SUBJECT: THE MAN BEHIND THE FACE ON MARS FILE: UFO2831
The man behind the face on Mars: How he thinks extraterrestrials and their
architecture may have restructured the entire solar system
RICHARD HOAGLAND
BY OMNI MAG.
Before Richard Hoagland spoke at the United Nations on February 27, 1992, a
person stepped into the Dag Hammarskjold Library Auditorium and asked: "Is a
man from Mars speaking here?" I must confess similar questions ran through my
mind before I first met Hoagland at Omni's New York office. There's no getting
around it: Hoagland has some unusual ideas about Mars. Monuments--a whole
metropolis in fact--he believes, are linked to structures on Earth and the
moon that, in turn, are tied together by an advanced new physics that may have
spawned "hyperdimensional" space technologies the United States government may
have gotten its hands on. Needless to say, these are ideas the mainstream
scientific community wants no part of. That doesn't make Hoagland wrong,
necessarily, but it definitely places him on the fringe.
At first blush, he certainly looks normal enough: a well-groomed, bearded man
of 48 dressed in faultless business attire. Our conversation began on a normal
note, too, with a discussion of parking strategies in Upper Manhattan and the
challenges of finding coffee in offices on Friday afternoon. When we got
around to the subject at hand0--the alleged words described in his 420-page
book, The Monuments of Mars--Hoagland stepped up to the "mike" like a seasoned
pol in the midst of a long campaign. And it has been a long campaign. For 11
years he has crisscrossed the country, trying to get scientists to seriously
consider the possibility that an advanced civilization has left calling cards
of various sizes and shapes all over the solar system. Whoever they were,
Hoagland jests, "they cared enough to leave the very best."
Well--versed in many areas of science and space exploration, Hoagland has held
several high posts at science museums and planetariums since 1965. He's been
space consultant to NBC and CBS News and editor-in-cheif at Star and Sky
magazine. His most far-reaching accomplishment--the plaque on the Pioneer
space probe he conceived with Eric Burgess, cofounder of the British
Interplanetary Society--has left the solar system and is now drifting in
interstellar space. The message carried aboard the spacecraft could outlive
Earth itself, Hoagland claims.
Although closer to home, his current activities are in some ways father out.
For more than a decade, Hoagland has worked with several dozen scientists
investigating the Mars face, a mile-long Sphinxlike protuberance first spotted
in photographs taken by the Viking Orbiter in 1976. During subsequent
examinations of photos of this Martian region known as Cydonia, Hoagland
identified a collection of pyramid-shaped mounds and objects he calls the
city. He and Erol Torun, a cartographer at the Pentagon's Defense Mapping
Agency, conducted an involved geometric analysis of the region. They claim the
Martian geometry--which to the uninitiated looks like a bizarre mishmash of
lines--strikingly resembles the pattern of angles observed among pyramids in
Egypt and Mexico, at Stonehenge, and even recent crop circles. How could this
be? Hoagland suggests an answer: Extraterrestrials may have tinkered with our
planet in ways we're just beginning to appreciate. His investigation, he's
quick to point out, is wholly unrelated to the UFO abduction phenomenon. "Our
work has nothing to do with things that go bump in the night or people
claiming to be snatched from their beds."
No one denies that Hoagland has performed the most detailed analysis of
Cydonia ever undertaken. If anything, critics say, the analysis is too
detailed, given the data available. "Since the pictures are less than ideal,
there is a tendency to overwork them and draw conclusions that may go beyond
reason," says NASA Ames planetary scientist Chris McKay (Omni Interview, July
1992). "There's no doubt the thing looks like a face, but the conclusion that
it was built by some civilization is a huge, huge leap."
Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan argues that given the human propensity for
picking out faces amid random patterns, it's not surprising that somewhere on
the 150 million-square-kilometer surface of Mars we might find something
resembling a human face. To him, this feature is no more remarkable than a
tortilla chip said to display the face of Jesus Christ, and eggplant
supposedly resembling Richard Nixon, or a radar image of Venus containing the
visage of Joseph Stalin.
The scientific community--and NASA in particular--has vested interest in
ignoring him, counters Hoagland, which he attributes, in part, to the "not
invented here" syndrome: "After spending a billion dollars to search for signs
of life on Mars and coming up empty handed, they might be just a little
embarrassed if a small group of amateurs found the evidence that eluded them."
NASA, Hoagland charges, has also engaged in a systematic "pattern of abuse,
ridicule, personal character assassination, distortion of data, and
misrepresentation of the facts going back to 1976."
Hoagland's counterattack has become more than a fulltime job. Through Mars
Mission, the 20,000 member, New Jersey-based public interest group he heads,
he's lobbying to "open the files" on Cydonia and restore "honesty in
government." He has touted his cause on TV, while making appearances at NASA
and the United Nations. In his spare time he tries to raise funds for a
private mission to the moon or Mars. His efforts have been nothing short of
monumental. But the question remains: Is it all an elaborate "delusion," as he
once asked in the book? Is he a latter-day Don Quixote tilting at Martina
sphinxes? Or has he stumbled upon a phenomenon so fantastic the rest of the
world cannot face up to it, despite a body of evidence he now calls
"conclusive?"
Steve Nadis
Omni: After so many years studying something the rest of the world either
hasn't seen or doesn't believe, have you ever doubted your sanity?
Hoagland: I don't think we're crazy. Posing that question in the book was
just a way of expressing my own incredulity, as well as sharing with the
readers the feeling that this stuff is pretty amazing. I grew up on the
Twilight Zone, Buck Rogers, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov.
But I never imagined I'd find myself in the middle of a bona fide
investigation of possible extraterrestrial artifacts. Never. Ever. So I
thought it was important to remind the reader that I'm always asking myself:
Can we prove this; can we test this; can we take this from the realm of
science fiction to the realm of science fact?
Hoagland: The weird stuff by definition is the stuff that doesn't fit, things
not discussed. Exceptions. Aberrations. But in the history of science you
find, first, there are semiperodic revolutions where all of what was accepted
wisdom is tossed out, and the weird stuff of the old becomes the accepted
stuff of the new order. Second, the revolutions are never accomplished by
those in he field--always by outsiders coming in with a fresh point of view.
I've been attracted to the exceptions because they may lead to that big
paradigm shift.
Omni: What give outsiders the edge?
Hoagland: Lack of vested interest. People in the field have their careers and
job security on the line, their house and car payments, maybe kids in college.
They have reason not to want to overthrow a system that's rewarding them quite
well. Outsiders don't have the reputation to protect, so they're more likely
to pursue an aberrant idea. If you're in a field for 10,20,30 years, you
develop a certain way of looking at things. You develop blinders. The thing can
be right in front of you, staring you in the face, and you don't see it.
In the early Seventies, when the American Apollo program was winding to a
close, the environment had become the big rage at CBS, where I worked as an
adviser to Walter Cronkite. I could have gone into toxic sludge and made a
nice career of it, but I decided not to because I was as sure then as I am
today that if the human race is going to have a destiny, it has to incorporate
space in a big way. After many battles with the network, I decided to leave in
1972 and privately pursue space as a critical avenue for the future of the
human species. At the time, of course, I didn't know that I'd find evidence
that may be the lever to get society to realize how important space is. If we
find evidence the human race is not alone, it's not going to be on this
planet, but through the monuments of Mars and maybe the stuff on the moon, and
that will have vindicated my faith that, yes, this is important.
Omni: How did you react when you first saw the face? Did it make a big
impression?
Hoagland: Actually, it didn't. I had two opportunities to take it seriously
and rejected it twice. I have great sympathy for people who say: "Oh my God!
Come on, give me a break. This can't be real. "Because I've been there. I was
at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1976 when Viking project scientist
Gerry Soffen showed us this kind of quirky face and said: "Isn't it cute what
tricks of light and shadow can do?" We all giggled and went about our
business. It had to be a trick of lighting. Absolutely no way this thing could
be real.
Then I went to Boulder in 1981 to attend the "Case for Mars" conference. One
night I saw a group of people staring at a projection screen with a big blowup
of the face on Mars. Except this face looked much more striking than the
knobby, gnarly thing we'd been shown at JPL. Vince DiPietro and Greg Molenaar,
engineers at Goddard Space Flight Center who'd gone through the original NASA
data and done state-of-the-art image processing, gave me a copy of their
monograph and I though, "Nah, it's just freak of nature." I took the
monograph one, put it on a shelf, and went back to the stuff I was doing.
Omni: When did the idea finally take hold?
Hoagland: In 1983, DiPietro sent me a packet of stuff, photographic samples of
their work on Mars. In the quietness of my den, it was just me and the
photographs, and I thought, "Damn, this is peculiar!" The images were very
crisp. They brought out details totally unavailable in the raw data. For the
first time I considered: What if this isn't just a weird, eroded mountain?
What if we're looking at an artifact? That simple though set in motion a
snowballing process that continues to this day.
Omni: Was it a question of timing, finding yourself in the right frame of
mind?
Hoagland: Probably of having the data and peace and quiet to really think
about it. I began to wonder that it'd mean for the human species to have
absolute, factual knowledge that the race is not alone. Not as a distant radio
signal from Alpha Centauri or somewhere out there, but as a set of existing
ruins in our own back yard, accessible with late twentieth-century technology.
Balancing the small probability of the against the overwhelming, almost
incalculable importance, I realized that, damn it, this data required somebody
doing something more.
Omni: Let's talk about your big breakthrough--the discovery of something you
call the city on Mars.
Hoagland: Well, I was looking down at the Viking imagery, photographed from
1,000 miles overhead, studying this striking, bilaterally symmetric image of a
humanoid face. Making the comparisons down a center line, it's about 90 to 95
percent symmetric. There's no easy way for geology to give you that kind of
symmetry, Then I started wondering where one might go to get a good view of
this sculpture. Examining the left-hand side of the photograph, I spotted a
collection of pyramid-shaped objects. The middle of this complex presented an
exquisite view of the face looking across the Martian desert.
In measuring this complex with a protractor and straightedge, I noticed
unexpected alignments. There was way too much order, pattern, linearity.
Later, when Erol Torun joined me, I uncovered a redundant, specific geometry
in the collection of pyramids we call the "city" and in the face--a specific,
repeating pattern of angles, mathematical constants, and equations, It became
apparent we weren't looking at pyramids in the Egyptian sense; some appeared
to be hollow.
Omni: You assume that at one time these may have been living quarters?
Hoagland: Yes. Considering the current Martian environment--mostly carbon
dioxide at one one-hundredth the air pressure at sea level on Earth--it's
pretty obvious if someone were to live on Mars, he or she would need some kind
of artificial environment. I was reminded of the arcologies, architectural
ecologies proposed by Paolo Soleri, which are like Biosphere II in Arizona:
large, enclosed environments with greenhouses, factories, and energy systems--
huge three-dimensional condominiums, miles in diameter. The things we're
seeing on Mars, the individual structures making up the city, seem to be
pyramids on the order of a mile or two in diameter. This is roughly what
Soleri was figuring is necessary to accommodate several million inhabitants.
Omni: In the book you admit that in the early stages of the discovery process,
you desired there to be a city. Might you have , to some extent, willed this
city into existence?
Hoagland: No. I was sharing with the reader my constant ambivalence. I'd love
this to be true, but also I'm saying to myself, come on, it can't be. We've
been brought up in a culture which for the last 30 years has shown us a dead
and lifeless solar system. People think the only place they'll see aliens or
lost civilizations is on Star Trek. Certainly not in photos taken of any piece
of real estate in the solar system. I was simply trying to be honest. I didn't
immediately embrace this; I had to be dragged. Had to drag myself, kicking and
screaming, inch by inch, micron by micron. Only when we got the numerical
data, this incredible, precise geometry giving us algorithms, a new physics,
and predictive examples of astronomy, could I go back and say "It has to be a
city." This phenomenon has to be a complex designed by intelligent beings,
because too much stuff checks out. There's a lane of circumstantial evidence
four miles wide.
Omni: Maybe so, but some critics like Carl Sagan aren't convinced.
Hoagland: Sagan has this curious argument, "Extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence," with which I flatly and totally disagree. That little
syllogism contains a fatal trap: the idea that you know enough to decide which
is an extraordinary claim. Who's in a position to judge? I can always shut you
off by claiming your evidence is insufficient because of the extraordinary
nature of the claim. The critics keep changing the rules of the game--with
each new piece of objective, scientific data this investigation has marshalled
in favor of the "intelligence hypothesis." They keep moving the goal line,
meaning there's no way we can win.
Omni: So you consider this an impossible burden of proof?
Hoagland: You bet. It allows people to kill an idea by claiming that (a) it's
extraordinary, and (b) there's not enough evidence. It fosters a subjectivity
that is bottomless.
Omni: You're suggesting people haven't looked into your claims for political
reasons. But might it be the scientific evidence you've put forward just isn't
compelling enough to warrant a closer look?
Hoagland: Well, they haven't looked, so how could they know? That we have the
data on the table, and the powers within NASA or above and beyond have not
seen fit to test our hypothesis, says something about the shortcomings of the
politics of this phenomenon, not the science of it.
Omni: But on a technical note, if you might address one point critics have
raised--the tendency to see faces in clouds, on mountains and the moon. The
human face is the most familiar pattern we're conditioned to recognize.
Hoagland: That's Sagan's argument, and it falls apart because out of all those
mesas we've looked at, only one resembles a human face. It also happens to be
one that's part of a complex possessing stunning geometry. The extraordinary
details we've found are as specific as finding New York City. What are the
odds of finding a series of rectilinear structures laid out on a slender
granite slab in the northeast region of the United States? You could say
there's a tendency to see rectilinearly, which there is. Somebody built this
rectilinear table, but they did it because that's what Euclidean geometry and
the penchant for intelligence compels us to do--to order the universe in
geometric patterns. And that is they key to decoding the features we're seeing
on Mars.
Omni: What other evidence supports your view?
Hoagland: Near the face, we find a collection of pyramidlike objects that, in
fact, morphologically, are pyramids. Hard, objective science demonstrates
we're not dealing with "tricks of light and shadow," but with actual pyramidal
and/or facelike objects. The point of contention now is their origin. Are they
pyramidal and facelike because of natural processes--wind, water, erosion--or
were they built?
One way to answer that question is by factual analysis, objective computer
criteria for discerninganomalies from natural background patterns. Mark
Carlotto and Michael Stein used this technique and picked out the face as the
most nonfactual, that is, the weirdest, most unnatural piece of Martian real
estate in the several thousand square miles we looked at. Finally, we have my
real contribution--the discovery of a geometric pattern linking several
objects within a few miles of each other on this Martian plane. It's a
recurring theme whose purpose seems to introduce us to a set of equations
opening up a whole new window on physics. This geometric pattern then argues
strongly that this complex was designed. There is meaning.
Omni: What is this meaning?
Hoagland: The geometry apparently was designed to communicate two fundamental
constants of nature: pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the
diameter, and e, the base of natural logarithms. When you divide pi onto e,
you get the ratio, 0.865. That number shows up within and between these
objects dozens of times. The odds of that happening by chance are
astronomical. That geometry and mathematical code confirms predictions made by
other researchers, particularly in astrophysics. Basically, it says spinning
objects like stars or planets should show upwellings of energy at specific
latitudes--19.5 degrees north or south, for example. Starting with the sun and
moving all the way out to Neptune, this prediction is confirmed.
Omni: Can you say a bit more about this new physics?
Hoagland: This theory, based on "hyperdimensional: mathematics, appears to
provide a fundamental connection between the four forces of nature. In our
universe energy flows downhill. Heat goes from hot to cold, from higher to
lower energy. So we considered that the math at Cydonia is telling us about
higher dimensions. A spinning object such as a planet, connected to a higher
dimensions. A spinning object such as a planet, connected to a higher and
lower dimension, should exhibit a weird energy anomaly, an unusual
manifestation from an invisible, higher dimension that shows up as an energy
excess in our normal three-dimensional existence. We found examples of this in
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, all of which are radiating more energy
than they're taking in form any observable source.
Omni: I a new mathematics and physics is being communicated, who is doing the
communicating and why?
Hoagland: Suppose we're seeing on Mars a sophisticated, high-tech culture with
access to technology based on a physics that is ligh-years beyond our current
thinking. Then maybe, just maybe, this civilization might leave us, the "new
kids on the block," clues, remnants, artifacts, to help us along. We have many
examples on Earth of advanced cultures lending a helping hand to less advanced
ones. We're losing the race between technology and population. Unless we
introduce something radically new to grab everybody's attention and make them
act like they're all part of the same species and stop killing other species
on this planet--we're doomed.
Omni: You figure these folks came from outside the solar system?
Hoagland: Do you see any place in the solar system where a high-tech,
indigenous civilization could have originated? I went through the list of
candidates and eliminated every place. If somebody did something on Mars, they
had to come from beyond the solar system. That was my position until a few
days ago. Now, some new data has come to the fore that's incredibly
speculative, but worth considering. There's a string of rubble between Mars
and Jupiter called the asteroids. There are comets. The origin of asteroids
and comets is ambiguous. The existing model holds that they are bits of debris
left over from the formation of the solar system. Now a new model suggests
asteroids and comets are actually remnants of a planet that exploded. If so,
where did it come from, and why did it disappear?
One possibility is that it used to be inhabited by a high-tech civilization
that developed a technology capable of destroying worlds. If this view is
confirmed, it will lead to a new theory for where the builders of Mars'
monuments came from. And a striking object lesson as well. It would be
sobering indeed, to confirm high-tech predecessors in the solar system that
blew themselves and their entire planet away because they were too ignorant to
handle what they'd figured out.
Omni: How could you verity such an incredibly speculative proposition?
Hoagland: We could rendezvous with a chunk of an asteroid and see if there's
something down there. We could look at other bodies in the solar system. If
we're not dealing with a visit from outside the solar system, then odds are
they put colonies not just on Mars, but on the moon and other places. There is
a whole bunch of real estate out there to visit. We've been looking at the
moon for two years. If someone built the monuments of Mars, maybe they would
have appreciated the biological role of the e moon upon Earth in the
hyperdimensional model. But the moon has 15 million square miles, so where do
you look? The math and geometry made a set of predictions, and when we started
looking at the most obvious site--on space-based, NASA-based, and Earth-based
photographs--we found a large crater containing an equilateral triangle, and a
series of stunning clues and structures that are positively baffling, if
they're not artificial.
Our evidence strongly suggests that at one time, there was some kind of large-
scale habitation and construction on the lunar structure. Again, we seem to be
looking at arcologies, enclosed environments. The great advantage, in contrast
to the couple of photographs we have of Cydonia, is that we have millions of
pictures of the moon, including almost two million photographs taken recently
by the Pentagon's unmanned Clementine spacecraft.
Omni: Just how big are these lunar structures, anyway?
Hoagland: Very big--hundreds of miles across and tens of miles high. The moon
is an easy place to build very large structures, with one-sixth Earth's
gravity, no hurricanes, wind, thunderstorms, or earthquakes.
Omni: Why didn't the Apollo astronauts see anything?
Hoagland: Well, when I was going through the Apollo transcripts, I found
comments suggesting some astronauts did see the things we have now
rediscovered on the photographs, but didn't recognize what they were seeing.
They were told they were going to a lifeless, uninhabited world and were never
briefed about the possibility of seeing artificial structures.
Omni: How could they have been prepared otherwise?
Hoagland: A 1961 Brookings Institution report, commissioned by NASA, discussed
this very contingency--that artifacts may be discovered by our space
activities on the moon, Mars, or Venus. The study described two viable options
for confirming extraterrestrial intelligence. One was a search for artifacts
in the solar system; the other, a radio search for signals from
extraterrestrials light-years away. The only E.T.s we ever expected to find
were those who call us on the phone from Alpha Centauri. The notion of finding
alien artifacts, somewhere, was considered politically unacceptable.
Omni: What, in you opinion, is behind this apparent bias?
Hoagland: The Brookings document discussed the possibility of finding
artifacts and E.T. radio signals and considered the potential risk to our
civilization. But what' the risk in artifacts? They communicate information
that will change the status quo in science, technology, anthropology, and so
on. New technology could lead to bigger, better things, including perhaps,
weapons. Ultimately, Brookings was saying what I said a few moments ago:
Unbridled knowledge in the hands of children can destroy a planet. So, the
only safe course, or so Brookings recommended, would be to not tell the
American people of such a discovery.
Omni: Since such a revelation could overthrow everything we know, how should
it be presented to the public?
Hoagland: Look at what we've lived with for the last 40 years. Every morning,
as kids got up and every night as they went to bed, they had to consider
seriously that they wouldn't wake up the next morning, that somewhere, someone
would push the wrong button and 50,000 nuclear warheads would turn this planet
into a flaming pyre. Somehow we dealt with this awesome, frightening
capability by openly discussing nuclear policy and proliferation. We now need
an adult attitude toward extraterrestrial intelligence whereby we can
rationally asses the possibility the human race is not alone.
Omin: How might it "change the history of human consciousness?
Hoagland: The standard biological models sys the human race is the result of
trillions of random decisions made in Earth's isolated environment. If you
roll the dice again, you'll come to the conclusion that, yes, you might have
intelligence on another planet, but it couldn't possibly look like us. It's
against that backdrip that we go to Mars. We take a set of pictures. And find
a mile-long 1,500-foot-high effigy that looks like us. Since you can pretty
effectively rule out that we did it, you're only left with a few
possibilities: an indigenous Martian culture, and exterior culture from beyond
the solar system, of a variant--another culture on another planet somewhere in
the solar system.
The problem is, it looks like us. Standard evolutionary biology says it can't
look like us. So it either means something about biology is totally whacko and
we don't understand it at all, or there has been contact between somebody out
there and somebody down here. In that case, we may be looking at some kind of
calling card specifically designed to capture our attention. It says very
simply that either the universe creates, over and over agin, conscious
sentient beings in our image or that somebody went to a lot of trouble to put
a version of us down on the Martian surface to tell us about prior contact.
Either scenario is awesome! If there is a universal template forcing
intelligence to assume a human form, that's pretty amazing; the other
possibility is that aliens have somehow meddled in the affairs of Earth.
Omni: How far do you suppose this "medding" might have gone?
Hoagland: Perhaps the face on Mars is evidence someone has used genetic
engineering to influence biological development in this environment for
reasons that are currently unknown.
Omni: Why would someone do that? For kicks? Profit? Altruism?
Hoagland: Who knows? But suppose somebody who knew a lot more than we currently
know arrived here, looked around, and said: "Whoops! They're not going to make
it." And they did something to give us a better chance, something enabling us
to pass on the favor some day. It may have been a little tinkering or a lot of
tinkering. Suppose they also decided to leave us a memorial, so when we grew
up and to to Mars we could thank them.
Omni: If true, that would cause a revolution in science and philosophy.
Hoagland: The history of science or philosophy can be viewed as a series of
successive dethronements. A few thousand years ago, we--whichever people we
were--considered ourselves the chosen of God. Things moved along and we found
maybe we're not so chosen, but at least Earth was the center of the universe.
Then along came Copernicus. For awhile, we clung to the idea the sun is still
the center of the universe, until we found it's just an average star on the
periphery of an average galaxy in a universe of billions and billions of
galaxies. But at least we were still the only sentient beings in the entire
cosmos. Maybe one reason people refuse to seriously consider the artifacts on
Mars or the moon has to do with the "last dethronement." If we were to find
evidence of structures in our own back yard, we'd no longer even be the first
civilization in this solar system. It was once someone else's!
Omni: What do you see as your role in this "last dethronement?
Hoagland: Now I'm just excited about having the chance to explore this prospect
in my lifetime--just being part of this enormous revolution, being able to
continue the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and to try to figure it
all out. That is much more exciting than any place in history. The struggle
will not be over when NASA finally, grudgingly acknowledges there are
artifacts. That confirmation of our discovery is not the end point at all. It's
just the beginning. It opens the door.
END OF INTERVIEW
Medium-angle, unenhanced original Apollo photograph, taken from lunar orbit 70
miles above the moon in the vicinity of the lunar craters Ukert and
Triesnecker. The mission photograph AS10-32-4822, was acquired by an Apollo
astronaut using a hand-held 70 mm camera. Date: May 1969, mission: Apollo 10--
pre-landing lunar orbital test flight for Apollo 11. The highly reflective
structures and background fragmentary geometric pattern are completely
inexplicable by any know lunar analysis carried out by NASA. The independent
scientific investigation currently being conducted by the Mars Mission (into
this and other NASA lunar photographs--see text) indicates an increasing
likelihood that these anomalous objects are in fact the product of intelligent
design. The largest anomalous fragment in the photograph is termed "the
Castle." It appears to be a manufactured, highly geometric object--exact size
currently unknown--embedded in a "gridlike" framework (remnants of a former
"lunar dome") estimated to extend approximately 30 miles above the lunar
surface. This particular version of the original Apollo photograph (one of
several Apollo 10 images discovered mysteriously archived under this identical
frame number) was supplied to the Mars Mission by sources inside NASA.
Subsequently, several public versions of this remarkable Apollo photograph--
complete with the Castle and the grid--have been confirmed.
In this computer-enhanced, false-color close-up of frame III-84M, another
remarkable object is seen just to the left of the Shard. Termed "the Cube," it
appears to be a seven-mile-high, one-mile-wide, geometric glasslike structure
composed of myriad "subcubes"--suspended in a darker, highly eroded, oqually
geometric matrix. The colors correspond to differing light intensities on the
original Lunar Orbiter frame: yellow and red indicating the brightest, shading
to green, blue, and magenta for the dimmest. Note the most intense light
scattering (red/yellow) is coming from the highly geometric interior of the
Cube (as opposed to its exterior surfaces). This is totally inconsistent with
any geologic object, but is highly consistent with a degraded, manufactured,
semitransparent, eroded glass structure. The highly eroded condition of this
anomalous feature, and its surrounding, darker structure, is thought to be due
to prolonged meteor bombardment--indicating literally millions of years of
exposure on the airless lunar surface.
This false-color, medium-angle shot of the distant lunar horizon in III-84M--
viewed from the unmanned 1967 Lunar Orbiter III, orbiting 30 miles above the
moon--reveals two striking lunar anomalies together: the Shard (right) and the
Cube (left), extending vertically miles above the airless lunar surface. In
this computer-enhanced view, the bright line slanting upward from the left is
a photographic frame line of the original Orbiter III mosaic; note that the
structures are not aligned with (or at right angles to) this prominent
photographic feature, but are aligned with the local vertical--toward the
center of the moon. Light intensities of the original film have been changed
by the computer to corresponding colors, to bring out the fainter extension of
a highly eroded structural "tower" connecting the Cube downward with the lunar
surface seven miles below; surrounding this lower can be seen other hints of
sparkling, fragmentary "structure"--indicating that these bright features are
only the surviving remnants of a once far more complete, much larger,
intelligently manufactured structure on the moon. Photographic experts,
geologists, and manufacturing engineers with the Mars Mission have ruled out
simple photographic defects or geologic features to explain these objects;
increasing evidence (from other NASA missions) and expanding analysis indicates
that these light-scattering features--in an airless, cloudless lunar vacuum--
most likely represent actual surviving remnants of some type of ancient "lunar
dome-like structure," possibly once covering much of Sinus Medii--perhaps
constructed by visitors colonizing the moon with extremely advanced
engineering technology millions of years ago. Return lunar missions will
either confirm or deny this hypothesis.
Lick Observatory photograph of the Sinus Medii central region of the full
moon. The large white circle is the rim of the sixteen-mile-diameter crater,
Ukert, located just north of Sinus Medii, viewed from Earth through a large
telescope under "high noon" lighting. Note the remarkably perfect equilateral
triangle darkening the crater floor. It was this striking geometric symbol--
directly connected to the mathematical decoding of the "Monuments of Mars"
(see text in accompanying article)--which led Richard C. Hoagland in 1992 to
examine this region of the moon for potential alien artifacts.
A ruined skyscraper on the moon? This striking object has been termed "the
Shard," a name deliberately chosen by the investigation to imply that it could
have once been part of a significantly larger feature. Photographed on film,
scanned, and radioed back to Earth in February 1967 by NASA's unmanned Lunar
Orbiter III(III-84M), the structure is a vertical, "swollen" column--casting a
distinctive corresponding shadow--standing at least a mile and a half above
the sharp horizon of the airless lunar surface. (The geometric crosslike
feature seen above the column is a camera registration mark, placed on the
Orbiter film before the spacecraft left Earth.) The Shard is located just
southwest of the Sinus Medii central region of the moon. Note carefully the
geometric detail visible inside the swollen middle section of the Shard; there
is no plausible geological explanation for this, or any other aspect of this
striking object.
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