Continued
Continued
3-19-00
Mutually Assured Ignorance?
I have little tolerance for Mars Global Surveyor conspiracy theories in the sense that I sincerely doubt NASA knows much more about Cydonia than the private research community. Plasma physicist John Brandenburg recently went public with his own attempt to describe NASA's seeming incompetence, stating that he had it on excellent authority that Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mars project scientists don't want the Mars Global Surveyor to make any noteworthy exobiological discoveries.
The reasoning behind this bizarre statement -- which seems to fly in the face of NASA's raison d'etre -- is well-documented. JPL's instruments are currently being used by career geologists. If discoveries were made that demanded the expertise of biologists, the Surveyor's geological objectives would take a backseat to exobiological concerns. Consequently, the reigning geologists would be in grave danger of losing hard-won research grants.
In this paradoxical context, ruins of an extinct Martian culture are an extremely unwanted discovery. The Mars Global Surveyor mission is supposed to be about geology, not alien life -- and especially not intelligent alien life. So even if a contingent within JPL feels Cydonia deserves a closer look, going public with preliminary findings would be professional suicide. If this seems preposterous, keep in mind that even non-establishment scientists who advocate Cydonia research are systematically ridiculed.
In my opinion, the only conspiracy in operation is one of mutually assured ignorance.
The forbidding but beautiful Martian surface as seen by Viking.
The following is an especially informed critique of NASA's ongoing "conspiracy" by NASA subcontractor Lan Fleming, in response to an email I submitted to a speciality mailing list. The "TJ Parker" enhancement referred to is the second image of the Face released to the public by NASA -- mere hours after the infamous "catbox."
"I don't believe the TJ Parker enhancement was botched, exactly. The tonal variation is about as good as you can get from the raw image. The problem, as you noted, is the Picasso-esque impression left by the 'nose' being pushed well to the right side of the centerline of the Face in the rectified image.
"There is nothing fundamentally illegitimate about Parker's rectification technique, but it has a major drawback: it works only for essentially two-dimensional features like crater rims. Parker simply stretched the image until the craters were round rather than elliptical as they are in the raw image. That's the way they should look. I've used the same technique myself. But the technique becomes more inaccurate the greater an object's height is relative to its width and length. Think of what you'd get if you took a picture of the World Trade Center at a 45 degree angle from the vertical and then stretched it out. You'd have a picture showing the skyscraper lying on its side on the ground, with its windows looking up at the sky! Yet if there were craters around the building, they would look circular as they should. An accurate rectified image, of course, would show only the roof of the building. Something similar happened with the Face, which is 400 meters high. That's why the 'nose' ridge is moved so far off center.
"Parker shouldn't have rectified the image at all, but since he did, it should have been released with a cautionary statement pointing out that it did not accurately show what the object would look like if it were viewed looking straight down from above. The spurious asymmetry he introduced into his enhancement by stretching it was probably even more damaging to the public perception of the Face than the Catbox, because the image looks like a good enhancement but isn't.
"JPL made horrendous mistakes with both enhancements. And the mistakes were, I think, clearly deliberate. They are not so incompetent as to commit such errors accidentally. They badly wanted to produce something that would severely undermine public support (what little of it there was to begin with) for any further investigation of Cydonia. And they did it quite successfully. We're left trying to figure out how to dig ourselves out the wreckage they left with their sneak attack of April, 1998. Well, the U.S. recovered from Pearl Harbor and won the war, so maybe we'll get around this eventually."
3-27-00
The "Pictogram"
The "triangle" north of the "City" complex appears to have a companion feature: a small tetrahedral pyramid positioned directly above the pyramid's apex. The pictogram-like feature is pointed due north in what appears to be some kind of intentional alignment, possibly solstice-oriented. The pyramid's location north of the Pictogram begs careful examination of the Cydonia region.
The small tetrahedron shown in context with the "Pictogram," aimed due north on the Martian surface.
3-30-00
Mark Carlotto Speculates
The following is a brief extract from recent IRC chat with Dr. Mark Carlotto.
"I think the one thing you have to remember is that the pyramids are probably thousands of years old [...] These features on Mars may be millions of years old. There's a huge gap between the two. The closest thing that comes to bridging that gap might be some of Sitchin's theories of the Summerians and the Annunaki. And to all fairness to Richard Hoagland, he pointed this possibility out as well.But that's only a starting point.
"It's important to have these discussions in the proper perspective because they can take on a life of their own. And very often skeptics will use this kind of conversation to turn it around and try to discredit the type of research we are doing.
"To be clear, our research stands or falls on these images. We have a very excellent camera orbiting Mars that if used properly, should get us quite a ways torwards whether if these objects are natural or maybe even one of them being artifical. That's the sort of thing that could inspire a real mission to Mars."
Warhol Does Cydonia
I just received a complimentary email from eWarrior, proprietor of The Electric Warrior, a site that reiterates the modern mystery Cydonia has become. In the spirit of an e-newsletter I maintained briefly on the subject of "mainstreaming the unthinkable," eWarrior has produced what may be one of the first true pieces of Cydonian pop-art: the appropriately titled "Cydonut Mosaic," pictured below. I detect more than a hint of Warhol in this . . .
4-6-00
New Cydonia Images Released
MSSS and JPL have released a mass of new Cydonia images, leaving the Mars community to wonder when these images were acquired and why their existence has been denied until April 5, 2000, when the images hit the Internet.
Notable target features included in the new batch of pictures include the "Tholus," which appears much as expected, and the "Fort," whose appearance is nothing short of a shock to many independent researchers. In the Viking photos, taken at different sun angles, the Fort appears to be a cleanly delineated, geometric feature, with an obvious "enclosure" or "courtyard." The new image shows the Fort without the expected "walls" and interior space.
To be sure, the morphology of the Fort appears convoluted and strange, and will attract attention from anomaly hunters for months to come. But while MGS-photographed features such as the Face and Main City Pyramid were essentially predicted by their Viking counterparts (despite claims to the contrary in the ultra-skeptical press), the Fort provides us with a more formidable challenge.
Rephotographing the Fort has been a top priority among planetary SETI researchers since the MGS took its 1998 images of Cydonia. Proponents of the Artificiality Hypothesis had hoped that the Fort's geometric shape would reveal conspicuous architectural detail when seen in high-resolution.
Image by eWarrior. Used with permission.
The Fort, as revealed on April 5, 2000. Where is the "central enclosure" evident in the Viking data?
The glaring discrepancies between the "new" Fort and the "old" Fort are already the subject of debate. New perspectives on this issue will be posted.
4-7-00
Fort and Tholus Animation
This new animation by Mark Carlotto depicts the Fort "morphing" from its confusing 1970s incarnation to the even more perplexing formation we see now:
The vanishing "courtyard." Animation courtesy Mark Carlotto.
The "enclosure" predicted by the earlier images is in fact a shadow; there is no "courtyard" and unfortunately no other single feature that can be positively identified as artificial. Yet the Fort is still interesting. It shares its alignment with the Face, Cliff and at least one other as-yet unreimaged formation in the City.
The prevailing hypothesis among advocates of the Artificiality Hypothesis is that the Fort is a collapsed pyramid (or other similarly shaped structure). The supposed "courtyard" was assumed to be a gaping hole in a once-surfaced structure. This hypothesis still deserves attention; while viewing Carlotto's rotation, I was struck by the Fort's odd, sunken quality -- "courtyard" or not, it's not terribly difficult to envision the Fort as an imploded megascale structure.
Concluding, I don't think the Fort is out of the running as a candidate artificial structure. But any hopes of it being the "smoking gun" for artificiality have been dashed by its obvious degradation.
Taking the Fort for a spin. Observe angular features along "foundation" and sunken, concave appearance. Animation courtesy Mark Carlotto.
The new image of the Tholus reveals esssentially what was already visible on the Viking images. Superficially, it looks rather like a scale model of Olympus Mons, the giant shield volcano on Mars' Tharsis Bulge. The ascending "groove" noted by Carlotto and others is faintly visible. Observers standing at the apex of the Tholus would have enjoyed a spectacular view of the Cliff to the north. The "opening" in the Tholus' side does not appear spectacular and may or may not be artificial. In any case, it looks crater-like enough to be the result of a chance collision.
The Tholus, then and now. Animation courtesy Mark Carlotto.
