A New Look at the Face on Mars

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuter) - For 20 years the face on Mars has been one of the world's most famous faces -- serene, mysterious and remote. Very remote. It was first photographed by a Viking spacecraft in 1976, a mile (1.6 km) in length from crown to chin, staring blankly into the heavens. But a year from now, we are likely to see it quite differently.

The Mars Global Surveyor, due to launch Wednesday, is expected to send back a new batch of pictures, this time from high-resolution digital cameras. If the pictures are good, they will answer many questions, and may spell the end of a cottage industry that has grown up around the Viking images.

Dozens of books and thousands of articles and newsletters have spun various theories about the face, some scholarly, some fit only for the supermarket check-out line.

One "Face on Mars" site on the World Wide Web recorded more than 20,000 visitors in October. Another had recorded half a million since its creation. Face on Mars may not beat the Kennedy assassination as an underground phenomenon, but it rivals alien abductions. And it is much bigger than pyramids.

"There's been a lot of growth in Face on Mars since the late '80s," said Alan Merten, a paranormal writer who chronicles such things for tabloid weeklies. "All it needs is a guest shot on 'The X-Files' (a popular television show dealing with the paranormal) to really take off."

"The UFO folks were quick to incorporate it, and of course, there's a theory that JFK was killed because he was ready to tell the public everything about UFOs," he said.

But the riddle of the face may actually be solved soon. If not by the Global Surveyor, then by another of the nine planned Mars missions in the near future.

If the face is nothing but a tricky play of light across a natural mesa, as NASA originally said, then new photographs will show that. And that could be bad news for hypnotist-therapist Donald Zanghi, who counsels victims of alleged alien abduction and believes the face is evidence of a vast and ancient civilisation living beneath the Martian soil.

"Why do you think the last spacecraft they sent to Mars simply disappeared?" Zanghi asks. "The Martians weren't ready to reveal themselves. Maybe this time they will let us see them."

Then there is face theorist John C. Cunningham, who says the face was built by the same people who built the Tower of Babel, which was really a spaceship, and the whole story is right there in Genesis.

"Most Creationist theories state that man did not rise -- he fell," said Cunningham. "It should not surprise Creationists that there might be evidence of past human achievements that go beyond anything we now have."

Then there is the chance that the face is an artifact. In that case, the scientific community will adopt it as its own, and legions of face fans will have to take a back seat.

"I think it's very likely that it will turn the world of planetary science on its ear," said David Webb, one of a small but growing number of Ph.D's who have devoted themselves to studying the face and lobbying NASA to do the same.

Webb, a Reagan appointee to the National Commission on Space, is among those who think it is irresponsible to talk about life on Mars in the present tense. But he believes the face probably means that intelligent life once was there.

In the same region, observers have spotted other objects that appear to have smooth, angular sides like a pyramid, and what might be the ruins of walls.

"None of the independent researchers has maintained that these details prove the face is artificial," says Stanley V. McDaniel, whose 1994 book, "The McDaniel Report," is credited with giving the face community some legitimacy. "But certain details make it more difficult to view the anomalies as accidents of nature."

Carl Sagan, the best known planetary scientist, for years dismissed

the Mars anomaly crowd as kooks and charlatans. But last year he modified that position and called NASA's early dismissal of the face as a trick of light "unfortunate."

Sagan remains thoroughly sceptical about the face but now says it is worthy of further study by NASA.



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