Martians?!?
 
 
 
The ball started rolling on a Sunday afternoon in 1976. Toby Owen, a member of NASA's imaging
 team for the Viking missions to Mars, knelt on the floor of his office, meticulously examining a series
 of photographs taken by Viking Orbiter 1. He was searching for a good place to land a
 remote-controlled robotic rover on the planet's surface. After several hours of squinting through a
 magnifying glass, he came across frame 35A72--the 72nd frame of the 35th orbit ("A" denotes the
 primary module, Viking 1). From a northern region of Martian desert known as Cydonia, something
 stared back at him: a human face. 
 Curious, he thought, but surely a mirage. Owen dismissed the image and moved on. He was
 busy--deluged with information and thousands of pictures. He had no time to chase ghosts in
 shadowy mesas millions of miles away. 
 The Face was forgotten until a subsequent press conference given by Viking Project Scientist Gerry
 Soffen. He opened by showing the image of the Face. "Isn't it peculiar what tricks of lighting and
 shadow can do," he said. "When we took a picture a few hours later it all went away."
 
 
   The Cydonia region on Mars 
 
 However, electrical engineer Vincent DiPietro discovered that Soffen's "lighting and shadow" explanation was completely fabricated. Viking 1 snapped image 35A72  late in the Martian evening. A few hours later, when Soffen had insisted a follow-up picture was taken, the area would have been shrouded in darkness. NASA had no second picture showing a "trick of lighting and
    shadow." Gregory Molenaar, a colleague of DiPietro, joined him in a search for other pictures of the Face. They eventually uncovered a second picture of Cydonia, which had been misfiled in the 60,000 other Viking images. Frame 70A13, taken 35 days later at a  different time of day, showed the landscape from a new angle. The Face was still there, and this time much clearer. 
 
 The Enterprise Mission, a Cydonia research  group founded by former CBS science consultant Richard C. Hoagland, uncovered  possible "Monuments of Mars"--relics of a  lost civilization. To the west of the Face lay a  mile-wide structure apparently surrounded by  several large walls. Hoagland refers to the  structure as the "Fortress." Beyond the  Fortress was a collection of other structures,  including a series of four-sided pyramids,  which Hoagland refers to as the "City."
 Hoagland believes to also have discovered a  "terrestrial connection" between Cydonia and
 the Egyptian pyramids at Giza. Consider: the  cosine of Giza's latitude is equivalent to the
 tangent of Cydonia's latitude. Furthermore,  the mathematical relationship of e/pi is found
 throughout both Cydonia and the terrestrial  pyramids. 
  
 NASA image number 70A13, taken by Viking 
 
In 1985, Dr. Mark J. Carlotto, a computer imaging scientist from Reading, Massachusetts used a
new computer imaging technique to bring out enough detail in the Face to show a distinct row of
teeth in the mouth. Carlotto also constructed three-dimensional models of the Face and other
"monuments," using the stereoscopic perspective from the two Viking images. 
Several years later, Carlotto applied fractal analysis, a process that detects breaks in natural chaotic
patterns, to Cydonia. Used in Desert Storm to identify enemy tanks on sand dunes, fractal analysis
has an accuracy of 80 percent. Two objects at Cydonia stood out as artificial: the Face (because it
has bilateral symmetry) and the Fortress (because it contains right angles). 
 
 
Mirror images of each side of the Face reveal a simian and a
lion, perhaps relating this monument to the Sphinx in Egypt
Carl Sagan once said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."   Thus, Stanley V. McDaniel of Sanoma University in California began a detailed evaluation of the Cydonia research. He found many top researchers' methods wholly scientific. However, NASA's  response continued to be one of ridicule  and avoidance. McDaniel discovered that although the two images of the Face were well documented, NASA still clung to their debunked, 15-year-old "trick of lighting  and shadow" explanation. Under pressure from McDaniel, NASA quietly retracted Soffen's original statement. On fractal analysis, McDaniel points out that although it does not prove the "monuments" are artificial, it definitely  warrants some sort of further study. "We must do it if we are going to be
scientists," McDaniel says. 
On August 7 1996, NASA held a press conference to announce a find that Carl Sagan called "a glorious discovery." A team of scientists from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, had been studying a football-sized Martian meteorite found in Antarctica 12 years before. Microscopic traces of  carbonate, some organic molecules and other  minerals thought to be residue from biological activity  were found within the rock. This 3.6 billion-year-old sample also contains strange, tubular-shaped structures that are very similar in both size and shape to some bacteria found on Earth. 
 
Suddenly, Mars was hot again. Headlines about life on Mars covered the front pages of magazines and newspapers. The X-Files even had an episode based on the concept. Like a shot of adrenaline, this has rejuvenated the space program and interests of returning to Mars.

Who knows. maybe there is life on other planets?