartoon face with a big nose, and a slug, but that's all.
The Conclusion: The above is an example of a natural Rorschach Inkblot, the Mars Face is not.
So the extremely detailed Hominid and Lion are probably the best evidence to date of the face's artifical nature.
Here is some other evidence which may (or may not) help support the case. These are low resolution images taken by Viking, so their true nature is difficult to determine.
The following is one of the Viking images of the Face. It was taken almost directly above the face during afternoon lighting. It seems to be a modern man.
Mirroring this image produced interesting results. The left half is still a modern man, and looks quite a bit like an Egyptian pharaoh with headdress. The right half is where it gets interesting. It appears to be the head of a Falcon. To the ancient Egyptians, the falcon head was the symbol of Horus, the great god of the heavens who shared his divinity with the pharaoh. You'd almost expect these two characters to be paired together. Once again though, these are dark, fuzzy, low quality images, so they are far from conclusive.
If this image does indeed represent Horus (a big "if", perhaps), then the Face on Mars may be responsible for another myth: the half bird, half lion Griffon. Depending on the viewing angle, the right side of the face may appear to be either a lion or a falcon.
Below: Another picture of "Horus".
So there it is. My evidence that the Face is not just a hill, not just a trick of light and shadow. While I may not have convinced you that the Face was created by an ancient ET civilization, I hope at the very least I've convinced you that the Mars Face still warrants closer study.
But the way I see it, the Face either proves the existance of an extra-terrestrial civilization, or it proves the existance of a Supreme Being, as the formation of these faces naturally would be nothing short of miraculous.