Associated in the minds of the ancients with armed conflict - our word ‘martial’ comes from the Latin Mars, the Roman god of war - the Red Planet has long exerted a particularly powerful, often awe-inspiring, influence on mankind. But only in February 1972 did the Mariner 9 probe show us what the planet was really like, sending back the first close-up images of our neighbour: it was rocky, barren — and yes, it was rather red.

However, neither the redness nor the rockiness attracted the most attention, especially in certain quarters. Images of the surface of Mars, taken on 8 February 1972, in the region known as the Elysium Quadrangle (15 degrees north of the Martian equator), appeared to show apparently pyramidal features — two large and two small three-sided pyramids. A second picture of the region, taken six months later on 7 August, showed the same features. These apparent structures were seized upon as evidence of an ancient Martian civilisation by, among others, Dr James J. Hurtak, then Professor of Oriental Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, who a few years later, as we saw in the last chapter, would carry out secretive work in the Great Pyramid.

In the 1970s Hurtak was described — by British author Stuart Holroyd — in these terms:

Few people took the Mariner 9 images of the Elysium pyramids seriously, although they did inspire a Dr Who television story² and, ironically, intrigue that arch-‘Skeptic’ Dr Carl Sagan, enough for him to write in Cosmos (1981):

In 1976, a new American space mission, Viking, photographed the surface of Mars.⁴ The two spacecraft involved, Vikings I and II, each consisted of an orbiting vehicle to send back pictures and other data and a lander that touched down on the surface to undertake — among other tasks - a search for life. In this, they apparently failed, although the results are still disputed among some scientists.⁵ The journey took the probes nine months, and each spacecraft cost $500 million. Viking I’s lander was originally intended to touch down on 4 July 1976 to mark the American Bicentennial, but worries about the viability of the chosen landing site led to a delay to 20 July, thus instead marking the seventh anniversary of the first moon landing. Viking I landed successfully and sent back the first television pictures from the surface of Mars. Viking II landed on 3 September 1976 and the landers continued to transmit data on the Martian weather conditions back to Earth for six years afterwards.

On 25 July 1976, from an altitude of 1,162 miles, Viking I photographed the region of Mars known as Cydonia Mensae, about 40 degrees north of the Martian equator, on the other side of the planet to Elysium. The image that was returned to Earth showed what looked like a human face staring outwards into space. This feature, about a mile long, was noticeable enough to be pointed out at a NASA press conference the next day, but, as it could reasonably be supposed to be merely a trick of the light, this, too, was deemed of no special interest. The image was filed away with the 51,538 other pictures taken during the mission. (Incredibly, only 25 per cent of these images have ever been scientifically analysed, as the budget ran out before the task could be completed.) This particular frame was given the official identification code of 35A72 - that is, the thirty-fifth image taken by Spacecraft A, Viking I, on its seventy-second orbit.

This time the story was rekindled when the image was ‘rediscovered’ some time later, although, even among those familiar with the Face on Mars controversy, few know the full story. In effect, the image was rediscovered twice, but only the second of these events has received widespread publicity. The little known story of the first rediscovery begins with H. Guard Hall, the chief of operations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the facility in Pasadena in California that controls space probes such as Viking. He was at that time the boyfriend (later the husband), of one of James Hurtak’s leading ‘disciples’, a Dutch woman named Marijke Posthuma (an artist, illustrator and set designer who once worked for The Beatles). Hurtak had told Posthuma about the image of the Face in December 1976, so she and Hall searched through the archived images until they found it.⁶ Hurtak then used the image in lectures as early as April 1977.⁷

Intriguingly, Hurtak was already referring to the Face as ‘Sphinx-like’, making an immediate and emotive connection with Egypt. Even more intriguing is the fact that Hurtak had predicted the existence of a Sphinx image on Mars in 1975, the year before the Viking pictures had been taken.⁸ But it was his extraordinary extrapolations from this image that have far-reaching implications. Hancock and Bauval said that Hurtak: ‘predicted that further finds of similar structures, including a Sphinx-like monument, would be made on Mars, and that these structures would be linked to the Giza monuments in a great cosmic blueprint.’⁹ Astonishingly, in some ways this was to be proved right: Hurtak’s ideas about Mars were to become the lynchpin of a new system of belief.

The story only really gathered steam in 1979 — the second rediscovery of the image — when Vincent DiPietro, an electrical engineer specialising in digital image processing at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Maryland, came across the image apparently by chance. DiPietro became intrigued, as did a friend, Gregory Molenaar, a computer scientist also under contract to NASA from the Lockheed Corporation. They wondered if it was possible to enhance the image to show more detail and determine whether it really was a face or something that only coincidentally looked like one. Their immediate problem was that the standard techniques for computer-enhancing the image available at that time were unsatisfactory, so they had to write their own software to do it, which they called the Starburst Pixel Interleaving Technique, or SPIT for short.

After searching through the Viking archives, DiPietro and Molenaar found a second image (70A13) of the Cydonia region also showing the Face. This had been taken thirty-five days after the first picture, from 1,080 miles above the surface of Mars, with the feature lit from a different angle by the sun. It showed the same apparent facelike structure as the first, apparently proving that, whatever else it might be, it could not be an illusion created by a simple trick of light and shadow.

DiPietro and Molenaar discovered another seemingly significant feature on frame 70A13: what appeared to be a five-sided pyramidal structure, about 10 miles south of the Face and approximately 1.6 miles long by 1 mile wide. This has become known as the D & M Pyramid, after the two researchers. DiPietro and Molenaar were convinced that these two features, located so closely together, were not accidents of erosion or tricks of the camera, but were artificial structures, presumably erected by some long-gone Martian civilisation. They made their conclusions known to the public on 1 May 1980.

The lead in promoting DiPietro and Molenaar’s discoveries and the issue, of the Face on Mars was taken up enthusiastically — not to say fanatically - by science writer Richard C. Hoagland, who, in 1997, sent ‘independent Egyptologist’ Larry Dean Hunter off to check Thomas Danley’s discovery of secret digging in the Great Pyramid.

Born in 1946, Richard Hoagland had worked for several science museums, such as the Hayden Planetarium in New York, and was advisor or consultant on space science for several television stations, including NBC and CBS, where he worked with legendary newsman Walter Cronkite. He is also the former editor of Star & Sky magazine, and a presenter for CNN. In 1971 Hoagland, with one Eric Burgess, came up with the historic idea of decorating the side of Pioneer 10 - the first space probe to leave the solar system — with a plaque bearing representational and symbolic information about the human race, including an upraised hand of peace and a diagram showing that man comes from the third planet from the sun. Hoagland and Burgess passed on the suggestion to Carl Sagan, and after that it became history.¹⁰

Between 1975 and 1980 Hoagland was a consultant to NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Maryland, organising media events, which is where his much-repeated ‘NASA consultant’ title originated. And he was also a prime mover behind the campaign to name the first Space Shuttle Enterprise, something clearly of personal significance: as we will see, he also changed the name of his Mars Mission to the Enterprise Mission as a tribute to his friend Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek.¹¹

Since first becoming involved in the Mars debate in 1983, Hoagland has become the main advocate for the presence of artificial structures on the Red Planet. He fulfils the role of self-appointed oracle of all things Martian so successfully that, to the vast majority of the public, he is now the main source of information about the Face.

When he first became interested in DiPietro & Molenaar’s work in the summer of 1983, Hoagland was working on a project concerning the rings of Saturn at SRI International at their headquarters in Menlo Park in California.¹² In July 1983 he was studying DiPietro and Molenaar’s enhanced images of the Cydonia region and noticed a series of other artificial-looking features to the west of the Face. To Hoagland’s eye there seemed to be a whole complex of pyramidal and other structures, covering an area of about 12 square miles. He excitedly termed it the ‘City’. This appeared to be made up of several massive, and some smaller, pyramids, plus some much smaller conical ‘buildings’ grouped around an open space that he called the ‘City Square’. In the north-east comer of the City was an enormous structure that appears to be made up of three huge walls, which Hoagland dubbed the ‘Fortress’.

Perhaps the most significant assumption Hoagland made — and surely the one with the least justification on such slight knowledge - was his association of these features with Egypt. As soon as he discovered the City, Hoagland wrote: ‘I was reminded overwhelmingly of Egypt.’¹³ He then went on to identify various other features in Cydonia: the ‘Cliff, a 2-mile-long wall-like feature near a crater 14 miles directly east of the Face; and several small (250-400-foot) objects dotted about the Cydonia plain that he called ‘mounds’.

The relationship between the City and the Cliff presents a significant example of Hoagland’s characteristically circular reasoning. He surmises that the Face, which lies east of the City Square, was built so that the City’s inhabitants, standing in the Square, would see the sun rise out of the Face’s mouth on the Martian summer solstice. Although the sun does not rise there on the solstice today, because of changes in the angle of Mars’s axis over time, it did so in the past - the last time being about half a million years ago. Hoagland concludes that the Cydonia Complex was built at least 500,000 years ago because the alignment with the sun on the summer solstice proves the dating — but the dating also proves the summer solstice alignment, and so on, round and round.¹⁴

Hoagland decided to set up a project to study these features further. He approached SRI and in October 1993 met its vice-president for corporate affairs, former intelligence officer Paul Shay, at the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley, California (founded by Arthur M. Young). This was to prove a significant meeting. Shay recommended that he collaborate with Lambert Dolphin Jr, the physicist who had led SRI teams in Giza between 1973 and 1982.¹⁵

In December 1983, Hoagland and Dolphin formed the Independent Mars Mission, with $50,000 from SRI’s ‘President’s Fund’, an internal funding source under the discretion of SRI’s President, Dr William Miller. Other key people involved in the Independent Mars Mission were Randolpho Pozos (anthropologist), Ren Breck (manager of InfoMedia, the computer conference company run by the thinking person’s ufologist, Dr Jacques Vallée), Merton Davies (a specialist in the cartography of Mars and other planets) and Gene Cordell (a computer-imaging specialist). One of the first to join the new project was physicist John Brandenburg of Sandia Research Laboratories (which specialises in nuclear weapons research). He was a leading scientist in Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (‘Star Wars’) programme, and had previously worked with DiPietro and Molenaar on their analysis of Cydonia.

The first lecture given by Hoagland and Pozos on the work of the Independent Mars Mission took place at the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in early 1984. One of those present was social scientist Tom Rautenberg, who later joined the project. His initial reaction to Hoagland’s revelation about the Face is highly significant:

The involvement of SRI in anything seems enough to ring alarm bells, at least among social scientists such as Tom Rautenberg. SRI’s connections with the CIA and Defense Department experiments — such as remote viewing — are too well known to be dismissed, and their reputation obviously precedes them. And now they were funding Hoagland’s Mars Mission, after having sent Dolphin to Giza in the 1970s ...

Another early recruit to the cause was a designer and illustrator named Jim Channon, a former lieutenant colonel with the US Army, who had been stationed at the Pentagon. Channon was the creator of the ‘First Earth Battalion’, which was, in Hoagland’s words, ‘a pragmatic proposal to combine the “spiritual warrior” goals of “the New Age” with the pragmatic grounded methodology of the military services’.¹⁷

Prior to this, Channon had been a member of an Army War College project called Task Force Delta, whose purpose was, in Jim Schnabel’s words, to ‘investigate alternative philosophic realms for anything militarily useful’.¹⁸

The Independent Mars Mission - with its SRI funding and resources — lasted for seven months, until July 1984, when it presented its findings at a conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Their conclusions were that the anomalous features of Cydonia were suggestive of artificial construction, and that efforts should be made to return to Mars to study them further. ¹⁹

If the features on Mars are artificial, who built them? There are three possible answers:

Between July 1984 and late 1988, nothing much seems to have happened. Then came a revival of the project, with an influx of new personnel, and, it seems, a very different agenda ... There was a notably close connection between the new Mars Mission and the US intelligence community.

The new project received support and encouragement from Representative (Congressman) Robert A. Roe, who was chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Roe agreed to support Hoagland and his team in their lobbying of NASA to rephotograph Cydonia in any subsequent Mars missions. (The official line from NASA was that it would not be making a special point of photographing the Face or other alleged structures again as it did not deem them worthy of notice.) Roe took the Mission’s side in its battle with NASA, even speaking to Hoagland quite explicitly about what he believed to be NASA’s ‘agenda’ in opposing the idea of a civilisation on Mars.²⁰ Roe was clearly on Hoagland’s side and not NASA’s — which was very strange, considering that the Congressional Committee of which he was chairman had direct responsibility for NASA’s budget, and ‘oversight’ responsibility - and therefore major influence - over its policies and plans.²¹ Roe, it should be noted, was also a member of the Congressional Permanent Committee on Intelligence.²²

In January 1991, nearly two years after his key meeting with Hoagland and other members of the Mission, Roe abruptly resigned from the Science, Space and Technology Committee, causing Hoagland to suggest that this was part of some conspiracy. Was Roe being ‘leaned on’ by some group whose interests he was failing to serve? Perhaps significantly, however, he remained on the Intelligence Committee.

The key members of the new project were David M. Myers, Erol Torun and Mark J. Carlotto. This trio introduced several new elements into the story, carrying the original ‘Message of Cydonia’ - that the ancient Martian civilisation has something to teach us now - into something much bigger and more far-reaching.

Dr Mark J. Carlotto is the manager of the intelligence section of The Analytical Science Corporation (TASC) in Massachusetts, and had been working on the Cydonia images since 1985, enhancing the interpretation of satellite photographs for defence and intelligence agencies, skills that were obviously of great use to the Mars Mission. Carlotto used a variety of image-enhancement techniques and processes on the Face to produce clearer images than those of DiPietro and Molenaar. He highlighted new — highly controversial - details, such as teeth in the mouth and the presence of a second eye socket on the shadowed side, thus apparently confirming the symmetry of the Face. His work also revealed what appeared to be distinct bands and lines on the forehead that some have taken to be a headdress, similar to those of the Egyptian pharaohs - which certainly seems to be running ahead of the available scientific data by miles.

Carlotto also enhanced other Cydonian features, most significantly the D & M Pyramid. It was his version of this, which had a much greater clarity of detail than DiPietro and Molenaar’s original, that enabled Erol Torun — a systems analyst with the Defense Mapping Agency in Washington, DC, whom Hoagland described as being ‘on loan’ to his private Mars Mission²³ — to make calculations based on the angles between the different faces of the pyramids. His contribution to the Mars Mission was his study of the geometrical relationships in and between the various Cydonian ‘structures‘, particularly the D & M Pyramid. He concluded that not only did the geometry show that they were artificial but that they also encoded certain sophisticated mathematical concepts that appeared to be trying to ‘tell us something’.²⁴

David Myers, who joined the team in 1989 and became full-time director of operations and editor of its journal, Martian Horizons, made further contributions to the discoveries about the significance of the geometry of Cydonia. (Together with his British colleague David S. Percy, he would add a whole new dimension to this work.)

The main features of the post-1988 Mars/Enterprise Mission have been these:

Hoagland is now firmly of the opinion that the Cydonia monuments were built by a civilisation from elsewhere in the galaxy, who visited Earth in the remote past, having revised his estimate of the Face’s age from half a million to several million - perhaps even a billion — years:

In other words, Hoagland is implying that these putative extraterrestrials actually created the human race, and this idea, odd though it may appear, is rapidly gaining currency throughout the world. Hoagland and his colleagues have been invited several times to present their findings to NASA itself, which is rather odd, because over the years Hoagland has become increasingly strident in his accusations that NASA - or rather, a highly placed cabal within it - is part of a conspiracy to prevent the truth about Cydonia reaching the public. For example, he has taken the lead in promoting the theory that the Mars Observer, which was officially lost in space in August 1993, was actually continuing to send data back to Earth in secret. He has also suggested that NASA are either deliberately ‘fudging’ the facts by withholding data from the latest Mars Global Surveyor images, making the publicly issued pictures look less like a face. It is therefore very strange to find Hoagland being actively courted by NASA in 1988 and 1990, with several invitations to address in-house audiences on the subject of Cydonia. Clearly, in some way it suits NASA — or certain people within that organisation — to have Hoagland at the centre of attention.

The first address was at NASA’s headquarters, NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center, in August 1988. According to Hoagland, at a presentation at NASA-Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio in March 1990, the director, Dr John Klineberg, introduced him with these portentous words: ‘[This is] the man who managed to convince the President to state that a return to Mars is one of our major goals.’²⁷ Perhaps significantly, Hoagland claims that Klineberg’s introduction disappeared from the video that NASA distributed after the event, because of ‘simultaneous equipment failure’ in two cameras — which hardly inspires confidence in NASA’s technical competence - though the opening words were captured on audio tape by Hoagland’s team.

Hoagland also gave a lecture to a meeting at the United Nations in New York in February 1992, which was enthusiastically received by a capacity audience.²⁸ Apparently they had no problem with his — admittedly well-presented and authoritative-theory that by then almost automatically linked Mars with ancient Egypt. Presented as it was with wonders and mysteries by a man who seemed to know, they lapped it up. Hoagland’s conviction and enthusiasm were contagious; almost certainly as a result of his influence, two countries - Sierra Leone and Grenada — featured the Face on Mars on their official postage stamps.

Hoagland is also one of the most regular guests on Art Bell’s nightly radio show, which is devoted to weird and wonderful paranormal, psychic and New Age topics and has an audience of 15 million listeners. By any standard, that is a huge number of people, who are presumably sympathetic to what has been described as Art Bell’s ‘blend of conservative political views and New Age credulity’.²⁹

Through the Enterprise Mission website, a series of videos, and Hoagland’s book The Monuments of Mars (first published in 1987, and already in its fourth, revised, edition), as well as regular media appearances and lecture tours, Hoagland has become the main source for the dissemination of information about the Martian enigmas, eclipsing much more solid, but unappealingly cautious, work by other researchers. A sign of this phenomenon is the title of the video series: Hoagland’s Mars.

When these images — of the Face and the City - were finally issued by NASA to huge disappointment and even incredulity, there was considerably less to suggest a Face. The many erstwhile enthusiastic proponents of the buildings on Mars theory who had second thoughts included Stanley V. McDaniel - another leading advocate of the Cydonia structures, although he parted company with Hoagland on many points — and even Mark Carlotto. McDaniel now says that the City’s apparent pyramids and other structures ‘appear consistent with a natural geological interpretation’.³⁰ In particular the four mounds making up the City Square, which plays an important part in Hoagland’s line of reasoning, are not symmetrically placed or uniform in size and shape. The City Pyramid, McDaniel admits, now looks more like a mountain than a building. And Mark Carlotto, while not dropping all claims of artificiality, said: ‘In the 1976 Viking images, the impression of a face was unmistakable. But illuminated from below, the Face looks less remarkable.’³¹

Hoagland, however, is as adamant as ever that the Face exists, and - characteristically blunt - dismisses the new images as ‘crap’.³² He insists that the Mars Global Surveyor pictures show more, not less, evidence of artificiality, even claiming that ‘room-sized cells’ can be distinguished within the main City Pyramid. Just as there were claims that the Turin Shroud’s carbon-dating tests were tampered with, many still sympathise with this view, claiming that NASA deliberately fudged the data by extracting some portions of it before issuing the new images, so that, for example, certain parts of the contrast were missing.

Hoagland’s Enterprise Mission website proclaimed that the new images showed that ‘It is a Face!’. Within days it had produced its own ‘rectified’ version of the new NASA pictures, this time looking more like the original Viking ones, which was only to be expected because they had filled in the ‘gaps’ in the new data with the relevant parts of the original images.³³

Hoagland clearly believed NASA was lying, and was furious. If there were no Face on Mars, then there was nothing on which to hang a ‘Message’. But, for Hoagland and those who share his views, there had to be a Face and a Message: it is all part of a much wider and more insidious agenda, which includes the ‘Message’ - and legacy - of ancient Egypt.

NASA’s marked lack of interest in pursuing the Cydonia enigma might, as many have suggested, conceal the fact that the US government is fully aware that the Face and the pyramids are artificial and want to withhold this information from the public.

Given the way that politics works, it is virtually certain that, should the US government even suspect that there is any truth in the claims of artificial features on Mars, it would want to make its own evaluation before deciding whether to disclose or conceal this knowledge.

There remain features on Mars — in Cydonia and elsewhere — difficult to reconcile with the natural processes of erosion and geology. For example, there is the so-called ‘Crater Pyramid’ in the Deuteronilus Mensae region, about 500 miles north-east of Cydonia.³⁴ Viking images of this area had shown an object, close to the rim of the crater, that cast a long, thin spirelike shadow. The object itself is hard to make out, as the camera was directly above it, but based on the shadow and angle of sunlight, it is calculated to be around 600 metres tall - hardly the pyramid Hoagland was swift to dub it, once again apparently seeking above all else to link Mars with Egypt, no matter how inconvenient the facts.

Such features continue to raise questions, although in the future they may be explained in some prosaic way. The only truly valid conclusion at the moment is that — as far as most people are concerned — there simply is not enough data to go on. We do not know enough to state categorically that there was not a civilisation on Mars in the distant past. On the other hand, much more investigation of the anomalies on Mars is needed before they can be positively identified as being man- (or rather, Martian-) made. Every drop of data has been wrung from the available images, and it still isn’t enough to tell us definitively one way or another.

Our own view is that the Martian anomalies are very much a subject for investigation. Although so far we have concentrated on Hoagland and his team, other independent researchers have conducted a great deal of excellent work that, even within the frustrating confines of available data, has raised important questions.

For example, in 1993 Stanley V. McDaniel published an analysis of the Mars situation in The McDaniel Report (as it is known for short).³⁵ Initially intended as a critique of NASA’s close-minded attitude to further investigation of Cydonia, McDaniel reviewed the evidence for the artificiality of the features and concluded that, at the very least, there is a case for further investigation. More recently, McDaniel and Monica Rix Paxson edited The Case for the Face (unfortunately published in 1998, just weeks after the new NASA images were released), which presents a series of much more soberly scientific papers on the enigma. Another independent group was the Mars Anomalies Research Society, founded in 1986 by former NASA astronaut Dr Brian O’Leary, whose members include Vincent DiPietro and John Brandenberg.

Many independent researchers reject the attempts of Hoagland’s Enterprise Mission to construct additional wonders on the shaky foundation of the data so far available, in particular questioning the claims of geometric alignments and sophisticated mathematical ‘codes’ so crucial to their interpretation. McDaniel organised the Society for Planetary SETI^a Research (SPSR) in 1994, which is in effect a rival to the Enterprise Mission. DiPietro and Molenaar, whose original work inspired the whole field, have themselves criticised attempts to go beyond the known facts:

Mark Carlotto is careful to be fair in his assessment of Hoagland’s ‘geometric code’, saying: ‘It’s hard to disprove, but it’s also hard to prove. I try to stick to the things I can prove. I approach the matter as a scientist while Hoagland approaches it as a writer.’³⁷ But Carlotto does admit that ‘Hoagland tends to process images until he gets what he wants.’³⁸

The question is open. Some of the data may be intriguing, but it is too limited for any conclusions to be drawn as yet. Although Mark Carlotto sensibly points out that there is no rush to find the meaning of the Face — after all, it is going nowhere — there are others who seem to be in an unseemly haste to come to a hard-and-fast conclusion, those who want to build the Mars mystery into their own agenda, centred on the year 2000.

Central to Hoagland’s own ‘mission’ is his emphasis on the (alleged) connection between Cydonia and ancient Egypt. But is there a connection other than the — arguable — observation that they both have pyramids?

The Cydonia enigma has recently been given a very significant boost in the form of an endorsement by Hancock, Bauval and Grigsby in The Mars Mystery. Although mainly concerned with the possibility of the Earth being hit by an asteroid or comet, the authors accept not just the reality of Cydonia and other Martian anomalies, but also its encoded mathematical Message and connection with the ancient civilisations of Earth, particularly ancient Egypt. Once these alleged connections are scrutinised, though, great flaws appear in their logic. The basic argument is that, because there are pyramids and a Sphinx in both Giza and Cydonia, the two are connected. But of course that depends on the Face on Mars being a Sphinx. The Cydonia clique describe it as being Sphinx-like; indeed, James Hurtak was using such emotive language even before it was officially discovered.

This eagerness to call the Face a Sphinx is very odd. Even if the Face were genuinely artificial, the fact remains that it is just a face, not a lion’s body with a man’s head. Besides, the Face only ‘works’ because it stares out into space — the only angle from which we could recognise it - whereas, of course, the Sphinx can only be perceived from a position on Earth. This is no good for the Hoagland camp. They have to devise increasingly unlikely scenarios to fit their Face/Sphinx correlation, requiring some extremely tortuous reasoning. Hoagland states that, if the Face on Mars is divided down the middle, and each half is mirror-imaged on to the other, we achieve two, distinctly different new images. One, he claims, is ‘simian’ in appearance, the other ‘leonine’ — an anthropoid and a lion. The Great Sphinx at Giza is a man’s head on a lion’s body. Conclusion: we have two Sphinxes - in close proximity with pyramids — on both worlds!³⁹

Serious problems are raised by this interpretation of the Face, and not merely the fact that the ‘simian’ looks, to us at least, much more like a cartoon dog, and the lion is similarly hard to see. One of the main problems with analysing the Face is that one half of it lies in deep shadow. Some of the image-enhancement techniques have been claimed to bring out certain details on the shadowed side, such as a second eye socket, but such claims are themselves controversial. There is no way in which the shadowed side can be reconstructed to show any fine detail, and certainly not half a lion’s face!

The argument about the Face may be extremely shaky, but the situation worsens when the clique tries to use linguistics to reinforce their case. Hoagland, and others such as Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval, make much of the fact that the name Cairo, in Arabic Al Qahira, means ‘Mars’.⁴⁰ Hancock, Bauval and Grigsby go so far as to describe the naming as ‘inexplicable’.⁴¹ But in fact it is very easily explained. Al Qahira literally means ‘the Conqueror’, which was the Arab name for Mars.⁴² Cairo/Al Qahira was founded in 969 CE by the Fatimid general Jawhar al-Siqilli, following his conquest of Egypt. When the site of the new city was established it was noted that Mars was at an astrologically propitious point in the sky — and this, together with the fact that it was built to honour a conqueror, explains the choice of the name.⁴³ It has no connection with any putative relationship between features on Mars and those on the Giza Plateau. In any case, Cairo was not always the capital of Egypt: until the time of the Crusades it was merely a satellite town of the more important city of Al Fustat.⁴⁴ The populous suburbs of Cairo have only begun to nudge up to the Sphinx in the last fifty years. Before that, Giza was completely separate from Cairo, 6.5 miles (10 kilometres) out in the desert, effectively undermining the theory that connects Giza and Cairo/Mars.

Hancock, Bauval and Grigsby also point out that ‘Horakhti’, meaning ‘Horus of the Horizon’ — a name of the Sphinx - was also a term used by the ancient Egyptians for Mars. Their central argument in Keeper of Genesis was that Horakhti was a representation of the constellation of Leo, though. Which one is it to be?

Another linguistic ‘fact’ cited by Hoagland, Hancock and Bauval is that the original Egyptian name for Horus, Heru, also meant ‘face’, so Horakhti can, according to those authors, be translated as ‘Face of the Horizon’.⁴⁵ Hoagland claims that, from the City of Cydonia, the Face would be seen on the horizon, so here we have a remarkable parallel. Two faces on the horizon, on two worlds ... But this is a highly contrived game: according to Wallis Budge’s An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary the two words, meaning ‘Horus’ and ‘face’, may sound the same phonetically (although as ancient Egyptian vowel sounds have to be guessed at, no one knows for certain), but that is as far as it goes.⁴⁶ They are two entirely different words. It is like claiming that the English word ‘knight’ is interchangeable with the identical-sounding ‘night’. And in hieroglyphs the two words are ‘spelled’ entirely differently and represent totally different concepts. Besides, heru is plural, meaning ‘faces’, which significantly alters the hypothesis of Hoagland et al.

The advocates of the Mars — Egypt connection seem to be enthusiastically incestuous in their adoption of each other’s ideas and theories to prove their points and convey their message. Hoagland has eagerly taken up the New Egyptology, including that of John Anthony West, in support of his claims of a Mars — Egypt link. For example, he reports Robert Schoch’s redating of the Sphinx from water erosion, claiming that, like Hancock and Bauval, it is evidence for a much older date of construction than 7000 BCE.⁴⁷

Hancock and Bauval based most of their arguments on Hoagland’s work and interpretation of the Mars material, which they seem to accept as if scientifically proven. Hoagland is given an especially warm acknowledgement in Keeper of Genesis, and it can therefore be assumed that the three had a close working relationship even at that relatively early stage in the development of Bauval and Hancock’s hypothesis.

Hoagland, too, had his much-admired source: Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, which he has absorbed into his own belief system, lock, stock - and errors. For example, he often quotes the ‘fact’ that arq ur means ‘Sphinx’.⁴⁸ This mistake - arising from that incorrect reading of Wallis Budge’s An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary — finds its way into the work of many of the Mars-Egypt proponents.

Physicists today believe that the universe encompasses far more dimensions than just the four (three of space, one of time) we know about and perceive with our senses. The only way we can begin to visualise the concept of a multidimensional universe is by analogy. One of the best is that of an imaginary world called Flatland, a two-dimensional place inhabited by two-dimensional beings, where there is only length and breadth, no up or down - something like a sheet of paper.⁴⁹ Imagine how Flatlanders would perceive a three-dimensional object that interacted with their world. For example, if a sphere passed through, the Flatlanders would only see it in cross-section; first a dot would appear, which would then become a circle that grows until the middle of the sphere passes through, and then it would decrease in size to become a dot again, and vanish. (No doubt such a ‘paranormal’ phenomenon would cause much consternation among Flatlanders and probably be hotly debated by learned Flatland societies as well as dismissed as a delusion by their ‘Skeptics’.) This analogy with the hypothetical Flatland enables us to understand that events taking place in the higher dimensions now acknowledged by theoretical physicists would have visible effects in our three-dimensional world, although the cause would remain beyond both our senses and even our most sophisticated instruments.

Physicists deal in such ‘extra’ dimensions because of certain phenomena associated with nuclear physics, although there is some debate about how many dimensions make up the universe. These hyperdimensions cannot be observed directly, since we and all our measuring devices are stuck in the three-dimensional universe, but they can be understood mathematically. Hoagland’s contention is that certain geometrical relationships in the Cydonia Complex are references to such hyperdimensional mathematics. The geometrical key is the repeated use of the angle of 19.5 degrees. For example, two sides of the D & M Pyramid are found at 19.5 degrees to Mars’s lines of latitude, and this angle recurs in the position of the small mounds in the same region.⁵⁰

According to Hoagland - and others of like mind — 19.5 (more precisely, 19.47) degrees is significant because it is the tetrahedral constant, which means that it relates to the tetrahedron, the simplest of the regular solids, with four sides of equilateral triangles, including a triangular base. If this shape were put inside a sphere, for example a planet, with one point touching one of the poles, the other three points will each touch the surface at a latitude of 19.5 degrees on the opposite hemisphere. This is a fact.

It has been observed that on all the planets in the solar system where it is possible to see the surface — Venus, for example, is always covered with clouds — there is invariably some great disturbance caused by an upwelling of energy at either 19.5 degrees north or 19.5 degrees south of the equator. The great Red Spot of Jupiter is located at this position. On Mars, Olympus Mons, the largest known volcano in the solar system (350 miles across), lies at 19.5 degrees north. On Earth, it is the location of the heavily volcanic islands of Hawaii, and the largest volcano on the planet, Mauna Loa.

The phenomenon of 19.5 degrees is thought to result from the rotation of the planets, being in effect a ‘shadow’ of highly potent forces of higher dimensions. In other words, the site of 19.5 degrees is a point where the other dimensions break through, becoming manifest in the three-dimensional world as a revelation of hyperdimensional forces.

This, claims Hoagland, is why the 19.5-degree angle recurs so often in Cydonia. It is a clue intended to lead us to an understanding of the hyperdimensional cause of the planetary upwellings of energy responsible for Jupiter’s Red Spot and Mars’s Olympus Mons. This in turn enables us to appreciate hyperdimensional physics. Hoagland argues that if the energy generated by higher dimensions can be tapped, we will have an unlimited source of power as well as the ability to develop such technologies as antigravity propulsion devices and interstellar space travel. These technologies, he believes, will solve many of the world’s problems and bring about, in his words, a ‘new world order’.

There are problems with this. Even in Hoagland’s lecture to the United Nations, where he talks at length about the importance of 19.5 degrees and tetrahedral geometry, he admits that the upwelling of planetary energies at these points had already been worked out years before by mathematicians dealing in hyperdimensions. The Message of Cydonia, in fact, merely repeats what very terrestrial scientists have known for years.

More importantly, Hoagland and Erol Torun drew a number of significant conclusions from Cydonia’s latitude. One of their key claims is that the latitude of the D & M Pyramid — 40.868 degrees north — was not only chosen because it embodied important mathematical concepts (being the tangent of the exponential constant e divided by pi), but also because the same concepts appear in the geometry of other features of Cydonia. The complex is therefore, they concluded, ‘self-referencing’, which means that the mathematics in the ‘buildings’ relate to the Complex’s position on the planet, proving that none of it is a mere coincidence.⁵¹

A difficulty arises as the co-ordinates for surface features based on the Viking survey have a marked margin of error. They are certainly not precise enough to fix a feature’s latitude to three decimal places of a degree. New, and more accurate data from Mars Global Surveyor suggests that all the previous figures should be revised so that the features are in fact slightly closer to the Martian equator, meaning that the D & M Pyramid stands at 40.7 degrees north.⁵² This is not particularly significant in itself (it represents an error of approximately 17 kilometres on the ground), but it is enough to invalidate the precise mathematical relationships of Hoagland’s theory.

In addition, other researchers, such as Tom Van Flandern of the US Naval Observatory, have pointed out that it is accepted that the Martian poles have shifted significantly over millions of years, so Cydonia has not always been located at that latitude.⁵³ (Interestingly, Van Flandern has calculated that, before the pole shift, Cydonia would have been on Mars’s equator.) There is also evidence that Mars’s crust has ‘slipped’ several times because of ‘crustal displacement’, again changing the position of the Cydonia region.⁵⁴

Even the theoretical harnessing of the energy generated by hyperdimensional forces - as hypothesised by Hoagland — is nothing new, although there are no known ways to actually do so — and the Message of Cydonia does nothing to enlighten us about this. Neither does it even hint how workable technologies might be developed from harnessing this energy. The ‘amazing’ geometry of Cydonia has added nothing to our understanding — of Mars, Martians or of mankind.

The Hoagland camp’s confident theorising does not stop there. When Hoagland’s colleague David Myers claims that a line running from a particular mark on the D & M Pyramid to a ‘teardrop’ on the Face measures exactly 1/360th of the diameter of Mars⁵⁵ (thus ‘proving’, incidentally, that the builders must have used the same system of measuring angles as ourselves), he is truly on a slippery slope. There is no justification for choosing to join these two insignificant points up except that they are, for Myers, the required distance apart. One would eventually find two points that would oblige somewhere in Cydonia.

The angles Erol Torun claimed to have found in the D & M Pyramid provide most of the basis for the decoding of the Message of Cydonia. What he claims to have found is in itself highly debatable: a five-sided pyramid that he managed to discern from an enhanced image of a partly eroded feature half in shadow. All the measurements have to be treated with caution, so any conclusions based on them must, at the very outside, be highly speculative. (The Mars Global Surveyor has not, unfortunately, re-imaged the D & M Pyramid yet.) In fact, Torun himself admits that there is an unknown margin of error in the Viking images - which makes his whole case for precise geometric relationships completely redundant.⁵⁶

Another prime mover in the Mars Mission is the British award-winning film photographer David S. Percy, who was appointed European director of operations by Hoagland (although they have since had a disagreement and no longer work together). In this capacity Percy enthusiastically promoted the Message of Cydonia in the United Kingdom and other European countries. He also produced the video of Hoagland’s address at the United Nations. Percy has lectured widely in Britain on the Cydonia — Mars connection, using state-of-the-art computer graphics to illustrate his points. Like Hoagland, whose media background enables him to present his ideas in a relaxed and professional manner, Percy uses his skills as a film producer to excellent effect. His images of Cydonia surpass even the earlier enhancements for clarity and sharpness. In particular, the all important D & M Pyramid — so crucial for the ‘decoding’ of the alleged geometrical and mathematical message - appears as a clearly defined feature, with the original blurred edges now in such sharp focus that they almost seem to be etched into the Martian landscape. In his lectures, Percy describes these images as being Mark Carlotto’s - but he adds vaguely that they have undergone ‘further enhancement and rectification in London recently’.⁵⁷ He gives no details of this process, but when we asked what he had meant, he admitted that he had done it himself.⁵⁸ Although professionals who have worked with the images of Cydonia — such as DiPietro, Molenaar and Mark Carlotto — have published detailed technical descriptions of the process they used, Percy has not obliged.

Percy added a new connection to the enigma. Hoagland had already noted the similarity between Silbury Hill — the largest manmade mound in Europe, which lies just south-west of Avebury in Wiltshire in England - and one of the Cydonian features called the ‘Tholus’, or Spiral Mound. In the library of his luxurious London flat, while looking at an aerial photograph of Avebury, Percy then experienced a great revelation, which he describes (somewhat mysteriously) as ‘far memory’.⁵⁹ His newly inspired eye suddenly noted that the great circle of ditch and earthen rampart that encloses its standing stones was a representation of nothing less than the large crater in Cydonia! He went on to demonstrate that the Avebury circle and Silbury Hill lie in the same relative positions as the Cydonia crater and Martian Spiral Mound — if the latter is scaled down by a factor of 14:1.

Percy and David Myers (the Mars Mission’s director of operations, and later co-author with Percy of a book called Two-Thirds), worked on this correlation and concluded that the Avebury complex had been deliberately laid out, some 5,000 years ago, as an ‘analogue’ of Cydonia. Percy claims that maps of the two areas, appropriately scaled up or down, can be superimposed over each other to reveal a perfect match.

Perhaps not unexpectedly, problems arise with this hypothesis. The only real correlation between Avebury and Cydonia is the relative position and size of two features, the crater/Avebury circle and the Spiral Mound/Silbury Hill. Even then the match is not perfect. When scaled down and superimposed, the crater is smaller than, and not the same shape as, the Avebury circle. Percy also claims correlations between other features that are even less persuasive. For example, the D & M Pyramid’s Avebury analogue is a certain tumulus surrounded by a grove of trees. In fact it fails totally to match its alleged Martian counterpart, not corresponding in size, shape or relative position with the D & M Pyramid. In any case there are many similar tumuli in the area. No other Cydonian features are ‘analogued’ at Avebury, although Percy makes much of odd indentations, lumps and bumps in the ground that he finds at the approximate position of the City on Mars. None of these are at all convincing. But there is one spectacular omission: there is no analogue of the Face at Avebury. Could it be that nothing could be found at Avebury - even by forcing the data to fit - to even vaguely remind us of the location and features of the Face, so it has been quietly forgotten?

In fact, only two features of Avebury correspond to any at Cydonia: the earthwork circle and Silbury Hill. It seems odd that an analogue of Cydonia, built on Earth, should centre on reproducing a natural feature of Cydonia - the crater - while not including the many supposedly artificial features. Finally, many landmarks of the Avebury complex have no analogue in Cydonia, the most obvious being West Kennet Long Barrow. Yet despite all these discrepancies and convoluted hypothesising, Hoagland incorporated Percy’s ‘discovery’ of the Cydonia-Avebury connection into his United Nations lecture.

Another area that greatly excites Hoagland, Percy, Myers and their colleagues is the vexed subject of crop circles. They maintain that these ‘transtime crop glyphs’, as they prefer to call them, contain geometrical and mathematical ‘codes’ that duplicate, and reinforce, the Message of Cydonia. By linking the builders of Cydonia with this very visible, yet enigmatic, modern phenomenon, Hoagland is effectively saying that the Martian builders are still around, and are active on Earth now. He describes ‘the fact that someone - demonstrably not from Earth — is now attempting to drive home the “Message of Cydonia” as a “message in the crops”, before our very eyes right here on Earth!’⁶⁰

One particular crop formation is given pride of place in the work of Hoagland and Percy because it incorporates tetrahedral geometry: the Barbary Castle formation, which appeared in a Wiltshire field in 1991. This ‘crop glyph’ was even featured in Hoagland’s UN lecture because, he claimed, it includes geometrical features that match some of the code of Cydonia. If this were true, it would confirm not only the terrestrial connection, but also the return of the builders of Cydonia. Hoagland in particular invests great personal belief in the ‘They’re Back’ interpretation of this formation, in which he and his team claim to have identified some of the same key angles they detected in the plan of Cydonia. David Percy goes even further, managing to overlay the Barbary Castle pattern on Avebury, to demonstrate how its geometry was used as the. plan for the layout of the roads!

Whatever the truth about crop circles in general, there seems little doubt that this one is a hoax or - as many of the circlemakers themselves tend to think of it - a work of art. The inspiration for the design is actually known. It is not a specially constructed design to encode some of the secrets of hyperdimensional physics, but is based on a design in a sixteenth-century alchemical treatise by Steffan Michelspacher, Cabala, speculum artis et naturae in alchymia.⁶¹

The identity of the makers is well known among the confraternity of circlemakers, and the modus operandi has already been described by Rob Irving, a writer, photographer and occasional circlemaker. Irving told us:

The formation wasn’t even executed with any finesse: there are kinks in some of the lines and mistakes in the geometry. Significantly, Hoagland and Percy actually use the errors in their reconstruction of the grand design of this pattern!⁶³

So what is the Message of Cydonia, according to Hoagland? He says:

There are only two possible reasons for these ideas: entirely spurious notions have been superimposed on a genuine mystery in order to give them an apparent feasibility; or the proponents of these ideas somehow knew, or thought they knew, in advance that these connections exist.

Perhaps the release of this information is an exercise in deception, or in ‘softening up’ the public to accept certain ideas, even to the point of promoting those ideas when the facts (as currently known) do not support them. There seems to us to be an air of desperation to make us believe, whether we want to or not and whether the evidence fits or not. And that is worrying.

With all of its monumental implications for our understanding of Man’s recent past and our immediate future — the ‘radical new technologies’ it promises and the implicit suggestion that the builders of Cydonia are about to return, if they have not already — the Message of Cydonia promoted primarily by Hoagland is not supported by the evidence. Clearly, it has been deliberately grafted on to what is, admittedly, a very intriguing enigma, in much the same way that Hancock and Bauval have grafted the date of 10,500 BCE on to the genuine ancient Egyptian mysteries.

The way that the Martian enigmas are being promoted by the likes of Hoagland presents a striking parallel to certain investigations of ancient Egypt. The common features of both are:

We have noted that Hoagland’s work appears to fall into two distinct phases: the first, backed by SRI in 1983 — 4, was concerned with promoting the idea of the existence of a very ancient civilisation on Mars. But, since 1989, the second phase has been about the ‘Message’, the connection with humanity’s own ancient history and our present and future.

Was Phase One, as social scientist Tom Rautenberg thought at first, in fact a sociological experiment to determine public reaction to the concept of life on Mars? And then did someone realise that the Mars material could be used more effectively to put across another message, part of a separate but interlinking agenda?

Another motive may have lain behind the 1983 — 4 SRI-backed project. The Iron Curtain was still in place and the attendant suspicions of Soviet plotting was very strong: the Eastern Bloc countries were perceived to be keeping many secrets very close to their chests. Perhaps Hoagland/SRI’s Phase One was an attempt to draw out of the Soviets their knowledge or suspicions about Mars. It is certainly a curious coincidence that, within a month of the Boulder conference at which Hoagland announced his initial findings, the Russian English-language propaganda newspaper, Soviet Weekly, carried an article by Vladimir Avinsky on his research into what he termed ‘the Martian Sphinx’ and ‘pyramids’.⁶⁵

Hoagland and his team then tried to establish a line of communication with the Soviet Academy of Sciences to exchange data on the subject. Significantly, their intermediary in this was Jim Hickman of the Soviet Exchange Program of the Esalen Institute in California (of which more later).⁶⁶

Not only do marked parallels lie between the way that the stories of Egypt and of Mars are being presented, but the stories themselves are also being deliberately fused to make one big, dramatic picture. These days there are few non-academic interested parties who fail to associate the features of Cydonia with Egypt. Those with their own agendas have been very successful: we have seen the attempts by Cydonia researchers such as Hoagland to link the Message with ancient Egypt (and other cultures, such as megalithic Britain). On the other hand, Hancock and Bauval have made the journey the other way round, beginning with the mysteries of Egypt, and then linking them back to Mars. This is one story, not two, as is demonstrated by the overlap of people and groups involved.

For example, it is reported that, in 1996, on their return to the United States from the Giza project, members of the Joseph Schor Foundation consulted both Richard Hoagland and James Hurtak, the two main proponents of the pyramids of Mars and of a Mars — Giza connection.⁶⁷ And Boris Said, the film-maker who has been chronicling events at Giza since 1990, recently enrolled James Hurtak as part of his team. Hurtak had talked about the Mars — Egypt connection as being part of a ‘great cosmic blueprint’ as far back as 1975.

There are other curious crossovers of personnel between the pyramids of Mars and the Mars-Giza camps. Dr Farouk El Baz was appointed head of the team that continued Rudolf Gantenbrink’s work to explore the ‘Sirius shaft’ in the Great Pyramid. El Baz’s past association with NASA may be coincidental, but SRI — as we have seen — certainly does not lack contacts within defence and intelligence agencies. (Since leaving NASA, El Baz founded and is now director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University. One of the Starship Enterprise’s shuttle craft in Star Trek: The Next Generation is named after him - true fame.)

By far the most prominent of all crossover individuals is Lambert Dolphin Jr, the SRI teamleader at Giza between 1973 and 1982, who was also the co-founder with Hoagland of the Independent Mars Mission in 1983, a project funded and resourced by SRI.

This is a strangely thought-provoking scenario, but it becomes even stranger, particularly when considered in the context of the knowledge we have gathered so far and the conclusions we can extrapolate from it.

A glaring paradox is found in the above points. On the one hand, the involvement of official bodies may simply mean that they have come to the same conclusions as Hancock, Bauval, Hoagland and Temple - and are, like them, excited by the idea of imminent revelations about Egypt and Mars. Perhaps they even have prior knowledge... Do the ‘powers that be’ already know about the influence on humanity of an extraterrestrial race — either from Mars or elsewhere? Are they secretly trying to recover some knowledge of that race?

Superficially, this may seem likely. On the other hand, as we have seen, the ‘messianic’ messages claimed for both the Egyptian and Martian scenarios do not bear scrutiny. They use faulty reasoning, misread source material or are manifestly massaged to accord with some personal — or group - hidden agenda. So why should official bodies such as SRI and NASA, who have reputations - and funding — to lose, take this all so seriously?

We can suggest two main hypotheses that may account for the mounting official interest in such apparently off-the-wall scenarios: one is a conspiracy about something real, and the other is a conspiracy to make us believe something that is unreal.

This hypothesis would account for much of the data, though not some of the official activities. We are convinced, for example, of clandestine activity at Giza, which is obviously expected to produce some kind of tangible results. Another example involves the curious circumstances surrounding NASA’s photographing of the Crater Pyramid. In our opinion, this 600-foot spire perched on the edge of a crater is the most compelling of the anomalous Martian features, and very difficult to explain in terms of natural processes. What is curious is that, back in 1976, Viking took four pictures of that area in rapid succession, the only time during the entire mission that this happened.⁶⁹ As Mark Carlotto has pointed out, this must have been preprogrammed into the orbiter, as the time delay on radio instructions would not permit mission control to react so quickly. It seems too much of a coincidence that the only instance of such rapid-fire photography should occur at that one particular spot - but how did NASA know in advance that there was something interesting to photograph in that area?

In this scenario, false evidence is being proposed to support a genuine phenomenon. This is a bold and apparently bizarre proposition, but the whole history of intelligence operations is one of absurdity and contradiction, albeit with a steely underpinning of single-minded agendas. This hypothesis deserves to be taken seriously, if only to see where it leads. Its advantage is that it explains why, on the one hand, official bodies appear to be searching seriously for something, while on the other the reasons for doing so simply do not sustain closer examination.

Our two hypotheses will be tested as this investigation continues: as we have seen, in the first, the so-called messages for mankind are simply fabricated or delusory. But is there any other information that might support the second hypothesis?

Could the ‘powers that be’ know that extraterrestrial influence on human civilisation and the connection with Mars are genuine, even if they have to create false evidence to persuade the public that this is so? If they really have such inside information, how did they acquire it? Evidence that convinced hard-headed industrialists, scientists and intelligence operatives about the reality of alien intervention in human affairs must have been so persuasive as to be virtually incontestable, but at the same time impossible to entrust to the public domain. But what kind of evidence could possibly be so watertight?

A clue may lie in the fact that a favoured target of the Pentagon’s remote-viewing experiments was Mars. The original SRI experiments, between 1973 and 1976, included sessions by Ingo Swann and physical researcher Harold Sherman in which they remote viewed the surface of Mars (and indeed, other planets). ⁷⁰ The results of these experiments have never been made public,⁷¹ although it is known that the Face on Mars was detected by RVers some years before the Viking mission.

In a conversation with Uri Geller in January 1998 about his time at SRI, he told us that the Face on Mars had, in fact, been discovered by remote viewing in the early 1970s, long before the Viking mission. For various reasons he could not reveal the identity of the remote viewer in question, but in October 1998 we asked James Hurtak’s Academy For Future Sciences about his supposed ‘prediction’ about a facelike feature on Mars that - according to Hancock and Bauval — he had made in 1975. The reply was: ‘Dr Hurtak shared his insights of “remote viewing” with Mr Harold Sherman’.⁷² This was rather puzzling, as we had not actually mentioned remote viewing; in our view, this was tantamount to an admission that the Face had been discovered by remote viewing. The AFFS’s reply went on: ‘However, the principle [sic] artifact that Dr Hurtak saw was the pyramidal formations [sic] which has always been his uniqueness and not the Face itself.’ So although Hurtak himself may not have remote viewed the Face, the implication is that Harold Sherman did. This is interesting, because we do know that Sherman remote viewed Mars for SRI.

Sherman began as a sports writer before becoming interested in the paranormal and UFOs in the 1940s. He coined the phrase ‘Little Green Men’ to describe aliens. Sherman was by 1975 a veteran psychical researcher, in his seventies, who had been brought in by SRI specifically to help set up the first remote-viewing project.⁷³

The issue of remote viewing may seem like something from The X-Files, a ripping yarn about invisible spies and mind control, not based on hard fact. No matter how it may challenge our mundane certainties about the ways things are, though, remote viewing works, which is why so much time and taxpayers’ money was invested in it by several governments, and particularly the US government. When the cream of the crop of US RVers repeatedly - and consistently - described the surface of Mars, individuals within the government and associated agencies took note.

The US Army’s highly talented remote viewer Joe McMoneagle ‘visited’ Mars several times, always sketching the scenes that met his disembodied gaze. There, unmistakably, were pyramids and, he claimed, tunnels under the Cydonia complex in which the remnants of an ancient civilisation continued to exist.

In his 1996 book Psychic Warrior, David Morehouse tells of his own remote-viewing missions to Mars eight years before. He had been given Mars as a blind target, without knowing that this location had been set for him. He saw nothing significant, just a barren reddish landscape that had been deserted for thousands of years. After this ‘mission’, Morehouse was shown a folder enclosing details of the target location: pictures of Mars, taken from orbit and the ground. He writes of the other material in the folder:

Morehouse, who also sketched a dream in which ‘the sky tears and another dimension is revealed’, had a tendency to remote view particularly significant scenes, even if he only realised it in retrospect. In Psychic Warrior he describes being set a blind target and homing in on a boxlike object hidden in a cavern that appeared to be protected by an aura of extreme danger. He told his ‘monitor’ that it was ‘something very powerful and sacred’ and said it would ‘vaporise’ anyone who got too close, adding: ’I felt very uncomfortable and vulnerable in that cavern’.⁷⁵ An hour or so after this ‘mission’, Morehouse was shown an artist’s impression of the target — the fabled Old Testament Ark of the Covenant, whose mysterious power could fell whole armies. It seems that he had successfully used one paranormal ability to get the target right — perhaps a form of telepathic contact with the mind of the experimenter - but had he really tuned in to the Ark itself?

No one knows for certain how remote viewing works, only what it can produce. Seated in a mundane office with a monitor asking questions, the RVer’s invisible consciousness takes flight and visits elsewhere, sometimes even elsewhen, for time is no barrier to the remote viewer who can ‘scroll’ up or down through past, present and future by the force of will alone. Sometimes, of course, they fail to describe the targets, and come up with either a ‘displacement’ description, an accurate description of a place that was not the target, or something that might just be fantasy. Sometimes the remote viewers can describe frankly outlandish scenarios.

Despite the many successes of remote viewing, the problem has always been the accurate interpretation of what is seen. Even everyday perception involves the brain making decisions about the meaning of the shapes of objects and people seen. In this process, context is everything, and the more obvious and detailed the context, the more accurate the brain’s interpretation of the shapes seen. The same applies to remote viewing, particularly when the target was Mars prior to 1976 - before the first good photographs of its surface reached us on Earth. The mind of the remote viewer would automatically try to make sense of unfamiliar landmarks, perhaps reacting as if to an inkblot test and turning a rocky outcrop into a recognisable Face.

We ourselves know that remote viewing can, and often does, work, but it is by no means 100 per cent accurate. One cautionary tale involves Courtney Brown, professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta. Trained in remote viewing in 1992 by a former member of the Pentagon RV unit (he refuses to name him, but it was, in fact, Pentagon remote-viewing star, Major Ed Dames), he hit upon the idea of using remote viewing as a scientific research tool, specifically to investigate the question of extraterrestrial visitors on Earth.

Brown made several ‘research trips’, via remote viewing, to Mars in 1993 and 1994. The first was part of his training, when it was a blind target (clearly a favourite destination for RV trainers). He described a pyramid, and nearby a volcano erupting, devastating the area and causing the inhabitants to flee for their lives. Afterwards, his trainer showed him the target picture: it was Cydonia.⁷⁶

Brown maintains, thanks to the evidence of his remote-viewing ‘eyes’, that there are not only survivors of the Martian race living underground on Cydonia, but also on Earth - beneath the mountains of New Mexico and in villages in Latin America. According to Brown, Martian civilisation at the time of its great catastrophe had achieved approximately the level of development of ancient Egypt, although we do not know whether that is the level understood by mainstream academics or that of the technologically advanced Egyptians of the New Orthodoxy. All but wiped out, the Martians were rescued by the arrival of the — by now familiar — Grey aliens, who took the survivors forward in time to our present and altered them genetically so they can live on Earth.

Things went badly wrong for Courtney Brown, though. He also claimed, based on the remote viewing evidence of his team, that a spaceship was following in the tail of the comet Hale-Bopp, a claim that he promoted widely, especially on the Art Bell show. Subsequently, the Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide specifically so that their souls would be ‘beamed up’ to the Hale-Bopp spaceship. Someone else who believed that there was something suspicious about Hale-Bopp, to the point of accusing the US government of a cover-up, was none other than Richard Hoagland, who promoted the theory with his usual zeal.⁷⁷

However, all this may well assume quite another interpretation when the possibility of remote influencing is taken into account...

Although thousands of meteorites rain down on the Earth’s surface every day, clearly this one was perceived to be different — but why? And what was the reason for the veritable circus of hype that erupted so abruptly over it? The sheer scale of the publicity surrounding the announcement and the way in which the whole business was stage-managed seemed odd at the time, but in retrospect it seems even more unusual.

A major press conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston was attended by the international media, ensuring that the news made headlines all around the world. The conference was hosted by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin, who hailed the event as ‘a day that may well go down in history for American science, for the American people, and indeed humanity’ - obviously he is not one to think small. He also called it, somewhat portentously, ‘the day we opened the door’. Later that day, President Clinton made a public statement hailing the event as historic and pledging that NASA would ‘search for answers and for knowledge that is as old as humanity itself but essential to our people’s future’: strange words, which appear to convey a subtext to those with inside knowledge, but only succeeding in mystifying the rest of us. What could there possibly be about micro-organisms in a piece of rock from Mars that is ‘essential to our people’s future’?

For a normally conservative organisation with a scientific reputation to maintain, NASA’s orchestrated media splash was unprecedented. This is particularly odd, because the evidence presented at that conference was by no means conclusive enough to justify such a major event. Many scientists, particularly in Europe, have since expressed reservations about NASA’s interpretation of the facts. The question of whether the ‘fossils’ really are biological in origin is still being hotly debated in the scientific community. They may well be, as claimed, evidence of primitive life on Mars, but it was NASA’s certainty about it, not to mention the almost evangelical fervour and the sheer hype with which they promoted it, that is so surprising as to suggest another agenda.

Bewilderment only increases when it is realised that such claims had been made before, though never with as much publicity as ALH84001. It is intriguing that this evidence had been brought to the attention of NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin just weeks before the announcement — by two of the original ‘discoverers’ of the Face on Mars, John Brandenburg and Vincent DiPietro.⁷⁸ Brandenburg had been researching the history of Mars in order to establish whether it had ever had conditions suitable for sustaining life, when he came across scientific papers written in 1989 by a British team reporting the discovery of organic carbon in a meteorite known to have originated on Mars.

Even further back, Dr Bartholomew Nagy of the University of Arizona had reported the discovery of bacterial microfossils in meteorites in the mid-1960s, although he did not discuss their origins. Nagy’s findings — particularly the question of the biological nature of the material — were published in the 1960s and early 1970s and had been disputed by other scientists at the time. Nagy had found what he believed to be microfossils in a specific type of meteorite known as carbonaceous chrondites. Later, Brandenburg tried to establish where these meteorites came from. He could do this relatively easily, as individual ‘signatures’ are found in the composition of different types of rocks, based on the proportions of certain isotopes, that associate them with Earth, Mars or elsewhere. (This is how we know that ALH84001 is Martian, for example.) Brandenburg found that the carbonaceous chrondites studied by Nagy had the characteristic signature of Mars. (Since this technique is well established, it is a mystery why nobody had, apparently, used it before. Perhaps they had.) Nagy died in December 1995, just a few months before NASA’s announcement vindicated his earlier work, notching the subject up into that almost hysterical publicity circus. It may well have shocked and saddened him.

Brandenburg published a paper on his research in May 1996, and lectured on his discoveries in Germany in July. A month before his paper was published he had personally approached Daniel Goldin with the results. Four months later came the big announcement.

ALH84001 had been discovered in Antarctica in 1984, but was only recognised as Martian in 1993. It had been analysed in secret at the Johnson Space Center in Houston - specifically to look for indications of biological constituents, which begs a question or two about the protocol of the scientific method. Brandenburg (who was present at the Houston press conference) speculates that pressure had been put on the NASA team to release their announcement before his work stole their thunder, although there was an ethical problem in this rivalry because his May 1996 paper had been peer-reviewed for publication by the very scientists at the Johnson Space Center who were secretly studying ALH84001! Others have speculated that Brandenburg’s work may simply have inspired NASA, who needed a good excuse for their suddenly renewed interest in Mars.

In a further twist to this story, shortly after the press conference a Washington call girl confessed to the press that a client, Dick Morris - one of President Clinton’s advisors - had told her some time before the announcement that evidence of life on Mars had been discovered but was classified as a ‘military secret’.⁷⁹

It has also been pointed out that Daniel Goldin, who hosted the press conference so exuberantly, is known to be a political appointee with a former career in top-secret defence-related industrial work. He had been appointed by President Bush - himself a former head of the CIA — and has overseen a marked increase in the amount of defence work conducted by NASA, as well as an influx of ex-Defense Department personnel into key posts within the space agency.⁸⁰

The whole subject of the Martian microfossils and the press conference that announced them has provoked a flurry of conspiracy theories, which divide into two camps: one centred on the suspicion that this is part of a ‘softening up’ process that will eventually lead to the revelation of intelligent life on Mars, while the other argues that the story was a stunt to create a new climate of excitement about Mars, leading to more government funds being allocated to NASA in order to explore the planet further. These theories are not mutually exclusive, although one school maintains darkly that NASA wants to explore Mars for other, clandestine reasons of its own. Such theories are stimulated by the obsessive secrecy that surrounded the work of the NASA team at Houston, and the over-the-top manner in which the discovery was announced, sidestepping the usual stages of peer-reviewed scientific papers, going instead straight to a live worldwide press conference.

There has certainly been a marked scramble to explore Mars recently: funding for Mars Global Surveyor — currently sending back images - was rushed through after the loss of Mars Observer in August 1993. It was launched in 1996. Since the August 1996 announcement, a series of new Mars probes are being planned to continue the search for life on the Red Planet, including the bringing back of samples from the surface, and plans for a manned mission are now being seriously considered for the first time in decades. Russia and Japan are also working on their own Mars missions.

With or without persuasive evidence from those vexed microfossils, excitement about Mars is building, especially in US governmental circles. Officials within the Clinton administration and in NASA seem to have a strong belief in life on Mars, perhaps even in intelligent life, and we have seen the eagerness of certain influential individuals and organisations — such as the Pentagon’s remote viewers, SRI and the Hoagland camp - to promote a widespread sense of belief and expectancy about Mars. Are ‘they’ looking for a stargate, either a physical or hyperdimensional portal through which they could more easily reach Mars, and perhaps even make contact with Martians? More importantly, do ‘they’ really believe that such a thing exists?

Or is this multi-pronged attack on public awareness simply an insidious exercise in mass manipulation, perhaps testing how we would react to the idea that there were, and possibly still are, Martians? This could be a dummy-run for a real announcement in the near future, likely to be timed to coincide with the Millennium and the first few years of the twenty-first century, when people in the West have come to expect momentous public revelations.

The plot thickens considerably, however, with the discovery that some prime movers in the West are utterly convinced that the stargate has already been opened - and that contact with extraterrestrials is already well established.