Mars - Cydonia

Cydonia Mensae is an albedo feature (region) on Mars. It lies in the planet's northern hemisphere in a transitional zone between the heavily-cratered regions to the South, and relatively smooth plains to the North. Cydonia itself is covered in numerous mesas and may have been a coastal zone if planetologists are correct in believing that the northern plains were once ocean beds.

One of the Cydonian mesas, situated at 40°45' north latitude and 9°26' west longitude, took on the striking appearance of a human Face on Mars in a photo taken by Viking 1 on July 25, 1976. It is generally understood to be an optical illusion, an example of pareidolia. A few, most notably Richard C. Hoagland, believe it to be evidence of a long-lost Martian civilization along with other features they believe are present, such as apparent pyramids, which they argue are part of a ruined city. NASA has stated however that "a detailed analysis of multiple images of this feature reveals a natural-looking Martian hill whose illusory face-like appearance depends on viewing angle and angle of illumination." More recent pictures by the Mars Global Surveyor seem only to confirm the validity of this scientific opinion. On September 21, 2006, the European Space Agency published new photographs of the Cydonia region taken by the Mars Express probe. The new images are at a resolution of less than 14 m/pixel (46 ft/pixel).

On October 23, 2006, the European Space Agency published a 3D animation of the "Face on Mars" using a combination of digital data from the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on the Mars Express probe and the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on board NASA's Mars Global Surveyor.

Originally, eighteen images of the Cydonia Mensae region were taken by the Viking 1 and 2 orbiters, but only seven have resolutions better than 250 m/pixel (820 ft/pixel). The other eleven images have resolutions worse than 550 m/pixel (1800 ft/pixel) and are virtually useless for studying the feature. Of the seven good images, the lighting and time at which two pairs of images were taken are so close as to reduce the number to five usable, distinct images. The Mission to Mars: Viking Orbiter Images of Mars CD-ROM image numbers are: 35A72 (VO-1010), 70A13 (VO-1011), 561A25 (VO-1021), 673B56 & 673B54 (VO-1063), and 753A33 & 753A34 (VO-1028).

Intelligent Design

Richard Hoagland and The Mars Mission found a number of structures that did not match the terrain in the area. Geologists said it was highly improbable that these structures would have been formed through wind/water erosion over the millenia. After discovering that the geographical location of the structures and their geometrical layout actually formed a "message" -- the angles between the buildings, Face, D & M Pyramid and other structures redundantly pointing out mathematical constants and ratios such as pi [3.14] and e [2.72] and specific angles such as 19.5 degrees -- the extreme significance of Cydonia cannot be ignored.

When SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) was first proposed, the first contact was expected to be made by receiving a radio signal which encoded a message using universal mathematical constants which can be easily understood by any intelligence notwithstanding the different languages. At Cydonia we have a group of highly anomalous structures on a neighbouring planet that is not only encoding a number of universal constants in the very way it was built, but when translated, these constants/ratios/angles, are actually giving us what now seems to be a New Physics! This cannot be anything but proof that the message of Cydonia is of intelligent, extra-terrestrial origin and not "a trick of light and shadow" as NASA is so fond of saying.

This valentine from Mars is actually a pit formed by collapse within a straight-walled trough known in geological terms as a graben. Graben are formed along fault lines by expansion of the bedrock terrain. The heart-shaped pit is about 2.3 kilometers (1.4 miles) at its widest. The image was targeted by the MOC team in order to examine the relationship between a lava flow and the graben and pits that disrupted and cut across the flow. The graben, pit, and lava flow are located on the east flank of the Alba Patera volcano in northern Tharsis. The MOC images are illuminated from the left. (Courtesy Malin Space Science Systems/NASA)