The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [28]
Intermittently, ‘The Face’ has attracted attention, both in the United States and in the former Soviet Union. The headline in the 20 November 1984 Weekly World News, a supermarket tabloid not celebrated for its integrity, read:
SOVIET SCIENTIST’S AMAZING CLAIM: RUINED TEMPLES FOUND ON MARS. SPACE PROBE DISCOVERS REMAINS OF 50,000-YEAR-OLD CIVILIZATION.
The revelations are attributed to an anonymous Soviet source and breathlessly describe discoveries made by a nonexistent Soviet space vehicle.
But the story of ‘The Face’ is almost entirely an American one. It was found by one of the Viking orbiters in 1976. There was an unfortunate dismissal of the feature by a project official as a trick of light and shadow, which prompted a later accusation that NASA was covering up the discovery of the millennium. A few engineers, computer specialists and others - some of them contract employees of NASA - worked on their own time digitally to enhance the image. Perhaps they hoped for stunning revelations. That’s permissible in science, even encouraged - as long as your standards of evidence are high. Some of them were fairly cautious and deserve to be commended for advancing the subject. Others were less restrained, deducing not only that the Face was a genuine, monumental sculpture of a human being, but claiming to find a city nearby with temples and fortifications.* From spurious arguments, one writer announced that the monuments had a particular astronomical orientation - not now, though, but half a million years ago - from which it followed that the Cydonian wonders were erected in that remote epoch. But then how could the builders have been human? Half a million years ago, our ancestors were busy mastering stone tools and fire. They did not have spaceships.
[* The general idea is quite old, going back at least a century to the Martian canal myth of Percival Lowell. As one of many examples, P.E. Cleator, in his 1936 book Rockets Through Space: The Dawn of Interplanetary Travel, speculated: ‘On Mars, the crumbling remains of ancient civilizations may be found, mutely testifying to the one-time glory of a dying world.’]
The Martian Face is compared to ‘similar faces... constructed in civilizations on Earth. The faces are looking up at the sky because they’re looking up to God.’ Or the Face was constructed by the survivors of an interplanetary war that left the surface of Mars (and the Moon) pockmarked and ravaged. What causes all those craters anyway? Is the Face a remnant of a long-extinct human civilization? Were the builders originally from Earth or Mars? Could the Face have been sculpted by interstellar visitors stopping briefly on Mars? Was it left for us to discover? Might they also have come to Earth and initiated life here? Or at least human life? Were they, whoever they were, gods? Much fervent speculation is evoked.
More recently, claims have been made for a connection between ‘monuments’ on Mars and ‘crop circles’ on Earth; of inexhaustible supplies of energy waiting to be extracted from ancient Martian machines; and of a massive NASA cover-up to hide the truth from the American public. Such pronouncements go far beyond more incautious speculation about enigmatic landforms.
When, in August 1993, the Mars Observer spacecraft failed within hailing distance of Mars, there were those who accused NASA of faking the mishap so it could study the Face in detail without having to release the images to the public. (If so, the charade is quite elaborate: all the experts on Martian geomorphol-ogy know nothing about it, and some of us have been working hard to design new missions to Mars less vulnerable to the malfunction that destroyed Mars Observer.) There was even a handful of pickets outside the gates of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, worked up over this supposed abuse of power.
The tabloid Weekly World News for 14 September 1993 devoted its front page to the headline