A casual glance reveals only a jumble of hills, craters and escarpments. Gradually, however, as though a veil is being lifted, the blurred scene begins to feel organized and structured - too intelligent to be the result of random natural processes. Although the scale is grander, it looks the way some archaeological sites on Earth might look if photographed from 1,000 miles up. The more closely you examine it, the more it is apparent that it really could be an ensemble of enormous ruined monuments on the surface of Mars. For a long while after the 1976 Viking photographs, NASA and other scientific authorities continued to disseminate what one researcher calls "the bogus claim that the Face is a trick of light and shadow". This notion began to be challenged seriously only when Vincent Di Pietro, a computer scientist and former NASA consultant, discovered another image of the Face on frame 70A13. This second image, which had been acquired 35 Martian days later than the first one and under different lighting conditions, made possible comparative views and detailed measurements of the Face.



Complete with its distinctive Sphinx-like headdress, it is now known to be almost 1.6 miles long from crown to chin, 1.2 miles wide and just less than 2,000 ft.. high. Image analysts say the bilateral symmetry of the Face, which has a natural, almost human appearance, is most unlikely to have come about by chance. This impression is confirmed by other characteristics that have subsequently been identified under computer enhancement. These include 'teeth' in the mouth, bilaterally crossed lines above the eyes, and regular lateral stripes on the headpiece - suggestive, to some researchers at least, of the headdress of ancient Egyptian pharaohs. According to Dr. Mark Carlotto, an expert in image processing, all 'these features appear in both the Viking images, and are coherent shapes structurally integral to the object. Thus random interference or artifacts of the image restoration and enhancement process could not have caused them.'



The same is also true for the 'D&M Pyramid' (named after Di Pietro and his associate Gregory Molenaar, also a former NASA contractor, who discovered it). This five-sided structure stands about ten miles from the Face and, like the Great Pyramid of Egypt, is aligned virtually north south towards the spin axis of the planet. Its shortest side is a mile, its long axis extends to almost two miles and it is half a mile high. Commenting on the proximity of the Face and the D&M Pyramid, American researcher Richard Hoagland asks a pointed question: 'What are the odds against two terrestrial-like monuments on such an alien planet and in essentially the same location?' Hoagland has made his own detailed study of Frame 35A72 and has identified additional, possibly artificial, features.



These include the so-called Fort, with its two distinctive straight edges, and the City, which he describes as 'a remarkably rectilinear arrangement of massive structures interspersed with several smaller pyramids'. Hoagland also points out another striking fact about the City: it seems to have been sited in such a way that the inhabitants would have enjoyed a perfect, almost ceremonial, view of the Face. The impression of a great ritual center, shrouded under the dust of ages, is enhanced by other features of Cydonia, such as the Tholus, a massive mound similar to Britain's Silbury Hill, and the City Square, a grouping of four mounds centered on a fifth, smaller mound. This configuration, so suggestive of cross hairs, turns out to be located at the exact lateral center of the City.



In addition, a group of British researchers based in Glasgow have recently identified what looks like a massive four-sided pyramid, the so called NK Pyramid, 25 miles west of the Face and on the same latitude (40.8 degrees north) as the D&M Pyramid. In the same general area is a feature called the Bowl, approached by a tapered ram that has been likened to the stairway of a Mexican pyramid. 'Looking at the whole of Cydonia," says Chris O'Kane of the Mars Project UK, 'my gut feeling is that these structures have to be artificial.' O'Kane's hunch is strengthened by the fact that 'many of the structures are non fractal'. In plain English this means that their contours have been scanned and assessed as artificial by highly sophisticated computers. 'What we have, therefore,' sums up O'Kane, 'is an improbable assortment of anomalies. They have alignments, they're grouped, and they're non-fractal.' Nor is Cydonia the only site on Mars to have yielded photographic evidence of unusual and apparently artificial structures. Pyramids have been identified elsewhere, notably in the region known as Elysium, on the opposite side of the planet where , as early as 1971, NASA's Mariner 9 spacecraft photographed a group of mile-high three-sided structures. Other Martian features that are decidedly non-fractal include a straight line more than three miles long defined by a row of small pyramids, extensive rhomboidal enclosures in the south polar region, and a weird, castle-like edifice rising to a steeple more than 2,000 ft. high.

WHAT HAPPENED?

If there was a civilization on Mars capable of creating such monuments, then what might have happened to it? A geological cataclysm is a possibility. Analysis of the Martian meteorite suggests the Red Planet was warm and wet - an environment that is likely to have been hospitable to life. Today, it is permanently frozen. The change may have been caused by a very large and rapid slippage of Mars's outer crust, a phenomenon that has also been cited as a possible cause of the cataclysmic end of Earth's last Ice Age 13,000 years ago. Evidence reported in Scientific American magazine in 1985 confirms that Mars did at some unknown stage in its history, suffer a catastrophic crustal displacement. If this had happened during the planet's warm and wet phase, any civilization present at that time would almost certainly have been wiped out in the ensuing global floods and earthquakes, leaving behind only whatever scattered ruins and monuments were massive and stable enough to survive. The pyramids and the sphinx on Mars seem to fit the bill. And if they are artificial, then the implications for our idea of ourselves and our place in the universe are shattering.

MARS - EARTH CONNECTION

A striking characteristic of the pyramids and Sphinx of Giza is the way in which they are integrated into a grand architectural plan, based on mathematical and astronomical data. There is no evidence that the pyramids were used as tombs. What is certain is that two narrow shafts emanating from inside the Great Pyramid were directed to two specific stars: Zeta Orionis, one of the three stars in Orion's belt, and Sirius, in the constellation of Canis Major.



It is certain, too, that the principal Giza monuments form an accurate terrestrial 'map' of the three stars of Orion's belt as these constellations appeared in 10,500 BC. (see above) Who could have been observing the skies over Giza in 10,500 BC and who, at that date, could have had the technical capacity to realize such monumental works as the Sphinx and the pyramids? Egyptologists assert there was no civilization on Earth at that time, let alone one capable of planning and building such immense, well engineered structures. If they are right, why do the alignments of Giza so plainly and repetitively mirror the skies of the 11th millennium BC?Former NASA consultant Richard Hoagland is convinced there may be a 'terrestrial connection' between Giza and Cydonia - the region of Mars where the mysterious structures are located - perhaps a common source that imparted the same legacy of knowledge and symbolism on both worlds. Hoagland's interest in Giza began when he met Dr. Lambert Dolphin, a scientist from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) who had conducted radar and seismographic research to locate hidden chambers near and under the Great Sphinx. Dr. Dolphin was captivated by Hoagland's idea of a 'Martian Sphinx' - the Face - and , in 1983, was instrumental in helping Hoagland set up the Independent Mars Investigation Project under the aegis of SRI. Hoagland argues that the Face on Mars is 'not merely the image of an terrestrial hominid...lying where it has no business being. One half (the right) is also the perfect image of a cat; specifically a lion - the king of beasts. So the Martian sphinx is in truth the combination of two "families": hominid...and ...feline.'

The description also fits the lion-bodied, human headed Egyptian Sphinx. Another coincidence is that the ancient Egyptians called the Sphinx Hor-em-Akhet, meaning 'Horus in the Horizon'. Horus - the hawk-god, the divine child of Isis and Osiris - is a name derived from the Egyptian word Heru, which translates a s 'face'. Helped by a mathematician, Erol Torun, Hoagland has also identified a number of intriguing mathematical and geographical connections between Cydonia and Giza. Torun was among the first to realize that one of the large; 'pyramids' on Mars, the D&M Pyramid, contains a variety of functions and constants used in a sophisticated mathematical system known as tetrahedral geometry. Evidence of such high mathematics in supposedly natural structures is strongly suggestive of a conscious design.The most important recurring feature found in the mathematics of Cydonia is the value 0.865 - derived from the ratio of 'e' (an important mathematical constant equal to 2.7) and pi (the mathematical constant of 3.142 used to work out the properties of spheres and circles). This Hoagland terms the 'message of Cydonia' A trigonometrical function, the arc tangent of 'e'/pi, gives the value of 40.8 that is the Mars latitude on which both the D&M Pyramid and the NK Pyramid are sited. Amazingly, another trigonometrical function, the cosine of 'e'/pi, gives the value 30 - the exact geographical latitude of the pyramids of Giza on Earth. Hoagland has demonstrated that the Great Pyramid of Giza contains 'tetrahedral' functions identical to those of the D&M Pyramid on Mars, and Torun has shown that the positioning of the Great Sphinx, relative to the pyramids, expresses the 'Cydonian ratio 'e'/pi. 'The odds of such correlation happening by coincidence on two neighboring planets are somewhere in the region of one in 7,000, says Hoagland. What makes coincidence look even less likely is a bizarre link to another ancient site on Earth. One of the key angles of Cydonia, repeated again and again, is 19.5 degrees. this is precisely the latitude (19.5) degrees north. Which is also the exact latitude of the pathfinder-landing site.

IS THE TRUTH BEING KEPT FROM US?

The space agency's almost unbelievable lack of interest since photographic Frame 35A72 was taken by the Mars orbiting Viking craft in 1976, and its obstinate disregard for calls from other scientists to investigate the Cydonia mystery further, have raised suspicions of a cover-up. And why not? We know that our governments selectively censor potentially traumatic or destabilizing information. If something has been found with the potential to upset established social values and religious beliefs, then it is reasonable to suppose we might not have been told about it yet. What makes this seem more probable is the fact that NASA's probe, Mars Observer, scheduled to rephotograph Cydonia in 1993 in response to growing pressure, failed to do so due to alleged technical problems (the orbiter was 'lost' by mission control at the crucial moment). Also noteworthy is the fact that NASA's constitution authorizes it to co-operate with agencies directly concerned with national defense and specifically obliges it to withhold from the public information classified to protect national security'. It is; therefore, by no means impossible that information has been withheld. If NASA really does have a secret interest in the Monuments of Mars, it would be expected that such an interest would also have been manifested here on Earth, in particularly, the three great pyramids and the Sphinx at Giza in Egypt.

In March 1995, a German scientific team discovered a mysterious 'door', with handles made of an unknown metal, lies at the end of a narrow (8 in. x 8 in.) 200 ft. shaft which cuts through the body of the pyramid from the south wall of the so-called Queen's Chamber. A proposal to put a fiber - optic camera under the door was mysteriously shelved on the pretext that nothing of importance would be found. However, in March this year, Egyptian scientist Farouk El Baz, a former NASA consultant, was chosen to lead a team scheduled to start work next month with equipment designed by Spar Aerospace. Which builds the hydraulic arms used by NASA Space Shuttles. Information was leaked to the U.S. media that nine further chambers and tunnels had been identified and that the sensors had picked up indications in all of  them,  the presence of metallic objects.

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