NOTE: If you have turned off the Load Images option on your browser, please do yourself the favour of loading the images for this page. You really do have to see these pictures of the "Face on Mars" to understand how delightful this true story is.

Round One:

Our story begins back in the 19th Century with an obscure Italian astronomer, Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli, the director of the Brera Observatory in Milan. Much of his career was unremarkable, his main interest being the study of comets, asteroids, Mercury, Venus, and Mars.

But his little spot in history came in 1877 with his announcement that he had observed about 100 of what he called "canali" on Mars. He even published a detailed map he drew (see below) of these "canali" based on his observations.

Thus began Round One of the civilization on Mars story.

Now the word "canali" in Italian simply means channels, and Schiaparelli was not the first to observe what was thought then to be lines on the face of Mars. But his writings on the subject caught the public's awareness. Unfortunately, the word "canali" was mis-translated as "canals" in English.

The rest is embarrassing history for the astronomy profession.

The modest telescopic technology of the late 1800s left much to be desired (at right is a picture of Schiaparelli's telescope). Optical illusions (which is what the lines were) and vivid imaginations often made up for fuzzy imagery. It didn't take long and much speculative literature and discussion about a possible civilization on Mars began.

Even the well educated hopped on board. Percival Lowell, the well-bred and well-educated scion of a New England family in the United States became convinced of an advanced civilization on Mars as a result of Schiaparelli's writings. Flying in the face of public scorn he spent a considerable amount of his personal fortune to build the now-famous Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, to study the canals on Mars.

Lowell never did make any definitive discoveries about Mars, but before his death in 1916 using measurements he made on irregularities in the orbit of Uranus, he accurately predicted the existence of the planet Pluto which was discovered in 1930.

Lowell's widely-publicized (and widely criticized) theory was that a highly evolved civilization of creatures used the canals to direct water from the Mars polar ice caps to irrigate crops in the equatorial areas of the planets. Lowell reasoned that this would account for the polar caps and central green areas changing through the Martian seasons.

While most of the scientific establishment of the day dismissed the idea outright, a cottage industry of non-scientists had a field day. English novelist H.G. Wells wrote his now classic novel, War of the Worlds, about a Martian military invasion of Earth. Lessor authors jumped in with their imitations. Speculative fiction abounded. And to this day science fiction writers and B-movie moguls in Hollywood have mined the notion of Martian civilization for much fun and profit.

While the canal theory was rebuffed at every turn in the early 20th Century, the die-hards hung on. Nonetheless, even confirmed believers of Martian civilization had to beat a strategic retreat in 1965 when U.S. spacecraft Mariner 4 took close-up photographs of Mars which showed a surface dried and pocked marked with craters much like Earth's own Moon.

Later pictures from the first lander satellites from the U.S. National Aeronatics and Space Administration (NASA) were released of the surface of Mars. A landscape was shown of barren desert sand and stones. Ah well, so much for canals on Mars.

But while the true believers in Martian civilization had little choice but to skulk off to a dark corner to lick their wounded pride, they only had to wait 11 years for hope to spring again.

Round Two:

Round Two of the civilization on Mars story began in July, 1976, while NASA's Viking Orbiter 1 was clicking photos of a central region of Mars. The idea was to search out suitable landing spots for Viking Lander 2. On July 25, a series of photographs was taken of the Cydonia region of plateaus and mesas. A few of the images showed a fuzzy hill with a face-like appearance (see the photo at the top of this page and at left).

For the true believers in civilization on Mars, this was manna from heaven. Maybe there weren't canals, but, by gosh, here was evidence (however fuzzy the picture) of a giant sculpture of a hominoid face on the red planet. And that was good enough.

In an amazing replay of their predecessors a hundred years earlier, a cottage industry instantly sprang up again. Numerous publications speculated about a great "lost" civilization on Mars which had left a "message" to us surviving Earthlings. Lectures, books, and videos swamped into New Age outlets throughout the world.

[Note to newbies: The Sphinx, The Pyramids, and multi-dimensional sacred geometry (don't ask) are always included in any New Age discussions of lost civilizations, whether the purported lost civilization was located on planet Earth or some other planet.]

Computer buffs managed to obtain digital copies of the original transmissions from the Viking Orbiter 1 and process the images (there were several) with their own computers rather than rely on the NASA imagery. (It hadn't taken long for the usual conspiracy theorists to join the fray and suggest that NASA was somehow up to no good and withholding something.)

A sample of this image processing is seen at right. But sadly, no matter whose computer was enhancing the data, the bitter reality remained: these were small fuzzy pictures beyond the resolution of the Viking Orbiter 1. Nothing was settled.

There the matter lay until the early 1990s when NASA proposed sending a new satellite to Mars, the Mars Global Surveyor Orbiter Camera, which would have a high resolution camera capable of taking a detailed photograph of most areas of the surface of the planet.

Well, you just know what happened next. The "face on Mars" people immediately wanted NASA to get on board and photograph the "face". It is still quite unexplained, but NASA initially balked at using this new satellite to photograph the "face." In part, no doubt, they did not wish to be seen to be capitulating to the unwashed unscientific masses demanding access to their closely guarded decision-making process. This was another symptom of NASA's huge unresponsive bureaucracy which really had no notion of public relations beyond blowing its own horn.

A world-wide outcry went up. Americans were petitioning their Congressional representatives and making quite the fuss, and urging others in other countries to do the same. Here in Canada  (where we have bleacher seats to watch our neighbours to the south as they carry on in public), it was quite the amusing show. If the Americans knew how infrequently Canadians wrote their own Members of Parliament, they might have realized the futility of asking Canadians to write a foreign elected representative.

Ultimately NASA caved in and agreed to take the pictures, claiming, of course, that they had intended all along to photograph the "face." Many technical difficulties were encountered getting the satellite up and orbiting Mars, but eventually detailed pictures of Mars began to be taken and sent back to Earth. And so, it came to pass that in April, 1998, while orbiting Mars, the Mars Global Surveyor Orbiter Camera took the following high-resolution photograph of the "face" on Mars:

Since I'm a firm believer in free choice, you can decide for yourself whether or not you're looking at a face sculpture.

By the way, I was in a New Age bookstore a couple of years ago, and I saw that most of the books about the "Face on Mars" were in the remainder bin. That really told me everything I needed to know about the face on Mars, or so I thought.

Round Three:

The old saying is that hope springs eternal in the human heart, and for the "lost civilization on Mars" crowd the flood of photographs from the two Mars rover robots in early 2004 provided just the tonic they were looking for. A gold mine of speculative frenzy erupted right away. Truth be told, nobody spotted any gold in the photographs, but what do you supposed landed in my email inbox one day?

Three guesses, and the first two don't count.

That's right!   Somebody had found a "face" in one of the photographs!

(Here we go again...........) Okay, so cue the spooky music and let's cut to the chase. The original NASA photograph is located to the immediate right of this paragraph. Can you spot the face?

Neither could I. But the kind, albeit anonymous, emailer provided me with the links to  (you guessed it)  a UFO website which had the following "enhanced" images below.

The so-called "face" is outlined in the box

Digital "enhancement" of the face

You're not the only one who's seeing a rerun of the 1970s "face on Mars" fantasy here. By 2006 the Sphinx, the Pyramids and a bit of sacred geometry (not to mention a few more UFOs) had dragged into the Mars Rover project photographs.

Don't believe me? Then click here for a pdf format file which takes a few fuzzy pictures from NASA and suggests that these images show artifacts scattered about the surface of Mars, and of course these artifacts are from a lost civilization on Mars. There's even been a book written about it, which the pdf file is more than happy to plug if you wish to buy the book.

Setting aside all that, I found the evidence of oceans having once been on Mars to be by far the most interesting, as that single fact alone establishes that once Mars had to have been as lush and verdant as Earth. But then oceans aren't particularly sexy, unless of course you happen to be a Pisces.

Round Four:

The techno-geeks are at it again with the new satellite images from Mars. Here's a decidedly different link:   a website which has an alternative take on the photos of Mars released by NASA, the website's theory being that in fact some of the photos show a lost civilization on Mars, and that NASA has been systematically covering this up. Click here, and understand that some of the photographic interpretation is pure speculation, but some is . . . well . . . thought provoking.

So notwithstanding all these very fuzzy pictures, what we can see clearly for ourselves is that believers of a lost civilization on Mars will be with us always.

And they are everywhere. One day not long ago, a clerk at a New Age bookstore pulled me aside to whisper in my ear in hushed secrecy that she had heard it on good authority that 186,000 years ago a great catastrophe had occurred on Mars and the civilization had been wiped out instantly. Her version was that human explorers on Mars would find the last ruins and a warning message for Earthlings.

Know that people tell me all sorts of things, but FWIW, you can always say you heard it here first (unless of course someone else has already told you). Will it take another hundred years to finish Round Four of the civilization on Mars story? Probably not. I'm waiting for Round Five to begin. It ought to be very interesting indeed.