The Face on Mars: the Gift that Keeps on Giving

NASA sent probes to Mars looking for signs of life – but when in 1976, an image from their Viking orbiter picked up what looked very much like a human face staring back at its camera from the top of a high plateau, the image was dismissed as a ‘trick of the light’.

Forty-five years later, the controversy surrounding the Face on Mars has never really gone away and this has nothing to do with wishful thinking, seeking meaning where there is none. NASA maintains that it is an old degraded mesa, reimaging the Face to prove the point, but this mile-long sculpture still has enough geometry to support the hypothesis of intentional engineering. Reminiscent of the culture of ancient Egypt, its emergence from a natural landform also echoes the sculpting of the Sphinx from the bedrock of the Giza plateau.

We have an intense curiosity about the architectural heritage of our ancient civilisations, and seeing something of our own past ostensibly looking up at us from the surface of Mars, surely leads us to think about our origins – and our future as a species. It is then, entirely apposite that the recognition of face shapes in something as nebulous as light and shade is an early brain activation process, occurring faster than does the brain’s recognition of an actual human face.

While the use of probes to explore Mars and its geological history has made us more aware of our own environmental issues here on Earth, when it comes to travelling in space ourselves, we are beginners. The desire to get space boots onto the Red planet is revealing our technical inadequacies when it comes to building spacecraft fit for humans. The Face on Mars is the gift that keeps on giving. It has also brought to the fore the subject of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, our attitudes towards any such contact, and the forms that communication might take. Alien Intelligence and the Pathway to Mars: the Hidden Connections between Earth and the Red Planet explores all the ramifications of finding the Face together with its attendant pyramidal landforms, along with the anomalous events that have occurred here on Earth since our probes first took its picture.

One of those events, was also situated on a high plateau overlooking a red desert-like terrain in Australia. Discovered on 26 June 1998, twenty-two years after the Martian Face photo, the giant outline of a man furrowed into the land was also dismissed by the authorities, only this time it was not a ‘trick of the light’, but a prank.

Recently, after some two decades of gradual degradation, the Marree Man’s original outline has been restored and the geoglyph integrated into the outback tourist industry. That process has merely served to emphasise the fact that to this day, none of the explanations for its presence on the plateau overlooking Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre have proven satisfactory – just like the Face on Mars.

Way Back in 1996, NASA/JPL Commissioned Pat Rawlings to create concepts of how the agency would put humans on the red planet. It is foolish to dismiss the power of human imagination to inspire and achieve the seemingly impossible – and the ever growing evidence that we will make contact with extraterrestrial intelligent life.

Mary Bennett

Aulis Online, January 2022

Originally published in Australia’s New Dawn magazine

See also Cydonia-Avebury: A Mars/Earth Connection

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