A few small mountains on Mars resemble pyramids. In the Elysium high plateau, there is a cluster of them – the biggest a few kilometres across at the base – all oriented in the same direction. There is something a little eerie about these pyramids in the desert, so reminiscent of the Gizeh plateau in Egypt, and I would love to examine them more closely. Is it reasonable, though, to deduce Martian pharaohs?
Similar features are also known on Earth in miniature, especially in Antarctica. Some of them would come up to your knees. If we knew nothing else about them, would it be fair to conclude that they’ve been manufactured by scale-model Egyptians living in the Antarctic wasteland? (The hypothesis loosely fits the observations, but much else we know about the polar environment and the physiology of humans speaks against it.) They are, in fact, generated by wind erosion – the splatter of fine particles picked up by strong winds blowing mainly in the same direction and, over the years, sculpting what once were irregular hummocks into nicely symmetrical pyramids. They’re called dreikanters, from a German word meaning three sides. This is order generated out of chaos by natural processes – something we see over and over again throughout the Universe (in rotating spiral galaxies, for instance). Each time it happens we’re tempted to infer the direct intervention of a Maker.
On Mars, there is evidence of winds much fiercer than any ever experienced on Earth, ranging up to half the speed of sound. Planet-wide duststorms are common, carrying fine grains of sand. A steady pitter-patter of particles moving much faster than in the fiercest gales of Earth should, over ages of geological time, work profound changes in rock faces and landforms. It would not be too surprising if a few features – even very large ones – were sculpted by aeolian processes into the pyramidal forms we see.
There is a place on Mars called Cydonia, where a great stone face a kilometre across stares unblinkingly up at the sky. It is an unfriendly face, but one that seems recognizably human. In some representations, it could have been sculpted by Praxiteles. It lies in a landscape where many low hills have been moulded into odd forms, perhaps by some mixture of ancient mudflows and subsequent wind erosion. From the number of impact craters, the surrounding terrain looks to be at least hundreds of millions of years old.
Intermittently, ‘The Face’ has attracted attention, both in the United States and in the former Soviet Union. The headline in the 20 November 1984 Weekly World News, a supermarket tabloid not celebrated for its integrity, read:
SOVIET SCIENTIST’S AMAZING CLAIM: RUINED TEMPLES FOUND ON MARS. SPACE PROBE DISCOVERS REMAINS OF 50,000-YEAR-OLD CIVILIZATION.
The revelations are attributed to an anonymous Soviet source and breathlessly describe discoveries made by a nonexistent Soviet space vehicle.
But the story of ‘The Face’ is almost entirely an American one. It was found by one of the Viking orbiters in 1976. There was an unfortunate dismissal of the feature by a project official as a trick of light and shadow, which prompted a later accusation that NASA was covering up the discovery of the millennium. A few engineers, computer specialists and others – some of them contract employees of NASA – worked on their own time digitally to enhance the image. Perhaps they hoped for stunning revelations. That’s permissible in science, even encouraged – as long as your standards of evidence are high. Some of them were fairly cautious and deserve to be commended for advancing the subject. Others were less restrained, deducing not only that the Face was a genuine, monumental sculpture of a human being, but claiming to find a city nearby with temples and fortifications.* From spurious arguments, one writer announced that the monuments had a particular astronomical orientation – not now, though, but half a million years ago – from which it followed that the Cydonian wonders were erected in that remote epoch. But then how could the builders have been human? Half a million years ago, our ancestors were busy mastering stone tools and fire. They did not have spaceships.
[* The general idea is quite old, going back at least a century to the Martian canal myth of Percival Lowell. As one of many examples, P.E. Cleator, in his 1936 book Rockets Through Space: The Dawn of Interplanetary Travel, speculated: ‘On Mars, the crumbling remains of ancient civilizations may be found, mutely testifying to the one-time glory of a dying world.’]
The Martian Face is compared to ‘similar faces . . . constructed in civilizations on Earth. The faces are looking up at the sky because they’re looking up to God.’ Or the Face was constructed by the survivors of an interplanetary war that left the surface of Mars (and the Moon) pockmarked and ravaged. What causes all those craters anyway? Is the Face a remnant of a long-extinct human civilization? Were the builders originally from Earth or Mars? Could the Face have been sculpted by interstellar visitors stopping briefly on Mars? Was it left for us to discover? Might they also have come to Earth and initiated life here? Or at least human life? Were they, whoever they were, gods? Much fervent speculation is evoked.
More recently, claims have been made for a connection between ‘monuments’ on Mars and ‘crop circles’ on Earth; of inexhaustible supplies of energy waiting to be extracted from ancient Martian machines; and of a massive NASA cover-up to hide the truth from the American public. Such pronouncements go far beyond more incautious speculation about enigmatic landforms.
When, in August 1993, the Mars Observer spacecraft failed within hailing distance of Mars, there were those who accused NASA of faking the mishap so it could study the Face in detail without having to release the images to the public. (If so, the charade is quite elaborate: all the experts on Martian geomorphol-ogy know nothing about it, and some of us have been working hard to design new missions to Mars less vulnerable to the malfunction that destroyed Mars Observer.) There was even a handful of pickets outside the gates of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, worked up over this supposed abuse of power.
The tabloid Weekly World News for 14 September 1993 devoted its front page to the headline ‘New NASA Photo Proves Humans Lived on Mars!’ A fake face, allegedly taken by Mars Observer in orbit about Mars (in fact, the spacecraft seems to have failed before achieving orbit), is said by a non-existent ‘leading space scientist’ to prove that Martians colonized Earth 200,000 years ago. The information is being suppressed, he is made to say, to prevent ‘world panic’.
Put aside the improbability that such a revelation would actually lead to ‘world panic’. For anyone who has witnessed a portentous scientific finding in the making – the July 1994 impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter comes to mind – it will be clear that scientists tend to be effervescent and uncontainable. They have an indomitable compulsion to share new data. Only through prior agreement, not ex post facto, do scientists abide military secrecy. I reject the notion that science is by its nature secretive. Its culture and ethos are, and for very good reason, collective, collaborative and communicative.
If we restrict ourselves to what is actually known, and ignore the tabloid industry that manufactures epochal discoveries out of thin air, where are we? When we know only a little about the Face, it raises goosebumps. When we know a little more, the mystery quickly shallows.
Mars has a surface area of almost 150 million square kilometres. Is it so astonishing that one (comparatively) postage-stamp-sized patch in 150 million should look artificial – especially given our penchant, since infancy, for finding faces? When we examine the neighbouring jumble of hillocks, mesas and other complex surface forms, we recognize that the feature is akin to many that do not at all resemble a human face. Why this resemblance? Would the ancient Martian engineers rework only this mesa (well, maybe a few others) and leave all others unimproved by monumental sculpture? Or shall we conclude that other blocky mesas are also sculpted into the form of faces, but weirder faces, unfamiliar to us on Earth?
If we study the original image more carefully, we find that a strategically placed ‘nostril’ – one that adds much to the impression of a face – is in fact a black dot corresponding to lost data in the radio transmission from Mars to Earth. The best picture of the Face shows one side lit by the Sun, the other in deep shadow. Using the original digital data, we can severely enhance the contrast in the shadows. When we do, we find something rather unfacelike there. The Face is at best half a face. Despite our shortness of breath and the beating of our hearts, the Martian sphinx looks natural – not artificial, not a dead ringer for a human face. It was probably sculpted by slow geological process over millions of years.