Encounters: The UFO Phenomenon, Exposed!/Encounters - The UFO Phenomenon, Exposed (1995).iso/misc2/misc034.txt

Text File | 1995-10-20 | 35KB | 616 lines

(Vol. 17, No. 3, December 1994, pp. 76-83, 100-110)

By Steve Nadis

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: This guy has some pretty strange 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 hand--the alleged works 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-chief at Star and Sky
magazine. His most far-reaching accomplishment--the plaque on the Pioneer
space probe he conceived with Eric Burgess, co-founder 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 farther 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, Jul
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, an 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 a 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 Martian
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; test this; take this from the realm of science fiction to
the realm of science fact?

OMNI: You once confessed to always being intrigued by the anomalies. What's
the fascination?

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 semiperiodic 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 the 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 gives 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: I sense you didn't feel constrained by the usual boundaries--that is,
you were never quite content to be a science journalist.

Hoagland: Sure, but my journalism stint at the networks came after a
background of being immersed in science and science education. I was not
inhibited then, nor am I now, from voicing a scientific opinion, not just a
journalistic opinion. Because as I said in Monuments, there are an awful lot
of parallels between good science and good journalism. Good science does not
rest with quoting authority, but with getting at the facts. Similarly, we now
have a new breed of journalists who independently figure out the truth by
going over the data and comparing different sources. In many ways,
investigative reporters are doing the work of good scientists.

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 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. We didn't give it another thought.

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 thought, "Nah, it's just a freak of nature." I took
the monograph home, 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 thought 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 what 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
ruins in our own back yard, accessible with late twentieth-century
technology. Balancing the small probability of that against the overwhelming,
almost incalculable importance, I realized that, damn it, this required
somebody doing something more. Little did I know then that it would involve
my life, day and night for over 11 years, with the prospect of it continuing
indefinitely into the future.

OMNI: You've described this moment as crossing a "magic line."

Hoagland: Yeah, once you step across it, it's remarkably freeing. I mean, a
scientist can't be afraid of what people will think. He or she simply has to
drop the preconceptions and begin to ask " what if" questions. That's what I
did. I very consciously said: "OK, suppose it's real." You have no idea of
the mental gymnastics required to actually look at the thing and say,
"Suppose somebody did it?" I think that has stopped a lot of people, because
you don't realize God will not strike you dead if you think that terrible
thought. The heavens will not open up, you will not disappear into the bowels
of the earth if you read this article and ask that unthinkable thought: "What
if this is real?" Instead, it liberates you to begin all the thinking that
should have been done 20 years ago, given the enormous possible interest and
importance.

OMNI: I gather once you make that leap of faith, all sorts of interesting
questions come up.

Hoagland: Sure. First was: "Well, if it's real and somebody did build this
thing, then why?" Then, why there? To be seen? From where--orbit or ground?
The questins go on and on. The crucial step is suspend your judgement,
because that's the only way you get progress in science.

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 1/100th 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: You say the thing you call a city doesn't really resemble a city on
Earth. Why call it a city?

Hoagland: On Earth, cities are basically rectilinear. Flying over them at
night, you see the lights run north-south or east-west. It's a grid, a
brilliant carpet of geometry. Flying over this thing on Mars would be more
like flying over the Giza plateau in Egypt if the pyramids were 100 times
bigger. You'd see huge, artificial mountains in the dark with little exterior
lighting because everybody is inside. The outside environment is so
inhospitable all the night life is going on inside.

OMNI: So you're talking the Mall of America and then some. . . .

Hoagland: No. You're dealing with, let's say, all of New York City, or Los
Angeles. Entire cities encased within pyramid-shaped domes.

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 it 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." It 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." To 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? All science
should be treated the same, as all men and women should be treated equally
beforre the law. When you begin to make value judgements, you've killed
science.

OMNI: So you consider this an impossible burden of proof?

Hoagland: You bet. It allows people to kill an idea by claiming that, a.
extraordinary, and b. there's not enough evidence. It fosters a subjectivity
that is bottomless. 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 martialled in favor of the
"intelligence hypothesis." They keep moving the goal line, meaning there's no
way we can win. Politics are stacked against us.

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, not the science.


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 rectilinearity, 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 the key to decoding the features
we're seeing on Mars.

OMNI: What other evidence supports your view?

Hoagland: First, we have morphological data, the shape. 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 fractal analysis, objective computer
criteria for discerning anomalies from natural background patterns. Mark
Carlotto and Michael Stein used this technique and picked out the face as the
most nonfractal; 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 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 into 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. 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
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 from any observable source.

OMNI: Do you claim to understand this physics already? That would be an
astonishing claim, given how long people have been trying to develop a
unified "theory of everything."

Hoagland: No, we're just at the beginning. We've seen several different
examples of phenomena that are predicted and appear to operate according to
this physics. Obviously we'd like to have more examples; we need laboratory
tests. We have all kinds of neat tests in mind that are not expensive. We may
have a testable theory of hyperdimensinality right in front of us. How do we
get the scientific estanblishment to test this out--that our political
problem. The payoff could be extraordinary, because in trhe end we may have
an inexhaustible, pollutionless source of energy to make other energy forms
totally obsolete.

OMNI: If 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 light-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're not just talking now about a new physics, but somethng designed
to shake us up--a kind of wake-up call?

Hoagland: A new paradign allowing us to see ourselves from a different
perspective and help us recognize our common humanity.

OMNI: What became of the intelligent beings that built these structures?

Hoagland: We're looking at photographs revealing features no smaller than 150
feet across. If it were still a thriving metropolis, the NASA data wouldn't
show that. But because of the deterioration we've observed even at that
scale, I feel they're long gone; it's been abandoned for hundreds of
thousands of years.

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. Not only did we
perhaps have a previous high-tech civilization, but they went and committed
the ultimate folly: they took this technology and destroyed their own world.

OMNI: You're suggesting we might have much to learn from this former
civilization, not just about a new science?

Hoagland: Yes, we may have some hints as to the emotional, psychological, and
geopolitical problems of dealing with this awesome technology and energy
source.  It would be a sobering lesson indeed, to confirm a high-tech
predecessor 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 verify such an incredibly speculative proposition?

Hoagland: It's exquisitely testable. 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 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. Perhaps the
equilateral triangle was left so when we developed telescopes, we'd find
them. Which, of course, can be tested. The great advantage, in contrast to
the couple of photographs we have of Cydonia, is that we have there millions
of pictures of the Moon, including almost two million taken recently by the
Pentagon's unmanned Clementine spacecraft.

OMNI: Just how big are these 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, earthquakes.

OMNI: Why didn't the Apollo astronauts see anything?

Hoagland: Well, 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
E.T.s 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's 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's 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: Do you think the Brookings panel underestimated the public?

Hoagland: That's where my Jerrersonian inclinations come to the fore. When
the U.S. constitutin was written, it didn't say that questions of major
import were to be left in the hands of a few, faceless bureaucrats, but were
the province of the people. When we are presented with such an awesome
possibility, we have an obligation to include them in the dialogue.

OMNI: Yet you've also said a revelation like this could ultimately overthrow
everything we know.

Hoagland: Sure! Look at what we've been living 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 asess the possibility that the human
race is not alone.

OMNI: How might it "change the history of human consciousness?"

Hoagland: The standard biological models say 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 backdrop 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. On a separate world!
Since you can pretty effectively rule out that we did it, you're only left
with a few possibilities: an indigenous Martian culture, an exterior culture
from beyond the solar system, or a variant--another culture on another planet
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 again, 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 "meddling" might have gone?

Hoagland: Perhaps the face on Mars is evidence someone, not from this planet,
has used genetic engineering to influence biological development in this
environment for reasons 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 got 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! Could that be
the real historical reason for the bias against taking this data seriously?

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 endpoint at all.
It's just the beginning. It opens the door.




Transmitted:  94-11-08 17:43:56 EST

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