But I might be wrong. It’s hard to be sure about a world we’ve seen so little of in extreme close-up. These features merit closer attention with higher resolution. Much more detailed photos of the Face would surely settle issues of symmetry and help resolve the debate between geology and monumental sculpture. Small impact craters found on or near the Face can settle the question of its age. In the case (most unlikely in my view) that the nearby structures were really once a city, that fact should also be obvious on closer examination. Are there broken streets? Crenellations in the ‘fort’? Ziggurats, towers, columned temples, monumental statuary, immense frescoes? Or just rocks?
Even if these claims are extremely improbable – as I think they are – they are worth examining. Unlike the UFO phenomenon, we have here the opportunity for a definitive experiment. This kind of hypothesis is falsifiable, a property that brings it well into the scientific arena. I hope that forthcoming American and Russian missions to Mars, especially orbiters with high-resolution television cameras, will make a special effort – among hundreds of other scientific questions – to look much more closely at the pyramids and what some people call the Face and the city.
Even if it becomes plain to everyone that these Martian features are geological and not artificial, monumental faces in space (and allied wonders) will not, I fear, go away. Already there are supermarket tabloids reporting nearly identical faces seen from Venus to Neptune (floating in the clouds?). The ‘findings’ are typically attributed to fictitious Russian spacecraft and imaginary space scientists, which of course makes it marginally harder for a sceptic to check the story out.
One of the Mars face enthusiasts now announces:
Breakthru News of the Century
Censored by NASA
for fear of Religious upheavals and breakdowns.
The Discovery of ancient
ALIEN RUINS ON THE MOON
A ‘giant city, size of Los Angeles basin, covered by immense glass dome, abandoned millions of years ago, and shattered by meteors with gigantic tower 5 miles tall, with giant one mile square cube on top’ is breathlessly ‘CONFIRMED’ on the well-studied Moon. The evidence? Photos taken by NASA robotic and Apollo missions whose significance was suppressed by the government and overlooked by all those lunar scientists in many countries who don’t work for the ‘government’.
The 18 August 1992 issue of Weekly World News reports the discovery by ‘a secret NASA satellite’ of ‘thousands maybe even millions of voices’ emanating from the black hole at the centre of he galaxy M51, all singing ‘ “Glory, glory, glory to the Lord on ligh” over and over again’. In English. There is even a tabloid eport, fully although murkily illustrated, of a space probe that )hotographed God, or at least his eyes and the bridge of his nose, ip there in the Orion Nebula.
The 20 July 1993 WWN sports a banner headline, ‘Clinton tfeets with JFK!’ along with a faked photo of a plausibly aged, ;lumped-over John Kennedy, having secretly survived the assassi-lation attempt, in a wheelchair at Camp David. Many pages nside the tabloid, we are informed about another item of possible nterest. In ‘Doomsday Asteroids’, an alleged top-secret docu-nent quotes alleged ‘top’ scientists about an alleged asteroid ‘M-167’) that will allegedly hit the Earth on 11 November 1993 md ‘could mean the end of life on Earth’. President Clinton is described as being kept ‘constantly informed of the asteroid’s josition and speed’. Perhaps it was one of the items he discussed n his meeting with President Kennedy. Somehow, the fact that :he Earth escaped this catastrophe did not merit even a retrospec-:ive paragraph after 11 November 1993 uneventfully passed. At east the headline writer’s judgement not to burden the front page ivith the news of the end of the world was vindicated.
Some see this as just a kind of fun. However, we live in a time >vhen a real long-term statistical threat of an impact of an asteroid ivith the Earth has been identified. (This real science is of course ihe inspiration, if that’s the word, of the WWN story.) Government agencies are studying what to do about it. Stories like this suffuse the subject with apocalyptic exaggeration and whimsy, make it difficult for the public to distinguish real perils from tabloid fiction, and conceivably can impede our ability to take precautionary steps to mitigate the danger.
The tabloids are often sued – sometimes by actors and actresses who stoutly deny they have performed loathsome acts – and large sums of money occasionally change hands. The tabloids must consider such suits as just one of the costs of doing a very profitable business. In their defence they often say that they are at the mercy of their writers and have no institutional responsibility to check out the truth of what they publish. Sal Ivone, the managing editor of Weekly World News, discussing the stories he publishes, says ‘For all I know, they could be the product of active imaginations. But because we’re a tabloid, we don’t have to question ourselves out of a story.’ Scepticism doesn’t sell newspapers. Writers who have defected from the tabloids describe ‘creative’ sessions in which writers and editors dream up stories and headlines out of whole cloth, the more outrageous the better.
Out of their immense readership, are there not many who take the stories at face value, who believe the tabloids ‘couldn’t’ print it if it wasn’t so? Some readers I talk to insist they read them only for entertainment, just as they watch ‘wrestling’ on television, that they’re not in the least taken in, that the tabloids are understood by publisher and reader alike to be whimsies that explore the absurd. They merely exist outside any universe burdened by rules of evidence. But my mail suggests that large numbers of Americans take the tabloids very seriously indeed.
In the 1990s the tabloid universe is expanding, voraciously gobbling up other media. Newspapers, magazines or television programmes that labour under prissy restraints imposed by what is actually known are outsold by media outlets with less scrupulous standards. We can see this in the new generation of acknowledged tabloid television, and increasingly in what passes for news and information programmes.
Such reports persist and proliferate because they sell. And they sell, I think, because there are so many of us who want so badly to be jolted out of our humdrum lives, to rekindle that sense of wonder we remember from childhood, and also, for a few of the stories, to be able, really and truly, to believe in Someone older, smarter and wiser who is looking out for us. Faith is clearly not enough for many people. They crave hard evidence, scientific proof. They long for the scientific seal of approval, but are unwilling to put up with the rigorous standards of evidence that impart credibility to that seal. What a relief it would be: doubt reliably abolished! Then, the irksome burden of looking after ourselves would be lifted. We’re worried – and for good reason -about what it means for the human future if we have only ourselves to rely upon.
These are the modern miracles, shamelessly vouched for by those who make them up from scratch, bypassing any formal sceptical scrutiny, and available at low cost in every supermarket, grocery store and convenience outlet in the land. One of the pretences of the tabloids is to make science, the very instrument of our disbelief, confirm our ancient faiths and effect a convergence of pseudoscience and pseudoreligion.
By and large, scientists’ minds are open when exploring new worlds. If we knew beforehand what we’d find, it would be unnecessary to go. In future missions to Mars or to the other fascinating worlds in our neck of the cosmic woods, surprises -even some of mythic proportions – are possible, maybe even likely. But we humans have a talent for deceiving ourselves. Scepticism must be a component of the explorer’s toolkit, or we will lose our way. There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any.
4
Aliens
Truly, that which makes me believe there is no inhabitant on this sphere, is that it seems to me that no sensible being would be willing to live here.’
‘Well, then!’ said Micromegas, ‘perhaps the beings that inhabit it do not possess good sense.’
One alien to another,
on approaching the Earth,
in Voltaire’s Micromegas:
A Philosophical History (1752)
It’s still dark out. You’re lying in bed, fully awake. You discover you’re utterly paralysed. You sense someone in the room. You try to cry out. You cannot. Several small grey beings, less than four feet tall, are standing at the foot of the bed. Their heads are pear-shaped, bald, and large for their bodies. Their eyes are enormous, their faces expressionless and identical. They wear tunics and boots. You hope this is only a dream. But as nearly as you can tell it’s really happening. They lift you up and, eerily, they and you slip through the wall of your bedroom. You float out into the air. You rise high toward a metallic saucer-shaped spacecraft. Once inside, you are escorted into a medical examining room. A larger but similar being, evidently some kind of physician, takes over. What follows is even more terrifying. Your body is probed with instruments and machines, especially your sexual parts. If you’re a man, they may take sperm samples; if you’re a woman, they may remove ova or foetuses, or implant semen. They may force you to have sex. Afterwards you may be ushered into a different room where hybrid babies or foetuses, partly human and partly like these creatures, stare back at you. You may be given an admonition about human misbehaviour, especially in despoiling the environment or in allowing the AIDS pandemic; tableaux of future devastation are offered. Finally, these cheerless grey emissaries escort you out of the spacecraft and ooze you back through the walls into your bed. By the time you’re able to move and talk . . . they’re gone.