UFO UpDates Mailing List
From: Stig_Agermose@online.pol.dk (Stig Agermose)
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1998 22:10:21 +0200
Fwd Date: Wed, 08 Apr 1998 18:51:40 -0400
Subject: Re: NASA Images Could Solve 'Face' Mystery
>From the Washington Post. URL:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/science/daily/april98/mars
07.htm
*******
NASA Images Could Solve 'Face' Mystery
Mars, Then and Now
1976: A photograph shows what appears to be a face on the surface of
Mars. (NASA photo via AP)
1998: A more detailed photo of the area appears to show a mesa. (NASA
photo via AP)
By Kathy Sawyer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 7, 1998; Page A1
NASA scientists yesterday wiped the "face" off Mars and with it, the
belief in some quarters that it was the remnant of an ancient Martian
civilization.
At least they hope they did.
More than 20 years ago, one of the U.S. Viking space probes took a
photograph of what appeared to some people to be a monumental sculpture
of a humanoid face, staring skyward from a hilly desert region of Mars
known as Cydonia. Since then, the Martian "sphinx" has generated
tabloid headlines, true believers and questions. For some, its stony
stare carried intimations of intelligent beings at work on the Red
Planet and led more recently to "X-Files"-style suspicions of a U.S.
government conspiracy to keep this knowledge from the public.
NASA yesterday released images taken over the weekend by the Mars
Global Surveyor spacecraft, which is orbiting the Red Planet on a
mapping mission. The pictures show the same site in 10 times the detail
and with the sun shining from the opposite direction, compared with the
1976 image.
It's a mesa, scientists have concluded, once again. And the only
sculptor at work there is nature. "There will always be a few
die-hards, but I think the American people will look at this and wonder
what all the fuss was about," said Surveyor chief scientist Arden L.
Albee of the California Institute of Technology.
"Anyone who has flown in an airplane will recognize that this is
natural," rather than an artificially constructed feature, he added.
"You could see [something like it] in many places on a flight from
Washington to L.A. It's not an unusual feature."
Albee said the new images, taken from 276 miles above the surface,
confirm previous NASA analysis indicating that the "face" is actually a
natural rock formation, an isolated mesa where ridges and gullies cast
shadows. The illusion of human features was produced by the combination
of light and shadow that prevailed when the original Viking picture was
taken on a July day in 1976.
The first Surveyor image of the region, which NASA posted on a Web site
in midafternoon (East Coast time), was a dark rectangle with a muddle
of lighter shapes, including what appear to be small impact craters, at
the location where the mile-wide face had appeared in the Viking image.
Subsequently, NASA posted clearer versions of the image.
Groups that believe in the "Case for the Face" (the name of a recent
publication that compiles 18 research papers on the issue) plan
exhaustive analysis of the new images in coming days and weeks, said
Stephen Bassett, of the Paradigm Research Group, a consultant for
leading advocates of the theory that the face is the unnatural product
of intelligent activity.
"There are many layers to this. This is going to be analyzed to death,"
he said. "At this point, there's nothing in that photo that leaps out
at you" to either confirm or eliminate the theory that the feature is
artificial. But he suggested that if someone had sculpted a face a mile
across, leaving it to weather as long as 2 million years, "getting
closer to it is not necessarily going to make it look more like a face."
In addition to extremely close scrutiny of the photos for such
signatures of artificiality as repeating patterns not found in nature
(fractal analysis), pro-face groups plan online chats and interviews
with experts. The new NASA images will be a topic of discussion at
gatherings such as the 10th annual Ozark UFO conference in Eureka
Springs, Ark., which begins Friday.
The supposed face has attracted the attention of engineers, computer
specialists and others with technical training, including some NASA
contract employees.
But some of the more extreme speculation has frustrated mainstream
scientists. Some face partisans have claimed to find a city to the
southwest of the face, complete with temples, fortifications and
monuments with an astronomical orientation.
And some have accused NASA of a vast coverup that included faking the
costly August 1993 failure of the $1 billion Mars Observer spacecraft
just as it arrived at Mars, so the agency could study the face
covertly. NASA scientists have consistently dismissed such a scenario
as not only outrageous but unnatural, against their own self-interest
and, in any case, impossible to pull off.
NASA's latest attempt to resolve the controversy goes only part of the
distance for true believers.
"The real issue is, 'What's the next photo,' " Bassett said. "We're all
waiting for them to take the city itself."
On the Web
*The Global Surveyor image of the controversial area (heavy traffic -
connection is slow)
*Past NASA images of the "face"
*NASA's "face" fact sheet
*NASA press release on the mission change
*Home page of an author who aims to prove scientifically that the
"face" is artificial
=A9 Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
UFO UpDates - Toronto -
updates@globalserve.net
Operated by Errol Bruce-Knapp - ++ 416-696-0304
A Hand-Operated E-Mail Subscription Service for the Study of UFO Related
Phenomena.
To subscribe please send your first and last name to
updates@globalserve.net
Message submissions should be sent to the same address.
|
Link it to the appropriate Ufologist or UFO Topic page. |
Archived as a public service by Area 51 Research Center which is not
responsible for content.
Financial support for this web server is provided by the
Research Center Catalog.
Software by Glenn Campbell.
Technical contact:
webmaster@ufomind.com