Ask an Amateur Scientist: The Face on Mars

By Brian Thompson

I. The Setup

Just a few days ago it was reported that the Mars Phoenix Lander, that scrappy little droid that’s been roaming around the red planet’s arctic for a while now, had discovered signs of snow falling from the Martian clouds.  This was good news for science, but bad news for me.  If there’s enough water to accumulate in the atmosphere as snow, then there’s a good chance there is or was enough water on Mars to support some kind of organic life.  But on the other hand, according to my the new Olmec/Celtic/Scientologist mega-religion I’ve created and started to practice, snow falling on Mars is a harbinger of terrible financial disaster.  Luckily I’ve put most of my money in the securities market, so I should be fine.  Also, the snow was too light to make it to the Martian surface without vaporizing, so I’m not sure if that skews my prophecy.  Ah, well.  I’m sure everything will turn out fine.

But the fact is that Mars is a really interesting place.  Don Cheadle once got stranded there.  Val Kilmer was once attacked by Tom Sizemore there.  Arnold Schwarzenegger once dressed in a woman-suit there.  It’s happening.  It also happens to be our best hope for a home away from home if anything catastrophic ever happens to our little blue ball here.  Breathing may be out of the question, but the comparable gravity and soothing rust coloration make the planet a far better permanent vacation destination than, say, the downtown Atlanta Super 8.  (I’m still not over the peanut butter on the walls.  It was peanut butter!  On the walls!  This isn’t something a maid’s supposed to just ignore!)

And if there’s a lot of water on Mars, that’s one less thing we have to check at the gate.  But it’s also a sign that perhaps Mars was once more hospitable to life than it is now.  It’s possible—maybe even likely—that Mars may have once been a little blue ball itself.  Which makes a manned Mars mission all the more tempting.  Where there are fossils, there’s delicious, delicious oil.  Take that, Middle East!  But if Mars was once a thriving wad of respiration, what are the chances some kind of advanced life existed?  What are the chances of an ancient Martian civilization?  Well, according to some people, the chances are pretty good.  And apparently the Martians were big into carving faces.

II. The Findings

Back in the ‘70s, when our cars and factories ran on cocaine and the blood of homeless Vietnam vets, NASA sent the Viking orbiter to photograph the surface of Mars.  Of course no one asked Mars if it wanted to be photographed, nor did we announce ourselves before we arrived.  So we got photographs of all sorts of naughty crags and crannies that, while geologically fascinating, were a terrible invasion of privacy.  We learned a lot from the Viking mission about the history of Mars’ terrain, the natural processes that are still shaping it, and the technology that would later be used to send probes into orbit around Lindsay Lohan to capture images of her nip in the process of a slip.

One such image showed a hill about a kilometer across (roughly six million miles, if my metric conversion tables are correct) in the Cydonia region of Mars’ northern hemisphere.  It’s an unusual feature—a plateau with sharply sloping sides set apart from any similar features.  Oh, and it looks an awful lot like a face.  Half of it is shrouded in darkness, but the other half has shadows that resemble the arch of a brow and the line of a mouth.  The NASA engineers who originally saw the image were so impressed with its face-like shape that they even wrote the word “face” on the printout.  Yes, there’s no denying the thing looks an awful lot like a face.

The problem is that there are several things that look like faces but weren’t designed to appear that way:  New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain rock formation, the western border of Montana, the crusty plate of mashed potatoes I never bothered to carry to the sink.  As discussed previously in this column, the tendency of the human mind to find pattern in chaos—particularly faces in random images—is called pareidolia.  And it seems like the Face on Mars is just another slice of the pareidolia pie (now with no trans fat!).

The biggest proponent of the artificiality of the face is a guy called Richard C. Hoagland.  If, like me, you’ve wasted countless sleepless hours in years past listening to Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM radio show (or, as it’s sometimes known, the Cavalcade of Crazies), you’ll recognize Hoagland’s name.  He’s an author who used to work as a curator of astronomy at the Springfield Museum of Science.  But since the Viking mission, he’s spent most of his time writing books, doing interviews, and talking to anyone who will listen about the lost Martian civilization.  It was Hoagland who saw that original image of the face and, instead of chalking it up to pareidolia and laughing it off like every expert scientist had done, began claiming that it looked like a face because it was a face.

In all the writing Hoagland’s done on the face over the years, it seems clear that he honestly thinks the artificial face hypothesis is the simplest explanation for the thing’s unique features.  Writing about all of Hoagland’s theories could take several columns, but suffice it to say the man seems to have sunk to the bottom of the deep end and never comes up for air.  Going from his artificial face belief, Hoagland has since picked apart every image of Mars’ surface.  Anything that looks like it may be a building is a building.  Anything that looks like a pyramid is a pyramid.  Anything that looks like a miles-long glass tube…  Well, you get the picture.  He’s even taken surface images from the various Mars landers and picked out hunks of rock as being scattered pieces of Martian machinery.  He’s measured the topography of the “ruins” he’s discovered and made up a new mathematical system of sacred numbers he calls “hyperdimensional physics” to which the Martians supposedly subscribed.  Not content with Mars, he’s gone on to claim there are glass towers on the Moon, and that Saturn’s moon Iapetus is an artificial Death Star-like device.  Oh, and that Old Navy stores are a cover for the alien-suppressing Illuminati conspiracy.  Unlike Hoagland, I’m not making this stuff up.  If you want to learn more about him and his claims, try visiting Phil Plait’s classic Bad Astronomy resource.

But let’s get back to the face.  All of Hoagland’s craziness doesn’t necessarily mean that the Face on Mars isn’t artificial.  Such an extraordinary claim should bear the burden of evidence, but I’m willing to concede when something’s too inconclusive to fall on either side.  But the thing is, NASA didn’t stop with Viking.  We’ve since sent better orbiters with much higher resolution cameras.  And yes, we’ve taken more pictures of Cydonia.  Turns out the new pictures of the “face” show it for what it is.  A weird, worn, but very natural hill that looks less like a human visage and more like a filthy litter box.

III. The Conclusion

Of course, Hoagland and the other Face on Mars fans have found many ways to discredit the new images of the Cydonia hill, from claiming NASA manipulated the images to acting like they never thought it was a face in the first place.  But the facts are the facts, and for now, the facts don’t say “face”.

Which is kind of sad, really.  Before I became a semi-professional amateur scientist, I was perfectly willing to buy into the idea that there was an ancient civilization on Mars.  Still am, as a matter of fact.  Unlike a lot of hokey ideas like ghosts and alien abductions, I actually want this idea to be true.  Maybe it has something to do with my secret desire to one day marry a Martian princess and do battle with multi-armed maniacs.  But we can’t let our secret desires get in the way of our critical thinking.  There may be evidence of the lost tribes of Mars, but the face isn’t it.  Chances are any sign of life on Mars will be as faint and fleeting as the Martian snow.  But that little jolt of awe we feel when we hear Mars might be celebrating a white Christmas this year should be enough to keep us looking.

Never miss an update. Subscribe to Pink Raygun by Email or subscribe via RSS

About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university and a regular blogger at CHUD. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.

Can’t get enough amateur science? Join Brian for The Amateur Scientist Podcast.

Related Stuff: