Date: 1976
Location: Cydonia, Mars
The Conspirators: NASA
The Victims: Unknown
When the Mars probe Viking I sent a set of photos from Mars in 1976, one shot in particular set off wild speculation that life was or had been present on Mars. One photo appeared to be a human face, perhaps even sculpted, about a full square kilometer in size. It is no exaggeration to say that it set the world abuzz. Skeptics dismissed it as a fun coincidence, a hill with shadows that, at first glance, did look a bit like a face. But others claimed the resemblance was far too close to be anything but a deliberate artificial carving and that NASA degraded or Photoshopped the new images in order to cover up the existence of the civilization that built the face. Conspiracy theorists pointed out that many other constructions in the immediate vicinity also appear to be artificial, including pyramids and geometrically shaped buildings. The region of Mars is called Cydonia, and if you believe the conspiracy, NASA seems determined to block humankind’s first contact with this enigmatic race that has tried so hard to signal their existence to us.
As we know from recent high-resolution photographs, the hill on Mars that some believe is a carefully carved face has no interesting features at all; it only appeared so in the earliest photo because of black dots where data was missing.
When NASA engineers first discovered the face, they thought it was pretty funny. All of Viking’s photos were speckled with black dots, which were places where the camera didn’t capture data. It is thanks to the fortuitous placement of about eight such dots that the hill looks reminiscent of a face. NASA published the photo, never imagining that people would think it was actually a face. Much to their dismay, they soon discovered they’d created a whole subculture of people who believed there was an advanced civilization of megasculptors on Mars.
This group was led by Richard C. Hoagland, a conspiracy theorist who spent much of his career trying to publicly associate himself with the US space program or famous planetariums or anyone who would listen to his various alternate theories. He has proposed something he calls “hyperdimensional physics” in which all fundamental understandings of the universe are wrong, and only he is right (despite having no academic credentials). He claims the Face on Mars is only one feature in what is a great citadel of pyramids and other monuments, despite a total lack of evidence and voluminous contradictory evidence proving that no such citadel exists.
In 1987, Hoagland published The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever. This book has become something of a Holy Bible for ancient monuments constructed on Mars, the Moon, and other places. It is full of conspiratorial gobbledygook, flagrant pseudoscience, and outright untruths about the solar system.
In 1998 and 2001, the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft took dramatically improved pictures of the Cydonia region with a resolution of only 1.5 m per pixel, and it became immediately clear that the Face on Mars did not look anything like a face. It was an unremarkable knoll without any especially distinguishing features. And then as if that wasn’t enough, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft (launched in 2005) took a picture five times sharper, all the way down to about 30 cm per pixel. Still no face. We now have excellent radar and 3-D data of Cydonia, and none of the features hold up to the initial expectations so many were hoping for. No pyramids, no buildings, no giant sculpted faces.
What we can tell from the 3-D data is that when the light is hitting the hill from a certain angle, two contours fill with shadow and look generally like an eye and a mouth on one half of a face. The other half of the face is in complete shadow.
Despite all this substantial evidence, Hoagland has not slowed down. The conspiracy community now claims that the NASA images have been “degraded” to obscure the face’s true details, which is silly because the hill’s features are clearly visible in great detail. Still absolutely insistent that it is an artificial face, Hoagland has also moved on to other structures throughout the solar system that he believes were constructed by advanced civilizations, including skyscrapers on the dark side of the Moon.
In science, we often point to the law of large numbers when confronted with a manifestation that appears unlikely. This law refers to the mathematical probability of highly unlikely events popping up at predictable intervals. The Face on Mars is about 1 square kilometer, and the entire surface of Mars is about 150 million square kilometers. If we posit that the likelihood of any given patch of surface looking somewhat like a face is one in a million, then the probability is that there are some 150 such faces on Mars.
Believe it or not, there are certainly many, many such faces on Earth. In 2013, a company called onformative created a program that automatically scanned Google Earth looking for natural features that look like faces, and many of the results were striking. Alberta, Canada, is home to the Badlands Guardian, which when viewed from the air appears to be an astonishingly realistic depiction of a Native American seen in profile, wearing a full feathered headdress. A natural gas well and road that were put in happen to make it look exactly like he’s listening to an iPod (trust me—head to Google for a picture). France has its Apache Head of Ebihens, a face jutting out from a hillside. There is the Queen’s Head in Taiwan, the sleeping giant of Pedra da Gávea in Brazil, the Hoburgsgubben in Sweden, and the Devil’s Head in North Carolina. And, of course, there is the most famous natural face of all: the Man in the Moon.
We can safely conclude that the existence of a conspiracy by NASA to cover up an advanced civilization on Mars is nonsense. There’s also no rational reason why NASA (or anyone else) would do such a thing. The law of large numbers and the phenomenon of pareidolia sufficiently account for any perceived similarity of the Cydonia formation to an actual face, and as the modern imaging proves, it doesn’t actually even look like a face!