Chapter One

The Monuments of Mars

One of the core problems most readers have with the question of extraterrestrial artifacts is that the story starts not at the beginning, when the artifacts may have been built, or even the middle, when they may have been abandoned, but very near the end.

 

The possible existence of alien artifacts didn't get its initial push into mass consciousness until July 25, 1976, when a project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory named Toby Owen put a magnifying glass over Viking Orbiter 1 frame 35A72 and exclaimed "Hey, look at this!" [Fig. 1-1]


After the initial splash created by what came to be known as "The Face on Mars," NASA held a daily press briefing in which the Face was the unquestioned highlight.

 

Gerald Soffen, a Viking project scientist, addressed the assembled press, including at the time one Richard C. Hoagland. Soffen introduced the Face image with the statement,

"Isn't it peculiar what tricks of light and shadow can do...? When we took another picture a few hours later, it all went away; it was just a trick, just the way the light fell on it."12

That last statement was later proven to be an outright falsehood, and it eventually became the first chink in the armor of the previously un-assailed integrity of the space agency.

 

Although the Face made newspaper headlines all over the world the next day, no journalist, including Richard C. Hoagland, took it seriously. They all accepted NASA's explanation that there were disconfirming photos taken later that same Martian day.


Yet the image of the Face apparently caused quite a bit of consternation at JPL.

 

The Viking missions actually consisted of four Vehicles - two Landers and two Orbiters grouped together and called Viking 1 and Viking 2, respectively. The Landers would separate from the Orbiters and descend to the planet's surface to test for signs of life and take pictures from the Martian surface.

 

The first Viking Lander put down on July 20, 1976 in the Chryse Planitia region of Mars, sending back photograph after photograph of the planet's surface.

 

Cydonia was the selected landing site of the second of the Viking Landers, but within a few days of the first "Face" image, 35A72, rumblings began about changing the Viking 2 landing site.


Cydonia (designated landing site B.l, 44.3°N, 10°W) had been chosen as the Viking 2 prime site because it was low, about five to six kilometers below the mean Martian surface, and because it was near the southernmost extremity of the wintertime north polar hood.

 

B-l also had the advantage of being in line with the first landing site, so the Viking 1 Orbiter could relay data from the second Lander while the second Orbiter mapped the poles and other parts of Mars during the proposed extended mission. While this was considered a good spot to find water, Viking project scientist Hal Masursky was worried about the geology of the region.

 

He asked David Scott, who had prepared the geology maps, to work up a special hazard map for B-l.

 

After studying the map, Masursky came to the conclusion that the area was not "landable." This analysis, of course, was made with maps based on Mariner 9 photographs.

 

He told Tom Young and Jim Martin, however, that there was one hope; wind-borne material may have mantled the rough terrain and covered "up all those nasties we see."


So the ostensible reason for changing the targeted landing site was that Cydonia was suddenly considered "too rocky" for the Viking Lander to risk a touchdown. It was further claimed that the "northern latitude" of Cydonia was partly to blame for this rough surface, and a more suitable landing sight would be sought farther south. In the end, Viking 2 set down in a region known as Utopia Planitia, an even more northerly and rocky site than Cydonia.13


Nobody thought much of the venue change at the time, but since their new choice for a landing site contradicted their reasons for scuttling Cydonia, it seemed that somebody at JPL was nervous enough about the Face to make sure Viking stayed well away from it.

 

One NASA scientist, nonplussed by the odd flip-flop on the landing site, compared the choice to landing in the Sahara desert on Earth to look for life, rather than a more hospitable climate.14

 

In an even more bizarre decision, NASA took two more high resolution images of Cydonia - 070A11 and 070A13 - in mid-August, well after they decided the region was unsuitable for a landing. In doing so, they sacrificed precious Orbiter resources that could have been used to photograph another presumably more suitable region of Mars.

 

Had they seen something in 035A72 that made them curious?


Things were pretty quiet on the Cydonia front after that until 1979, when a couple of imaging specialists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Vince Dipietro and Greg Molenaar, decided to look up the Face.

 

They quickly found 035A72 (labeled simply "Head" in the Viking image files) and their early enhancements seemed to argue against the "trick of light and shadow" explanation. They then decided to look for other possible images of the Face taken on other orbits.

 

They were surprised to find both that potentially interesting images of the Face taken on subsequent orbits seemed to have disappeared, and there seemed to be no trace of the "disconfirming photographs" that Gerald Soffen had alluded to 5 years earlier.

 

After an exhaustive search of the Viking archives, they discovered a second misfiled Face image, 70A13, taken 35 orbits later at a 17° higher sun angle. They never did find the supposed "disconfirming" image and subsequently established that since the next Viking orbit took it nowhere near Cydonia and was at Martian nighttime, no such image could conceivably exist.


They then began to seek out other input. Although stymied in their attempts to get articles on the Face published in the peer-reviewed journals, Dipietro and Molenaar eventually managed to get some of their enhancements of the Face into the hands of Richard C. Hoagland.

 

Although Hoagland had requested the prints in order to study the image enhancement technique (called S.P.I.T.) being used by Dipietro and Molenaar rather than the Face itself, he was intrigued by what he saw. After some discussions with them Hoagland was able to secure funding for the first Independent Mars Investigation under the auspices of the Stanford Research Institute.


From the beginning, Hoagland realized that the question of the Face required special consideration.

 

 As far as any members of the IMI knew, no one had ever attempted such an investigation before, and there were therefore no set rules as to how the "Face problem" should be approached. Working from the idea that if the Face were indeed artificial it would likely be beyond the experience of geologists and planetary scientists, Hoagland determined that the research required a group with a broad cross section of skills from the various "hard" and "soft" sciences.

 

This "multidisciplinary" approach allowed the original members of the IMI to examine the Face from every possible scientific perspective, and to cross-reference their results with a ready-made peer review panel.


What they found only deepened the mystery. After close scrutiny of both 035A72 and 070A13, some initial conclusions were immediately evident.


Since the Face was not a profile view as seen in terrestrial rock faces like the Old Man in the Mountain in New Jersey, but rather a direct, overhead view more akin to the presidential monument at Mount Rushmore, they quickly decided against the idea they were just "seeing things." The Face seemed to have specific characteristics of human visages, including a brow ridge, eye sockets, a full mouth and a nasal protuberance.

 

The higher sun angle image 070A13 showed that the beveled platform upon which the Face was seated appeared to be in the range of 90% symmetrical, despite the presence of a data error in the image that distorted the area around the eastern "jaw."


This second image also confirmed the presence of a second "eye socket," and that the level upon which the facial features rested was uniform in height and symmetrical in layout at least as far down as the "mouth." This image also eventually revealed (under enhancements by Dr. Mark Carlotto) what appeared to be teeth in the mouth, bilaterally crossed lines on the forehead and lateral striping on the western half. Both images also showed a mark of some kind, dubbed the "teardrop," on the western side of the face just below the eye socket.


Later, using a "bit slice" imaging technique, Dipietro found what he claimed was a spherical "pupil" in the western eye socket. It will be important later to remember that the critics of the investigation, among them Dr. Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems (who controls the camera for the current Mars Global Surveyor probe), claimed that the "pupil" was not really there and was beyond the resolution limits of the data.


But the most controversial features by far were Carlotto's "teeth."


Dr. Mark Carlotto had been brought in to the second Mars research group organized by Hoagland, the Mars Investigation Group, in 1985. He used new imaging techniques to bring out more detail than Dipietro and Molenaar's earlier method had from the two Viking images. In both of the original Viking images (35A72 and 70A13), there were fine but obvious structures in the mouth that seemed to represent teeth [Fig. 1-2].

 

One of the key tests for the artificiality of the Face has centered on this issue. In fact, it's hard to imagine a more decisive test of artificiality then the representation of teeth in the mouth. Dr. Malin apparently realized this as well, because he made a special effort to debunk the presence of teeth in the Viking data by placing fake images of the "teeth" on his website.

 

He also went well out of his way to misrepresent the arguments made by the researchers advocating the presence of "Teeth." 15


One of the first contentions made against the presence of actual teeth was the claim that they were merely artifacts of the image enhancement process. However, the possibility that a teeth-like set of artifacts could appear on two very different (although covering much of the same area) images in precisely the same location are non-existent.

 

It is even less likely when you consider that there are no other appearances of teeth-like "artifacts" anywhere else in either image, and the features are well beyond the range of any individual data errors. Finally, the two images are oriented at differing perspectives relative to the pixel grids.

 

In spite of this, Malin and others have persisted in their mischaracterization of the issue.



The City and Other Anomalies at Cydonia

Hoagland was the first to realize that all of this detail was ultimately meaningless if it turned out that the Face was an isolated landform.

 

No matter how much it looked like a Face, if it was all by itself, with no evidence of any civilization around it to have constructed the monument, then it could simply be a marvelous trick of erosion and shadow after all.


So Hoagland and the members of the investigation began to look in the immediate vicinity of the Face to see if there was any other evidence of anomalous objects nearby. Dipietro and Molenaar had previously noted a cluster of "pyramidal" mountains to the west of the Face, and they had also pointed out a massive object (1.5 km in height) to the south that appeared to be a four-sided pyramidal mountain. Hoagland dubbed this cluster of mountains the "City," and the massive pyramidal mountain the "D&M Pyramid" [Fig. 1-3], in honor of Dipietro and Molenaar.

 

Enhancements by Carlotto revealed that the "D&M" seemed to be a five-sided pentagonal object, rather than four-sided, as Dipietro had argued, and the "City" objects displayed a number of unusual geomorphic characteristics as well.

 

In time, features like,

  • the "City Square" (an arrangement of equally spaced mounds with a direct sightline to the Face)

  • the "Fortress" (a object just outside the "City" which seemed to have a triangular shape and two straight walls)

  • the "Tholus" (a rounded mound which closely matched man-made earthen mounds in England in shape and layout - complete with a "trench" around it)

  • the "Cliff (a long, almost perfectly straight ridge atop what appeared to be a platform built over the ejecta from a nearby impact crater)

  • the "Crater Pyramid" (a tetrahedral pyramidal mound somehow perched on the rim of the impact crater) formed what became known as the "Cydonia Complex" [Fig. 1-4].

Further examination provided additional details.

 

There was evidence of digging next to the Cliff, implying that the platform upon which it rested had been built up from this material. The Tholus turned out to have an "entrance" of sorts at the top, a walkway that went from the base to this entrance and a pointed, almost pyramidal cap on it.

 

The D&M had what appeared to be almost a bottomless crater next to it, and the right side of the object seemed to bulge out slightly, as if from an internal blast (caused by whatever made the crater?).

 

The City turned out to have a degree of organization to it, and architect Robert Fiertek did an extensive reconstruction of the original layout.16


By the mid 1980s, the various members of the investigation were ready to present their findings to the scientific community and call for more analysis and better pictures to determine the validity of their observations. They met with a chilly reception.


Efforts to get their work published in peer-reviewed journals were quickly rebuked. Members later found out that in most cases, the papers were rejected without even having been read, much less "reviewed by peers." Behind-the-scenes efforts to get assistance from prominent members of the scientific community met with a bit more success, as Carl Sagan helped Carlotto get a couple of papers published in computer optics journals.

 

Oddly, at the same time he was doing this, Sagan was attacking the whole issue publicly with an infamous disinformation piece in Parade magazine.17 This would not be the last time that Sagan contradicted himself on Cydonia.


Attempts to present their data to peers directly, via scientific conferences and the like, were also met with resistance. When members of the Mars Investigation Group presented a poster session and a paper at the 1984 "Case for Mars" conference, they were surprised to find out that their presentation and their paper had been expunged from the officially published record of the conference, as if they had never been there.18


Undaunted, Hoagland and the others continued their research.

 

Yet, as documented by Dr. Stanley V. McDaniel of Sonoma State University in his voluminous McDaniel Report,19 NASA seemed to have an aversion to investigating what seemed to be an ideal subject for the agency's agenda.

 

In fact, they vociferously refused to even consider making the imaging of Cydonia a priority for any new Mars missions. Beyond that, they continued to insist, in response to inquiries from congressional leaders and the public, that the non-existent "disconfirming photos" proved that the Face was just an illusion. Only after many years (17) of repeatedly pointing out to NASA that no such images existed did they finally cease making this claim.


Dr. Carlotto moved the research in a new direction when he developed a fractal analysis technique, to discern which objects in an image were the least consistent with the "natural" background, to be used on the Cydonia images. After an initial study of about 3,000 square kilometers around the Face, Carlotto and his partner, Michael C. Stein, determined that the Face and the Fortress were the two most "non-fractal" objects in that terrain.

 

Pressed to go even further, they eventually used the program on images covering some 15,000 square kilometers around the Face.

 

The results were consistent with the earlier run-through. The Face was by far the most non-natural object in the surveyed terrain. NASA responded through Dr. Malin to the effect that Carlotto had not measured anything other than the fact that the Face was different, rather than artificial, and suggested that if he applied the technique to a broader area, he would find that the curve would smooth out, and that the Face was not all that unusual.


This response ignored the fact that Carlotto had already done just that by expanding the survey from 3,000 square kilometers to 15,000 and that, contrary to Malin's assertions, the Face's uniqueness was even more pronounced. Lacking the funds to expand the research even further, Carlotto offered to turn the program over to NASA so that the agency could continue the survey over the entire Martian surface. NASA's response was a polite "thanks, but no thanks."
 

Up to this point, a lot of the behavior of NASA and the planetary science community could be viewed through the tint of simple prejudice or ignorance. No one wanted to be the next Percival Lowell, sticking their chin out on the issue of life on Mars only to have their reputation forever soiled if the data turned out to be wrong. Other members of the broader scientific community simply refused to even consider the possibility.

 

Their models and training had taught them that Mars was a cold, dead world, and had been for billions of years. The notion that someone had been there, built these monuments and then left sometime in the distant past was just too destabilizing to their way of thinking.


The next step in the investigation was even more radical however, and it is here that NASA's resistance turned to active disinformation and suppression.
 

 


Mathematical Message?

Early on in the Cydonia investigations, Hoagland had proposed that there might be a broader, contextual relationship between the various landforms identified as anomalous.

 

By themselves, the Face, Fort, City, Tholus, Cliff, Crater Pyramid and the D&M Pyramid were anomalous geomorphic objects that were incongruous with the existing geologic model of Cydonia.


But Hoagland had also noted several "interesting" relationships between the potential monuments on the Cydonia plane. He noticed, for instance, that the three Northward edges of the pentagonal D&M seemed to point to other key features of the complex. Using orthographically rectified images provided by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Rand Corporation, he drew lines defined by these faceted edges across the images of Cydonia.

 

One edge passed right through the center of the City Square, the next right between the eyes of the Face, and the next straight across the apex of the Tholus.

 

He also noted several "mounds" in and around the City. They were consistent in terms of size (about the scale of the Great Pyramid at Giza) and shape, and also seemed to form a perfect equilateral triangle [Fig. 1-5].


It is important to appreciate the sequence in which these observations were made. Hoagland has often been accused of "circular reasoning," of just drawing lines on the photos until they "hit" something and then declaring that object to be a "monument." This is not, in fact, the case.


As we have seen, and has been well documented by Hoagland, Carlotto, Pozos, McDaniel and others who were there, the anomalous geomorphic characteristics came first. It was only later, when some thought was given to how the unusual landforms might have a contextual relationship that the measurements were made.

 

Even then, the methodology could have become "circular" if certain precautions were not taken. Hoagland carefully used only techniques that had been previously established by archeologists in their surveys of ancient ruins.


Taking a page out of the SETI manual, Hoagland decided that any intended message would almost certainly have been inscribed more than once. If an architect were seeking to send a clear mathematical signal to a civilization

that would happen upon his creation, he would surely have reinforced the message, since a single mathematical relationship could not be distinguished from random "noise."

 

So a cornerstone of the whole process was that any "significant" mathematical relationship must occur redundantly. He also made certain not to include any object that was not significant in some other way to the model. If an object was not anomalous in any way, but stood at a significant location in the alignment model, it was rejected. Each and every relationship that would be considered significant had to be a candidate for inclusion on at least two grounds.


A prime example of this is the City Square. It was originally considered a potential candidate for artificiality because of the way the four mounds were equally spaced around a central nexus. Additionally, the four mounds seemed to be almost identical in height, scale and volume. So the fact that the center of the City Square was later found by Hoagland to lie along a direct line marked by the northwest facet of the D&M was only significant because of these previous observations.

 

Without the initial geomorphic issues calling the features into question, the later determined alignment would have been meaningless in Hoagland's methodology.


Yet he still faced a significant degree of criticism from "reductionists" inside NASA. The reductionist method seeks to isolate each and every data point in a given argument and break it down without reference to the greater context. Hoagland argued that this isolationist approach could not be valid in an investigation such as this one, since there would likely have been some form of intent in the mind of any "Martian architect," just as there was in any earthly monumental architecture.


This was not the first time that someone had faced this sort of criticism from NASA.


On November 22, 1966, three years to the day from the date President Kennedy had been killed, NASA released a Lunar Orbiter 2 image from the Moon in the vicinity of the crater Cayley B in the Sea of Tranquility.

 

In it, there were objects casting extremely long shadows that seemed to imply that the objects themselves were "towers" of seventy feet or more [Fig. 1-6].

 

Such objects, if they really were present on the lunar surface, would almost by definition be artificial. Eons of meteoric bombardment would have long since blasted any such naturally occurring objects into dust.


William Blair, a Boeing anthropologist, noted that the "spires" had a series of contextual, geometric relationships to each other. "If such a complex of structures were photographed on Earth, the archeologist's first order of business would be to inspect and excavate test trenches and thus validate whether the prospective site has archeological significance," he was quoted in the L.A. Times.20

 

Blair had extensive experience analyzing aerial survey maps to look for possible prehistoric archeological sites in the Southwest United States.


The response from Dr. Richard V. Shorthill of the Boeing Scientific Research Laboratory was swift and eerily reminiscent of the criticism aimed at Hoagland.

"There are many of these rocks on the Moon's surface. Pick some at random and you eventually will find a group that seems to conform to some kind of pattern."

He went on to claim that the long shadows were caused by the fact that ground was sloping away from relatively short objects, thereby elongating the shadows. Subsequent analysis has proven Shorthill wrong on all counts.21

 

The objects are indeed very tall, and the shadows are not caused by a sloping hill. Beyond that, the geometric relationships cited by Blair turned out to be based on tetrahedral geometry, which will become very significant as you read on.


Blair's rebuttal would later put the reductionist arguments in their appropriate context:

"If this same axiom were applied to the origin of such surface features on Earth, more than half of the present known Aztec and Mayan architecture would still be under tree and bush-studded depressions - the result of natural geophysical processes.

 

The science of archeology would have never been developed, and most of the present knowledge of man's physical evolution would still be a mystery."

In 1988, Hoagland was approached by Erol Torun, a cartographer and satellite imagery interpreter for the Defense Mapping Agency.

 

Torun was probably the most uniquely qualified person on the planet to render a judgment on the potential artificiality of the Cydonia enigmas. After attaining a degree in geology with a specialty in geomorphology, he had spent more than ten years of his professional life looking at remote imagery just like the original Viking data and distinguishing artificial structures from naturally occurring landforms.


After reading Monuments, he had written Hoagland expressing his surprise that his initial assumptions about the subject were not supported by his subsequent analysis.

 

He was particularly impressed with the geometry and geology of the D&M Pyramid.

"I have a good background in geomorphology and know of no mechanism to explain its formation," he wrote Hoagland.22

Torun had come to the Mars investigation as a skeptic; relatively certain he would find that the geomorphic interpretations and the early contextual alignments cited by Hoagland would turn out to be "false positives" in the search for answers to the riddle of Cydonia.


Yet once he had a chance to study the Cydonia images in detail, Torun concluded that the D&M itself was nothing less than the "Rosetta Stone" of Cydonia, finding a series of "significant" mathematical constants expressed in the internal geometry of the D&M.

 

Being careful to avoid projecting his own biases on the measurements, Torun decided beforehand that he would restrict his analysis to just a few possible relationships.

 

As it turned out, not only did the D&M have a consistent internal geometry, it was also one full of rich geometric clues that spoke to him of a specific mathematical message. He found numerous repetitive references to specific mathematical constants, like e/pi, v2, v3, v5 and references to ideal hexagonal and pentagonal forms.

 

He also found geometry linking the shape of the D&M to other ideal geometric figures, like the Golden Ratio (phi) and the Vesica Piscis, which is the root symbol of the Christian church - and the five basic "Platonic Solids" - the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron. Further studies found that the reconstructed shape of the D&M, as determined by Torun before he took any of these measurements, is the only one that could produce this specific set of constants and ratios.23

 

More than that, these same constants showed up redundantly in all the different methods of measurement, and were not dependant on terrestrial methods of measurement (i.e. a radial measurement system based on a 360° circle).

 

As Torun put it:

"All of this geometry is 'dimensionless'; i.e. it is not dependent on such cultural conventions as counting by tens, or measuring angles in the 360 system. This geometry will 'work' in any number system" [Fig. 1-7].

After receiving Torun's study, Hoagland quickly realized that they were on the verge of a potentially important discovery.

 

If Torun's numbers were repeatable throughout the Cydonia Complex, if the same angles and ratios appeared in the larger relationships between the already established potential "monuments," then they would have a very strong argument that Torun's model was valid.

 

Again being careful to only take measurements between obvious features, the apex of the Tholus and D&M, the straight line defined by the Cliff, the center of the City Square, the apex of the tetrahedral Crater Pyramid, Hoagland found that many of the same angles, ratios and trig functions applied all over the Cydonia Complex [Fig. 1-8].


Somewhat stunned by what they had found, Hoagland and Torun had come to the realization that there was a message on the ground at Cydonia. The problem was that they didn't know what that message was trying to say.


In the Message itself was the key to decoding it. One of the angles noted by Torun within the D&M was 19.5°, which occurred twice. Hoagland also found the same "19.5°" encoded in the broader Cydonia complex three more times.

 

Searching for the significance of this number, they eventually determined that it related to the geometry of the tetrahedron. The simplest of the five so-called "Platonic Solids" (because it is the most fundamental three-dimensional form that can exist); it made a certain kind of sense to use this "lowest order" geometric shape as a basis for establishing communication across the eons.


If a tetrahedron is circumscribed by a sphere, with its apex anchored at either the North Pole or South Pole, then the three vertices of the base will "touch" the sphere at 19.5° in the hemisphere opposite the polar apex alignment. In addition, the value of e (as in the e/pi ratio which is encoded at least ten times throughout the Cydonia complex) is 2.718282, a near exact match for the ratio of the surface area of a sphere to the surface area of a tetrahedron (2.720699).
 

This whole "tetrahedral" motif was reinforced when they went back to the original Cydonia images.

 

Some of the small mounds Hoagland had noted earlier had the look of tetrahedral pyramids, and the Crater Pyramid, which is involved with one of the key 19.5 measurements, is also clearly tetrahedral. The mounds themselves were also arranged into a couple of sets of equilateral triangles, the 2D base figure for a tetrahedral pyramid.


Later, Dr. Horace Crater, an expert in probabilities and statistics, did a study of the mounds at Cydonia with Dr. Stanley McDaniel.24

 

What Crater found was that not only was there a non-random pattern in the distribution of nearly identical mounds at Cydonia, but that the pattern of distribution was overwhelmingly tetrahedral - and to a factor of 200 million to one against a natural origin.




The Message of Cydonia

In 1989, Hoagland and Torun proceeded to publish their results in a new paper titled, appropriately, "The Message of Cydonia." 25

 

Based on the barrage of ad-hominem criticism Hoagland had experienced after "Monuments" was published two years before, they assumed that it would be pointless to try to have their paper published in the NASA controlled peer review press. Instead, they decided to go "straight to the people" and uploaded the paper to CompuServe, the largest online message board of its time.

 

The paper contained a number of predictions based on their evolving theory of the tetrahedral Message of Cydonia and also the even more radical new idea that within the tetrahedral mathematics was nothing less than an entirely new physics model.

 

Hoagland then found that there was a long-abandoned line of thought by some of the masters of early physics, including James Clerk Maxwell, which included the idea that certain problems in electromagnetics could be solved by the imposition of higher spatial dimensions into the equations.

 

The energies coming from these higher dimensions would then be "reflected" in our lower three dimensional universe through tetrahedral geometries. It was this crucial insight, they decided, that the builders of Cydonia were ultimately trying to impart.


The reductionists were quick to attack Hoagland and Torun's model. The critics argued against the validity of the model on one of two basic counts - that the measurements were either inaccurate, or if they were accurate, they did not mean what Hoagland and Torun implied they meant.


Anonymous memos from within NASA in the late 1980s used the same sorts of tactics they had leveled at Dr. Blair years earlier.

 

They argued that Torun's measurements were not reliable because of the amount of error built into the ortho-rectified images. They frequently disputed the measurements themselves, but did not actually bother to try and reproduce them.

 

Dr. Ralph Greenberg, a University of Washington mathematics professor, has more recently taken up this view.

 

Greenberg has written several documents critical of Hoagland and Torun's model, and has also made something of a mini-career for himself accusing Hoagland of lying about his contributions to the idea of life under the oceans of Europa.


Dr. Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems (who controlled the camera for the then planned Mars Observer and the current Mars Global Surveyor) took a slightly different tack, agreeing that the measurements made by Hoagland and Torun "are not wholly in dispute" 26 but arguing that even if the numbers were right, it did not necessarily follow that they meant something significant.


Most of these critiques are typical of the type of reaction you get from scientists when their established paradigms are threatened or when experts in particular fields try to apply the standards they are familiar with to a problem that is outside their experience.

 

The issue of margins of error, especially, is one that (even today) is simply misunderstood, even by experienced mathematicians. Put simply, Greenberg argues - as many have before him - that the margin of error built into the measurements of the Cydonia Complex renders them useless, because they are large enough to make almost "any" mathematical constants and ratios possible.

 

Greenberg, who has become pretty much the point man for attacks on the Cydonia Geometric Relationship Model, also claimed that Hoagland and Torun "selected" 27 the angles they found, implying that they were looking for specific relationships before they ever started.


For the record, Greenberg also argues that the frequently cited mathematical and astronomical alignments of the Pyramids in Egypt are fallacious, even though few Egyptologists doubt them. It is by now well established that the base of the Great Pyramid is a square with right angle corners accurate to 1/20* of a degree.

 

The side faces are all perfect equilateral triangles which align precisely with true north, south, east and west.

 

The length of each side of the base is 365.2422 Hebrew cubits, which is the exact length of the solar year. The slope angle of the sides results in the pyramid having a height of 232.52 cubits. Dividing two by the side length by this height gives a figure of 3.14159. This figure gives the circumference of a circle when multiplied by its diameter.

 

The perimeter of the base of the pyramid is exactly equal to the circumference of a circle with a diameter twice the height of the pyramid itself.28


Because of the angle of the slope sides, for every ten feet you ascend on the pyramid, your altitude is raised by nine feet. Multiplying the true altitude of the Great Pyramid by ten to the power of nine, you get 91,840,000, which is the exact distance from the sun to the earth in miles.29

 

In addition, the builders also apparently knew the tilt of the earth's axis (23.5°), how to accurately calculate degrees of latitude (which vary as an observer ventures farther from the equator) and the length of the earth's precessionary cycle.


And all of this, according to the brilliant Dr. Greenberg, is just a coincidence. Just an example of "the power of randomness."


Greenberg's arguments are pure reductionism. Forgetting for a moment the sheer unlikelihood of finding consistent and redundant mathematical linkages among a very few objects pre-selected only for their anomalous geology, (which Greenberg does not address in any of his arguments) not for their possible mathematical relationships to one another, and using only clear and obvious structural points on these objects from which to measure, Greenberg completely fails to grasp the issue - Hoagland and Torun's measurements are nominal, meaning that they are valid to the closest fit of the methodology employed.

 

They are not saying, "these are the numbers within a loose tolerance range," they are saying flatly "these are the numbers."

 

The tolerances are just what we have to live with pending higher resolution images. Further, having stated that the measurements reflect a specific tetrahedral geometry - not just any set of "significant" mathematical numbers, as Greenberg implies - and that they encode a predictable physics, it becomes very easy to simply test their contextual model vs. his reductionist view.

 

Greenberg seeks to isolate the numbers themselves, and argue only his view of the "power of randomness," rather than simply test the alignments in the greater context of the physics they imply.


Fortunately, "The Message of Cydonia" contained three predictions that would provide the ideal opportunity to do just that. At that time, Voyager 2 was approaching Neptune but had yet to image the planet up close.

 

At the end of their paper, Hoagland and Torun put in three specific predictions about what Voyager would see. They predicted a storm or disturbance within a few degrees of the tetrahedral 19.5° latitude.

 

Based on their further interpretation of the hyperdimensional physics they were developing, they also predicted that this disturbance would be in the southern hemisphere of the planet, and that the magnetic dipole polarity of Neptune's magnetic field would be anchored at the Northern Pole.


All three predictions - remember, based on the supposedly "fallacious" numbers derived from a supposedly "meaningless" set of alignments of possible ruins on Mars - turned out to be...


Absolutely correct.


Greenberg and the reductionists then argued,

"a single prediction, no matter what it is based on, cannot be relied upon as proof of anything."

This tactic, combining the predictions into a single one instead of three, is a common means of dismissing the frequency of Hoagland and Torun's successes.

 

As Harvard astronomer Halton Arp put it in his excellent book, Seeing Red,

"The game here is to lump all the previous observations into one hypothesis' and then claim there is no second, confirming observation."

There is, flatly, no way that Hoagland and Torun could use a set of "meaningless" or "fallacious" data to make three such accurate predictions about features on a planet the human race had never seen up close before.

 

These features have no explanation in the conventional models, at least as far as providing a mechanism for the storm, the location of the storm, and its relationship to the magnetic pole of the planet. In other words, there is no way they could have just "gotten lucky" by using established models of the solar system.

 

Their predictions come solely from the Cydonia Geometric Alignment model.

 

This is not only a ringing endorsement of the validity of both the measurements and the physics model deduced from them, but also a harsh indictment of the methods and motives of both Greenberg and Malin (Greenberg at one point challenged Hoagland to a "debate" on the mathematics of Cydonia, but only if he could exclude Crater's tetrahedral mound data, which he acknowledged he could not explain away).


Armed with the suspicion that they had found the intent of the builders of the "Monuments of Mars," Hoagland and Torun now turned their attention to the possible application of the geometry they had discovered.

 

 


Chapter One Images

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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