************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * * * * ************************************************************** The Viking mission to Mars in 1976 returned over 60,000 photographs of the red planet's surface. For a bit of levity, NASA released a photo of the Cydonia region, featuring a rocky mesa that looked like a face. NASA sometimes tries too hard to be cute. It once compared Voyager photos of a Jovian moon to a bubbling pizza. In 1979 two programmers working for a NASA contractor rediscovered the Mars face photos. With no training in geology, they pronounced the face artificial, ostensibly made by some long dead Martian race. The UFO crowd ran wild with the images and began searching for other structures near the face. They found a fort, a city, and pyramids in the murky gray scale images. Space scientists attributed the face to light, shadow, and the human mind. The photo was taken when the light was at a low angle. Humans are hardwired by evolution to see faces in the blurriest of images. When you're a baby, a face means your mother. Your mother means food. (See aspsky.org/html/tnl/25/25.html for an interesting overview as well as images of Henson muppets NASA has been covering up!) Believers in the Mars face cover up grew when science journalist Richard Hoagland took his theories about ancient artifacts on Mars and the Moon to the net in March 1996 (see www.enterprisemission.com). In a series of press releases posted to net.news, Hoagland promised to reveal suppressed evidence of structures on the Moon. His hidden evidence turned out to be Apollo photos that have been in the public domain for a quarter century. When NASA announced the Global Surveyor mission, Mars "facers" and skeptics hoped new images of the Cydonia region would put the matter to rest. Unfortunately, patience is not in the vocabulary of many facers. The Cydonia region was not high on NASA's target list. There are more interesting scientific targets. For example, Mars' Olympus Mons is the largest known volcano in the solar system. The Society for Planetary SETI Research (see the SPSR's web site at www.mcdanielreport.com) lobbied NASA to raise Cydonia's priority. In what seemed a remarkable turn of events, NASA complied with the wishes of the facers, raising the priority about as high as it could go. Some of the first pictures out of Surveyor would be of the face. Raw data would be posted to the net as soon as it came in. This isn't the first time NASA has met with and given voice to its kookier opponents. Shortly before the Apollo 11 moon shot, the space agency's chief met with Rev. Ralph Abertnathy, the leader of a populist anti-poverty/anti-Apollo group. Despite the many troubles Abertnathy had given NASA over the years, the reverend and some of his followers were given in-demand VIP seating for the historic launch. As promised, NASA posted the raw data within hours of acquisition. Hey, guess what? It looked nothing like a carved face. Matter settled? Nope. When a scientific theory in wrapped in a conspiracy theory, one can insert a conspiracy at any point to account for a lack of data. Shortly before Surveyor's launch, I posted to alt.alien.visitors a flow chart helping facers generate a typical conspiracy theory at ever turn of the mission (see www.netizen.org/arc-hive/UFO_0034.TXT). The SPSR, surprisingly, accepted the photos as tentative nullification of the face hypothesis. Richard Hoagland, however, was a different matter. Hoagland quickly reposted the NASA images on his site but offered little initial comment. Within days, he came out swinging. As my flow chart predicted, Hoagland accused NASA of releasing doctored photos as raw data. As proof of tampering, Hoagland claimed the photos were missing grey levels. No one was quite certain what information could have been surreptitiously deleted along with the "missing" grey levels. Malin Space Science Systems, the company that actually made Surveyor's camera (see barsoom.msss.com), applied Hoagland's own methodology to the face picture from the original Viking mission and found it was missing more grey levels. A Malin engineer concludes "If it doesn't look like a face, it isn't because gray levels are missing."