Click on the photo above to see the presentation by Tom Van Flandern, "Artificial Structures on Mars," with slides.

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Life Elsewhere in the Solar System                   by Richard Stammler    © Rich Stammler, 2008      Sometimes it’s fun to explore the contrary view. If the government (our government) had discovered life or the signs of past life on another planet in our solar system, then there are plenty of logical reasons, why the authorities might not want the information to be public, particularly if it is suspected that the life may be (or was) advanced. There may be technology to exploit providing motivation to keep other governments from learning of it. There may be real fear of the disruption of the social fabric of our society. In spite of the Copernican revolution and the constant expansion of the known universe by modern astronomy, there are significant segments of our society that still believe that man is God’s finest creation and has a favored place in the universe. For those who hold that view with great passion and inflexibility, such potential news as the existence of advanced non-human civilizations, possibly with technology far greater than ours, may create cognitive dissonance.1 In this case something must give, which results in a variety of coping behaviors including discrediting the source, non-belief in the phenomenon, or, in its extreme, violence against the people or institutions espousing the dissonant information. This could lead to disruptive social forces and mistrust of our public institutions. There are official documents that indicate that portions of our government have thought this through very well. If these advanced civilizations are proven to exist and shown to have superior technology, our government may conclude that the aliens are hostile (an argument can easily be made that throughout man’s history any culture with superior technology exploited and dominated any weaker culture.) So logical arguments can be made that if government had information about non-human life, even of a now ancient and extinct society, it would not want it known. But it is in man’s basic nature to dream and creatively express possible alternatives, which sometimes show themselves to be the reality. So let’s explore one of these alternatives. Ever since man had the capability to use an optical instrument to make visible the features on Mars, there has been speculation of other life on that planet. Public and scientific thought of the day was energized by the sight of linear features on the planet’s surface, which were taken to be signs of civilization, perhaps canals. The first modern spacecraft explorations of Mars began with the Mariner series (Mariner 3-4 and Mariner 6-7) that flew by the planet snapping pictures and remotely measuring various parameters of the planet. These began on November 28, 19642, and the launch of Martian orbiters, landers, explorers and other Martian missions has continued largely unabated since then with at least 13 past and 5 current missions from the US alone. These numbers do not include 1 European, 1 Japanese and no less than 18 Russian launches (some of these were failures and never achieved their objective). Each had or has many remote sensing or direct sensing systems as a part of the spacecraft. These represent a huge investment in Martian exploration and we might ask, what is it that makes this investment worthwhile (outside of the thrill of exploring new territories)? In some measurement modalities, like laser sensing of terrain height, Mars is more thoroughly measured than Earth. One of the drivers of this interest is that it appears that Mars at one time contained ancient oceans covering much of its surface, and more recent observations indicate the presence of water and water erosional actions just below the surface. Our supposition is, where there is water there is life. So we have been searching for microbial life but, is it possible that higher order life was present in the past? Therein lies the mystery. There are those who believe that there are signs of intelligent life, perhaps a past civilization more advanced than ours, on Mars. What is some of the evidence? Although we no longer look for canals on Mars, there are other geographic features that are unusual. One example is the “cave skylights,” round features that are holes in the surface some 100 to 225 meters across (see graphic below). Yes, the almost perfectly round features are deep holes in the terrain (see image below). Seven very dark holes on the north slope of a Martian volcano have been proposed as possible cave skylights, based on day-night temperature patterns suggesting they are openings to subsurface spaces. These six excerpts of images taken in visible-wavelength light by the Thermal Emission Imaging System camera on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter show the seven openings. Solar illumination comes from the left in each frame. The volcano is Arsia Mons, at 9 degrees south latitude, 239 degrees east longitude.3 Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. There are also interesting features, whimsical tracks left in the Martian terrain due to large dust devils as they uncover darker soil under the sand. This is an image from APOD, NASA’s astronomy picture of the day website, beautifully displaying the geologic artwork of the dust devils but also showing a fascinating, somewhat luminescent, linear feature running through the center of the graphic. [NASA Mars image: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ for 21 October 09.] This brings us to Cydonia. On 25 July 1975 a technician reviewing the large number of images taken by the Viking spacecraft taken the day before, noticed an unusual, large geologic feature in the image that looked like a face. The remarkable image of a huge head soon ignited the imagination of the scientific and pseudoscientific community. Graham Hancock in his book, The Mars Mystery,4 deals extensively with the face at Cydonia. Hancock also relates the work of a Defense Mapping Agency cartographer, Erol Torun, who laid out the geographic analysis of the greater Cydonia site, which includes the famous face, a “pyramid” and other seeming cultural features. He and others have concluded that these features were not likely to have been formed by any known natural process.5 Perhaps, at this point, it is worth quoting from a 1958 Brookings Institution Report commissioned by the then newly formed organization, the National Aeronautic and Space Agency, that detailed long term policy and strategy recommendations. Hancock quotes from a section of the report entitled “Implications of a Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life.” Cosmologists and astronomers think it very likely that there is intelligent life in many other solar systems . . . Artifacts left at some point in time by these life-forms [may] possibly be discovered through our future space activities on the Moon, Mars, or Venus. Hancock, citing a further explanation from the report, goes on to conclude, The Brookings Report evisages [sic] that hard evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life might have severe effects on political leadership shaking up and causing the public to question entrenched elites: Perhaps this is why NASA was quick and repeated in its assertion that the face at Cydonia is nothing more than a visual trick of illumination that will not reveal itself if the image is taken from a different perspective and under different lighting conditions. Tom Van Flandern received his Ph.D. degree in Astronomy, specializing in celestial mechanics (the theory of orbits), from Yale University in 1969. He spent 21 years (1963-1983) at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., where he became the Chief of the Celestial Mechanics Branch of the Nautical Almanac Office. During the past decade, he has been a Research Associate at the University of Maryland Physics Department in College Park, MD, and a consultant to the Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, MD, working on improving the accuracy of the Global Positioning System (GPS). Van Flandern has proven himself to be a bit of a maverick. In 1993 he published a book entitled Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets: Paradoxes Resolved, Origins Illuminated, in which he develops a new theory of gravity, asserts that the big bang did not happen, black holes cannot exist and presents other counter-conventional ideas. His more recent ideas are hosted on his web site http://www.metaresearch.org/.6 So back to our topic, Van Flandern delivered an interesting briefing on the Martian images and the possibility of “Artificial Structures on Mars” at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on April 5, 2001.7 You will find the presentation (attached) fascinating. In it Van Flandern calls out the NASA release of follow-on imagery that demonstrated their thesis that the Cydonia face at another angle and lighting loses any human countenance. Van Flandern analyzed what had been done and concluded that it had been so manipulated that the resultant image was not what the human eye would perceive under non-manipulated conditions, implying that it had been purposefully contrived to prove NASA’s official position. The companion Word document describes and explains the slides and talks about media reaction (see the last paragraphs). It is interesting how thoroughly the “independent” media follows government lead on these issues. There is more. To see the presentation by Tom Van Flandern, "Artificial Structures on Mars," with slides, please click on this link. ________________________ 1 Cognitive dissonance is a term invented by psychologist Leon Festinger in 1957, which states, “there is a tendency for individuals to seek consistency among their cognitions (i.e., beliefs, opinions). When there is an inconsistency between attitudes or behaviors (dissonance), something must change to eliminate the dissonance.” (http://tip.psychology.org/festinge.html). 2 Mars exploration by humans turned serious when the first Martian Explorer descended to the surface July 20, 1976, and since then a steady stream of experiments orbited Mars and have descended to the surface. 3 http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/newsroom/pressreleases/20070921a.html 4 Hancock, G. (1998). The Mars mystery: the secret connection between the Earth and the red planet. New York: Three Rivers Press. 5 Until recently he still worked for its legacy organization, The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. 6 Van Flandern died earlier in 2009. 7 Thanks for the briefing, Warren.