I'm really not enough interested in the topic of "faces on Mars" to want
to argue about whether these "faces" are real or not. I personally am
convinced that they are nothing more than odd geological features. I'm
convinced because of evidence such as is shown at the following URLs:
Overall Jet Propulsion Lab Mars Global Explorer website:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/index.html
Detailed photos of "the face" taken in April 1998, alongside the old
1976 Viking photos:
http://mars3.jpl.nasa.gov:80/mgs/msss/camera/images/4_6_98_face_release/index.ht
ml
Index to lots of photos of the Cydonia region:
http://mars3.jpl.nasa.gov:80/cgi-bin/AT-mgsindexsearch.cgi
High resolution image of "the face" and link to extremely detailed NASA photos:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/atlas/theface.html
Commentary and comparison photos from a skeptic:
http://mysteriesandmyths.com/Face.html
Latest extremely high resolution photos from April 2000:
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/4_5_00_cydonia/index.html
Many comparison photos:
http://www.xtl-ak.com/cyface1.html
Showing how tricks of light and shadow, combined with the human mind's
natural penchant for finding orderly patterns, turns odd, blurry photos
into "real" things:
http://www.xtl-ak.com/cyface3.html
This about wraps up my feelings about "the face":
http://www.metaresearch.org/solar%20system/cydonia/face-art.asp
For Tom:
I took a look at the two websites you suggested, along with the photos
they presented. In view of the above listed material, I simply don't
agree with the claims of the authors. What I did see is a presentation
of information that has been terribly skewed to make it appear that
NASA is engaged in some kind of massive conspiracy -- something that
always sets off major alarm bells in my mind. I noted that a photo was
presented on one website that had obviously been selectively enhanced
to emphasize what the author wanted. I also noted no particular
attempts to deal with criticisms or comments by NASA that go against
the authors' theories.
The authors, and authors of similar websites claim that NASA has
doctored the photos it has released to the public. However, I see no
evidence for their claims and they have not presented anything to
support their claim, except their own obviously doctored photos.
Given this kind of bias, I'm not inclined to believe anything they
say. If you or anyone else can present solid evidence that
shows manipulation by NASA, I'm certainly willing to listen. I just
have not yet seen it. To do this, one would have to deal with all of
the photos shown on the above listed websites and prove that NASA or
someone else doctored them.
I consider all this to be similar to the way people like Charles Taze
Russell, Piazzi Smyth, Joseph Seiss and thousands of other apparently
sincere people jumped on the Pyramidology bandwagon in the late 1800s.
Despite writing tens of thousands of pages claiming all sorts of
semi-magical or divine properties for the Great Pyramid of Gizeh,
we know today that all of it was a product of their imaginations.
They 'saw' patterns where there were none.
A couple of recent examples of supposedly solid "mysteries":
Crop circles are claimed by many to be the product of extraterrestrial
visitations. By about 1996(?) the actual perpetrators of the original
hoaxes in England confessed and demonstrated how, in the middle of the
night, they were able to produce amazing "structures" by flattening
growing wheat or whatever in fields. What was apparently an amazing
mystery turned out to have a quite normal cause. Amazingly, even
after these guys demonstrated how they did it, some of the
more rabid crop circle enthusiasts continue to claim that some of
the crop circles must have been of extraterrestrial origin.
They have too much emotional energy invested to let go.
Then there's the famous "spontaneous human combustion" business.
Many stories surfaced over the last several decades about humans
literally bursting into flame and burning up completely. Several
breathless documentaries were done "proving" that some sort of
magical or demonic or extraterrestrial forces were involved. Great
mysteries were implied, since no one could figure out why a human
body would begin burning, and then continue to burn for hours until
much of it was consumed. But as usual, the phenomenon turns out to
have a rather mundane, but surprising explanation. It turns out
that under unusual circumstances a person's clothing can catch
fire, and burn just long enough to heat up the fat under the skin
so that it begins melting and burning, and then a self-sustaining
burning process begins. As long as nothing is disturbed, the body
will simply burn up the fat, which melts and drips out and is
wicked along from the inside to the outside by ash debris. When
the fat is used up, the burning stops. This was demonstrated in
a recent documentary presented on either The Learning Channel or
The Discovery Channel, where an investigator took the carcass of
a pig, covered it with clothing, doused it with perhaps a pint of
gasoline and lit it. After a little over a minute the gasoline
had completely burned up, but by then the fat under the skin had
ignited in a self-sustaining burn. The carcass was still burning
about seven hours later when the investigator manually put it out.
When these findings were applied to several old mysterious
cases of "spontaneous combustion", and the investigators knew
what evidence to look for, everything fit into place. One woman
who had burned up pretty completely appears to have suffered a
heart attack while sitting in a chair and smoking. The cigarette
dropped onto her clothes, started a fire, and then her skin and
fat began burning. Her remains were found mostly burned up in
the chair. Interestingly, a plastic-bodied TV set sitting high
on a shelf partially melted from the heat accumulated near the
ceiling of the closed room, just as happened in the experiment
with the pig carcass.
In another case, a woman's body was found burning a few meters off
the side of a road. The police couldn't figure out how the body
could burn like that, and for what appeared to be several hours by
the time they found the body. They eventually found the murderer
but he wouldn't tell them how he ignited the body after killing
the woman. By the time police put out the fire, the body was
about half consumed. Most likely the murderer doused the body with
gasoline or alcohol and ignited it, which caused the body to burn
just like the pig carcass. Mystery solved, but it took several years.
I strongly recommend that people who want to find amazing explanations
for what most likely has mundane explanations read a couple of books
by Martin Gardner: Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science
and The New Age: Notes from a Fringe Watcher. Gardner shows
how many, many charlatans or sincerely self-deceived people have
come up with all sorts of 'explanations' for things that have since
been explained by quite ordinary means.
AlanF
