UFO Mars Correlations

From:
Architects of the Underworld
by Bruce Rux

Chapter 7

Correlations



"Anine and I are now doing a study of the correlation between the frequency of sightings and the distance of planet Mars," Jacques Vallee wrote in his diary on November 25, 1961, "which comes closest to the earth every twenty-six months. The resulting curve is striking. Guerin tells us he had not expected such a clear-cut relationship." The following year, Jacques and Janine Vallee published their findings in the September 1962 issue of Flying Saucer Review. One year later, he showed trepidation about the findings in his journal entry of November 17: "I often hit theoretical snags, as I did in the correlation between the frequency of sightings and the distance of Mars." He also stated concern that he not inadvertently lead future researchers astray with mistaken findings at his early stage of investigation.

In 1965, in his first published book on the subject of UFOs, Anatomy of a Phenomenon, he had rethought his position once again, stating, "We feel that our documents for the period between 1870 and 1914 are sufficient to justify an attempt to correlate UFO activity with the oppositions of Mars. Correlation of these limited data has so far given negative results . . . One should use extreme caution in interpreting in any direction, the existence or absence of correlations such as these." An accompanying table showed the seven peak UFO waves from 1881 to 1913. One of those waves was exactly one year distant from the best opposition; one was exactly at best opposition; one was five months past, two were four months from best opposition (one preceding and one following); one was only two months past the opposition; and the remaining one (1905) was apparently invalidated by the year's wave remaining consistently high throughout, though Vallee made no comment one way or the other about it. Despite his "negative results," Vallee, with his wife, Janine, was soon to reevaluate his position once more, coming to different conclusions.







Vallee's correlation tables between UFO waves and
oppositions (nearest distance) of the planet Mars.
The regularity is consistant as a heartbeat.

From Challenge to Science
by Jacques and Janine Vallee
(New York: Ballantine, 1966)






Admitting for the moment that Vallee's findings at the time were not solidly "positive," two things about them must still be noticed. One is that five of the seven charts have Mars either at best opposition to Earth, or within one third of that distance (four months in either direction is approximately a third or less the optimum Mars - Earth distance); the other is that Vallee thought there might be any correlation at all. On what "documents for the period" might he have been basing his assumption that there could be such a correlation ?

Among the multitude of sightings made during the time period (and shortly before and after) in Vallee's table were the following: A "long train of clouds" was sighted by two different astronomers, Sir Norman Lockyer and a man named Sacchi, four days apart, on the Martian surface in 1862. On two different occasions - October 24, 1864, and January 3, 1865 - red lights were seen on opposite sides of Mars. Then the Journal of the British Association published that on June 17, 1873, a much more impressive and frightening display was witnessed officially in England by a Dr. Sage, who saw a luminous object issuing from Mars which arrived in the skies of Austria - Hungary, in the startling space of five seconds, then exploded. Sage commented, "It seemed as if Mars were breaking up under the force of the impulsion of this object, and dividing into two parts. The concussion of the firing was sharp." On June 10, 1892, beams as if from a searchlight were projected from Mars to Earth, a phenomenon that was witnessed again in 1928 and the winter of 1936 by French astronomers and confirmed by Professor Robert Damion, an astronomer and editor of a then popular scientific journal. And on August 3, 1892, witnesses in Manchester and Loughborough, England, saw rapid flashes of light on Mars that were not aurorae. At least from this period through 1936, occasional "flaming up" of a "queer bluish light" was noticed on the Martian surface, recurring at regular intervals for up to forty seconds. Brilliant, clearly defined bright spots of temporary duration, in locations of obviously nonrandom distribution, were reported by astronomers to be moving or changing color in 1890, 1892, 1894, 1900, 1911, 1924, 1937, 1952, 1954, 1967, and 1971. Transient, intensely dark spots were witnessed on the planet's surface in 1925, 1952, and 1954.

On March 9, 1901, the Colorado Springs Gazette reported that Nikolai Tesla believed he was picking up intelligent radio signals from Mars, something he considered true for some time before he admitted to it, due to fear of ridicule. Ridicule was exactly what he got, until May 18, 1902, when Lord Kelvin publicly announced that he agreed with Tesla and made worldwide front page news. The critics did not necessarily believe either man was right, but Kelvin's vocal support did silence them. The New York Tribune of September 2, 1921, stated that Dr. Frederick H. Miller had attempted communication with Mars for several weeks from his giant wireless station in Omaha, but had given up for lack of success; the report went on to say, however, that the owner of Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, Ltd. "believed he had intercepted messages from Mars during the recent atmospheric experiments with wireless on board his yacht Electra in the Mediterranean." What had impressed Signor Marconi was that the signals received were 150,000 meters, when the maximum wavelength of that time was 14,000.

On June 30, 1908, an atomic explosion occurred over the Tunguska region of Siberia, that science writer and science fiction author Alexander Kazantsev would say in the early 1960s might have been caused by a crashing spaceship, which he speculated could have come from Mars. Not one to mince words, Kazantsev is on record as saying, "Highly advanced creatures from Mars have visited the Earth many times until today." The Irkutsk newspaper of the time, Sibir recorded that peasants had seen, high above the northwest horizon, "a body shining very brightly (too bright for the naked eye) with a bluish-white light. It moved vertically downwards for about ten minutes. The body was in the form of a 'pipe' (i.e. cylindrical) . . . when the shining body approached the ground it seemed to be pulverized and in its place a huge cloud of black smoke was formed and a loud crash, not like thunder, but as if from the fall of large stones, or from gunfire, was heard. All the buildings shook and at the same time, a forked tongue of flames broke through the cloud. The old women wept. Everyone thought the end of the world was approaching." Half a dozen aftershock waves were recorded around the world; people were able to read the London Times at midnight by the explosion's glow; the light was enough to take photographs by, throughout the night in Stockholm; and clouds sufficiently bright to interfere with astronomical observations persisted till the next morning in Holland. More than fifty years after the fact, two separate reports were conflicting as to whether or not abnormal radioactivity was at the site, though there seemed general agreement that electromagnetic disturbances were severe, and growth of the local flora was unusually accelerated in much the same way as can be witnessed at many crop circle locations today. The cause of the explosion is still unknown, but there is no question that it caused burns and apparent radiation sickness in the local population at the time, devastated the region for approximately thirty seven square miles from a blast epicenter about one mile high, and caused an aurora on the magnetic opposite side of Earth consistent with atomic explosions that was witnessed by the British explorer Ernest Shackelford at the Antarctic volcano Mount Erebus.

The most intriguing observations in this time period, though, were by Dr. William H. Pickering, who was the first man on record to witness "many geometrical figures, seen on Mars, that could not have been just produced by nature." Reported in 1907 and 1924 were "a vast octagon replaced by a five-pointed star" on Mars, and over the years other configurations were observed. By 1954, respected avant-garde English archaeologist - mythologist Harold T. Wilkins had recorded in Flying Saucers on the Attack that equilateral triangles, a cross in a circle, and other geometrical patterns had repeatedly been observed on the Martian surface. On November 24, 1894, Pickering saw from Lowell Observatory a self luminous object approximately twenty miles above the unilluminated portion of Mars' surface. He also witnessed one of the many "absolutely inexplicable" light displays from the planet's surface, which played for seventy minutes on the night of December 7, 1900. He believed he detected an intelligent pattern behind them, in flash variations of two-thirds, one and one-third, and one and a half intervals, similar to the signals Tesla claimed to have received on his wireless as "a series of triplets." Japanese astronomer Tsuneo Saheki, professional observer of Mars since 1933, witnessed a similar display accompanied by intermittent radiation bursts that he took to be signals; on January 15, 1950, he reported seeing what he thought could be "an atomic explosion on Mars." It was a brilliant flare attaining the brightness of a sixth magnitude star, lasting for five minutes. Thirteen years later, author V. A. Firsoff agreed with Saheki's assessment in his Life Beyond Earth: "No terrestrial volcano could produce a light of such brilliance; a megaton hydrogen bomb could."

Curiously, given both the Vallees' and Pierre Guerin's developing interest in the planet Mars and the fact that UFOs display inordinate interest in our atomic and weapons development, Vallee subtly suggested in 1965 the possibility of the entire modern era of UFO sightings having been triggered by our atomic bomb blasts ~ and that there was a connection with Mars. He brought up the fact that by 1947 a total of five atomic bomb explosions ~ Alamogordo (July 16, 1945), Hiroshima (August 6, 1945), Nagasaki (August 9, 1945), Crossroads A, and Crossroads B had taken place. He then quoted from the declassified Appendix D to Project Sign's Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (proving that the military were not as lacking in interest on the subject as Vallee elsewhere commented): "Of these, the first two were in position to be seen from Mars, the third was very doubtful (at the edge of Earth's disk in daylight), and the last two were on the wrong side of the Earth." For the first, Mars was 165 million miles from Earth; for the second, it was 153 million. He avoided any conclusions, but referred to the author of the Appendix's "suggestion" that "other galactic communities" may have been keeping an eye on us . . . by tacit implication, from the planet Mars.

Vallee did not mention a fact that would have made this "suggestion" much more important: atomic explosions create aurorae disturbances in the ionosphere on the magnetic opposite side of Earth, causing extraordinarily bright lights, as were witnessed in the Siberian explosion of 1908. These would be at least as visible to a planet as close as Mars, if not more so, than the atomic explosions themselves. Weighing the aurorae into the equation, that means that out of the first five atomic explosions on our planet, all but one (80 percent) would have been in ideal position to be seen from Mars, with the remaining one a viable possibility.

In 1966, the Vallees were more decisive, though Jacques Vallee still exhibited his usual reserve. In their joint book, Challenge to Science The UFO Enigma, they wrote: "According to our previous experiments, it would seem that the coincidence with the Martian cycle is very well verified for the period covering the four peaks of 1950, 1952, 1954, 1956, but loses its validity beyond this period. This would explain why more roughly made studies over a wider period have sometimes seemed to result in a reasonable correlation." After a tremendous amount of overly cautious and highly technical double talk designed to make it appear as if their results might somehow be an accident, they presented a graph of UFO waves from 1947 to 1962 with sharp spikes showing pronounced increase in sightings precisely and unfailingly, during closest oppositions between Earth and Mars. The graph not only showed a marked increase during the peak opposition periods, but another peak during the "half period." Mars has an elliptical orbit bringing it closest to Earth every twenty six months (the oppositions), at distances varying from approximately thirty four to sixty four million miles, and the thirteen month, or "half periods," exactly between those oppositions ~ as Mars was just starting on its next close pass ~ also showed lesser but regular, noticeable upsurges in UFO appearances.

The Vallees explain, "The problem of [this] study of the cyclic variations is essentially a question of finding some period that `best' represents the curve [of 1947-1962]. Our approach to this problem may be described in the following way. Choosing some arbitrary period, we compute the resulting error by the difference (or its square) between this theoretical curve and the curve [of 1947-1962]. Then we take a slightly different period and compute this error again, and so on. The minimum error corresponds to the theoretically 'optimum' representation. When these computations are performed two minimums are found, and the corresponding periods are one year and three months and two years and two months (fifteen and twenty-six months, respectively). The second value is precisely the period of the Martian oppositions. The first value is very close to the half period. When the error is evaluated by least squares, the first minimum vanishes. The fact that a period very close to that of the Martian cycle has been found is clearly important. It could be regarded as a confirmation of the correlations found earlier. . . .

Applying two further scientific tests to the same curve, cross and auto correlation, "we found an interesting confirmation of the results discussed in the preceding section; we again obtained a period of one year and one month, the half period of the Martian cycle. The second experiment [cross correlation] was conducted using a list of the distances of Mars, using four values per month. Again, a good correlation was obtained; in view of the preceding results, this cannot, of course, come as a surprise. As a test we ran the same calculation with the distance of Venus, and we found only a poor correlation." Applied to Vallee's 1965 chart of 1870-1914, the figuring in of the Martian half period, brings the seemingly furthest figure off the one an entire twelve months away, almost perfectly into place.

Typically, Vallee wrote that ". . . [the] cycle is interesting, but it is far from being absolutely demonstrated." If by "absolutely" he meant 100 percent, then of course he is correct; but at the very least, the Vallees' findings demonstrate an extremely probable connection between the UFO phenomenon and the planet Mars. This is further emphasized by their assertion that no apparent relationship exists between the phenomenon and other planets: "Indeed, in a psychological theory, there is no reason for these two planets [Venus and Jupiter] to play a less important role than Mars." Of the Mars-Earth correlation, they added, "the current military investigations ignore [it] entirely," which certainly was true of Blue Book, but the subject couldn't possibly have been outside of someone's official research jurisdiction, as the aforementioned Appendix D proves.

Nor was this the only correlation Vallee found with Mars. On April 5, 1962, he wrote, "Today Guerin called me at work with an exciting observation. He had noticed that the three great circles I had computed divided the equator according to a defined scale, with a basic unit of 12.4 degrees which turns out to be related to the Martian mean time. Could we have found a genuine law? The elegant geometric pattern formed by these three great circles does seem to be more than the product of coincidence." What precisely those three great circles represent is not clearly expressed, but seems to have had to do either with sightings or landing patterns, probably the latter.

And Pierre Guerin and the Vallees had not been alone in discovering a connection between Mars oppositions and UFO waves, though apparently the others who noticed it did not continue to chase the lead. As Nigel Blundell and Roger Boar wrote, in The World's Greatest UFO Mysteries, "UFOlogists noted that the sighting peak years of 1967 and 1973 coincided with the time when the orbit of Mars brought it closest to Earth; they wondered whether Martians had to wait for suitable conditions to travel, just as Russia and America had to select exactly the right moments to launch their Venus probes." The 1967 wave alone answers Vallee's only stated objection to pronouncing his Mars correlation results "reliable" as opposed to "an interesting experiment": "This time interval (1947-1962) is not long enough to test a period in excess of two years; a time span at least ten times longer than the period is generally recommended. This means that we should at least consider all sightings between 1946 and the end of 1966. But all the 1966 cases will not be known and coded before 1967 or 1968. The problem will then have reached maturity and it will be very interesting to resume this research on a larger scale." If the inclusion of four more years would have satisfied Vallee that "the problem had reached maturity," then the inclusion of the two biggest subsequent UFO waves in the modern era over the next five to eleven years - 1967 and 1973, both occurring during peak Mars oppositions surely make his findings "reliable."

Vallee wrote no further on Mars correlations in his research, instead focusing on occupant reports and their history for the remainder of his career. Mars research in the space age was just beginning, however. Mariner 4 brought back the first observations of the planet in July of 1965, followed by Mariners 6 and 7 in 1969. The unmanned robot probes beamed back a dismal landscape of a dead world, nothing like the romanticized images of Percival Lowell a century before, who had envisioned a Martian civilization with structured canals from the icecaps and geometrically designed surface features. Despite this dismal evidence, Carl Sagan addressed the 1966 American Astronomical Society Meeting with the words, "The earth may have been visited by various galactic civilizations many times (possibly in the order of 10,000) during geological time. It is not out of the question that artifacts of these visits still exist, or even that some kind of base is maintained (possibly automatically) within the solar system to provide continuity for successive expeditions." What might have given this hard - boiled scientist, publicly disbelieving of the entire flying saucer phenomenon, such an idea?

In 1971, Mariner 9 beamed back much different pictures of the Martian surface, cleaner, more detailed, and covering a greater and more interesting surface area. Among the images it returned were what appeared to be regularly spaced pyramidal objects, in rhombus formation, in the Elysium area. Additionally, frame 4212-15 showed a formation on the south of Mars dubbed "Inca City" after the acute resemblance to what NASA geologist John McCauley called "continuous (ridges), show(ing) no breaching . . . out among the surrounding plains and small hills like walls of an ancient ruin." And on frame 4209-75 at longitude 186.4 could be seen what NASA described as "unusual indentations with radial arms protruding from a central hub," which to all superficial appearances resembled what we would recognize as an airport terminal, though of course the explanation given by NASA was much more mundane: it was simply an unusual formation, admittedly rather regular looking, caused by the melting and collapse of permafrost layers. It wouldn't be for some time yet that the former speculation would sound less like science fiction than a very real possibility. Sagan lost no time publicizing the Elysium pyramids on his TV series, Cosmos, rallying public support for future unmanned missions to examine the objects and televise them for all the world to see. Author, lecturer, science writer, and present civilian Mars Mission group head Richard C. Hoagland mentioned in his book The Monuments of Mars that neither Sagan nor anyone else honestly believed the objects were real pyramids.

But others noticed mathematical connections with the Red Planet, and with unquestionably real pyramids on Earth. The first notable publication of such findings came from British researchers M. W. Saunders and Duncan Lunan in 1975, in the book Destiny Mars. Extremely difficult to find in the United States, its central findings as relate to this study can be found published in George C. Andrews' Extra-Terrestrials Among Us. Duncan Lunan first observed that the Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt and the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan aligned, and that their alignment "defined an orbital period which locked with the rotation of Mars." Further, "There seem to be relationships between the Great Pyramid, the Martian moons, and the largest volcanoes on Earth and Mars." By their measurements, the Great Pyramid's base length times 1,000 million was found to be within 1 percent of the mean distance between Mars and the Sun; 1,000 million times its height equaled the mean Earth-Sun distance, with an error of 2 percent; and the maximum Mars-Earth distance was equivalent to 1,000 million times its height plus base-length, with an error of only 0.14 percent. The cubit itself, the measurement by which the Pyramid was built, was found to equal the Mars-Earth indicated base-length divided by 440, with tolerances for error beneath 0.1 percent [plus 0.04 in one instance). They also found that the eccentricity of Mars' orbit was equivalent to the displacement of the center of the Pyramid's innermost (King's) chamber from the east-west center line, divided by the mean semibase, to a tolerance of 0.0023 percent, and other more complex ratios. And Earth's Moon figured into at least one of their Pyramid calculations: the added equatorial radii of Earth and its Moon, divided by Earth's equatorial radius, equals the slope of the Great Pyramid to within 0.06 percent.

Other points of mathematical correlation were discovered by Saunders and Lunan between Earth and Mars. For one thing, the north slope of the Great Pyramid, which is a 2 pi pyramid, "points to a height above the equator equal to 2 pi times the equatorial radius of Mars" with a 0.5 percent margin for error. They observed that the Pyramid's longitude is almost exactly opposite that of Earth's largest volcano, Mauna Loa, approximately 19.6 degrees north of the equator, and that the largest volcano on Mars, Olympus Mons ~ which is also the largest known volcano in our solar system ~ is the same number of degrees south of the Martian equator. Hoagland later measured a more precise 19.47 degrees north and south, and found it to be an apparent universal constant for maximum volcanic activity of planetary bodies, being the location of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, the Great Dark Spot of Neptune, and the Alpha and Beta Regions of Venus, among others.

Saunders and Lunan also found the following pi correlations (among others), all with a margin of error of 0.5 percent or less, for the two Martian satellites Phobos and Deimos: the mean height of Deimos' orbit equals pi times Earth's equatorial radius, and if a satellite in Earth's orbit were at the same height as that of Deimos, it would revolve twice for every rotation of Earth; for every rotation of Earth, Phobos orbits Mars pi times, and if Earth had a satellite at the same height as Phobos, it would revolve two pi times in the time it takes Earth to rotate once.

The significance of this is that Phobos and Deimos may not be natural satellites, but manufactured ones, which was seriously proposed ~ at least in Phobos' case ~ by Russian scientist I. S. Shklovslii in a book co-authored with Carl Sagan in 1966, Intelligent Life in the Universe. It was suggested that Phobos either had an ice center or was hollow, which was roundly attacked by the scientific community, and the idea that it might actually be some kind of manufactured satellite ~ or, by implication, a converted planetary body ~ was met with even more scorn. But it was admitted that Phobos did not act as any other moon in the solar system, and in fact was inexplicably gaining speed in its orbit. Its small size should either have caused it (as well as Deimos) to be cast away from Mars or to have crashed into its surface long ago; its orbit is too circularly perfect, not elliptical, directly in the equatorial region between the sixty-fifth parallels north and south, and unnaturally fast at approximately three and a half orbits in each Martian day. Counter to every known body in the Universe, Phobos rises in the west and sets in the east. There is evidence that activity has taken place on its surface that is in no way natural, and that it is ongoing; grooves and track marks mapped on Phobos by Mariner 9 were discovered to have increased in number by the time that Phobos 2 arrived at Mars eighteen years later, and these all lead to a mammoth "crater" on one end of the moonlet that is perfectly circular and takes up more than an entire third of Phobos' diameter. And, interesting to note, Phobos and Deimos were not discovered until 1877, though astronomers had been observing Mars for some time before that and arguably had sufficient lenses to see its satellites. Even the conservative Vallee admitted it was conceivable "that the `saucers' are interplanetary craft that use either a satellite of Mars or that planet itself as a base in their exploration of our solar system. In our present state of the ignorance of the nature of the Martian satellites it is not impossible to think that they are large interstellar vehicles, placed into orbit more than a century ago . . . by an advanced scientific community coming from elsewhere in the universe." In short, nothing seems "natural" about Phobos.

For that matter, a great many questions have been raised about our own Moon that have yet to be answered. As NASA scientist Dr. Robin Brett puts it, "It seems much easier to explain the nonexistence of the moon than its existence." The Moon functions as a stabilizing brake on Earth's rotation, by its effect on our oceanic tides. To say the least, it is "convenient." So much so that, were such a thing possible, one might almost suggest its function had been deliberately calculated. A more curious feature about it is its perfectly synchronous rotation about Earth-meaning that it turns once on its own axis in exactly the time it takes to revolve once around the Earth ~ which causes it always to show the same face to our planet. Theoretically, there is no reason this cannot occur in nature, but its exceptional improbability has always left science seeking a plausible answer for it. This is especially true since our discovery that the Moon lacks the proper composition for it to have assumed such an orbit. Having been to the Moon, we have explored only a very small portion of it, leaving a great many fundamental questions unanswered; we are not even sure of its core, it being one-quarter the diameter but only one eightieth of Earth's mass, indicating it is most probably hollow . . . as, it would also appear, is Phobos.

It would be some time yet before Phobos was more fully studied, but in the meantime, Mars had greater surprises to yield. In the summer of 1976, the orbiter Viking 1 was placed over Mars, a second orbiter within a month of assuming position. Viking 1 dropped a robot probe on July 20, and on its own thirty fifth orbit photographed something from about a thousand feet up in the planet's Cydonia region, approximately forty one degrees north of the equator. Imaging team member Toby Owen found it on frame 35A72 on that Sunday afternoon, and took it to show Viking project leader Gerry Soffen, whose exact reaction was, "Oh my God, look at this!" What the frame showed was a mesa more than a mile across, two miles long, and half a mile high that looked exactly like a human face. An international press conference was held the same afternoon, at which time Soffen - renowned for his integrity - displayed the photo, saying, "Isn't it peculiar what tricks of lighting and shadow can do. When we took a picture a few hours later, it all went away; it was just a trick, just the way the light fell on it."

In fact, they had not. It wasn't until thirty five days later that Viking frame 70A13 was photographed of the same area, with a lighting change of twenty degrees - and the face not only wasn't gone, it was clearer, especially given the original image to make stereoscopic comparison with. As Richard C. Hoagland says in The Monuments of Mars, this was not so much a deliberate lie or concealment as it was an "overwhelmingly favored presumption" on the part of the Viking team. "This tendency to presume, rather than to check, would manifest itself again and again in the course of events surrounding investigation of this enigmatic landform.'' Hoagland had been one of the press conference reporters on the day Soffen issued his pronouncement, and accepted it at the time on the senior man's word.

It was three years after that conference that two scientists, Vincent DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar, unearthed the second NASA frame for independent study. To clarify the image, they pioneered a new computer graphic technique called Starburst Pixel Interleaving Technique (SPIT). In four months they had developed suitable evidence that the face was bisymmetrical and had created some striking three dimensional computer facsimiles of it. After only four people ~ two of whom were reporters ~ turned out to see them display their findings, DiPietro and Molenaar were invited to speak at the American Astronomical Society's June 1980 meeting. Approximately 10 percent of the thousand nationwide members remained behind to get a better look at the pictures the two men had developed, and some ordered copies. The scientists continued to apply new techniques following the meeting, but failed to rally the support for further Mars exploration to closer examine the Cydonia anomalies. They revealed heightened detail on the face with the assistance of Dr. Mark J. Carlotto, of the Analytic Sciences Corporation, eventually including the pupil in the eye cavity, teeth in the mouth, cheekbone delineations, and clearly marked darkened bands on what increasingly appeared to be an Egyptian style headdress or helmet (previously thought to be the face's "hair"). They also discovered something else that shouldn't be there: a pyramid.

The pyramid was immense, approximately 1 by 1.6 miles. Situated about ten miles southwest of the face, its four sides were aligned to the spin axis of Mars, as the Egyptian pyramids are precisely aligned to Earth's cardinal points. This pyramid was not one of the formerly seen Elysium pyramids, which were three sided, Elysium being almost directly opposite the Cydonia region. They also had discovered what they took to be several smaller pyramids in the area. DiPietro and Molenaar published their findings in 1982, complete with numerous computer enhanced photos, under the title Unusual Martian Surface Features.

In 1981, Hoagland met the two men at a "Case for Mars" conference in Boulder, Colorado, and thought he detected more in the photos they presented than had yet been seen. Unsure of himself, it was two more years before he detected, in updated editions of their work and additional original photos from the Viking mission, what looked to him very much like a city of intelligent construction. Detail on the newly processed photos showed two clear impacts on the pyramid, with ejecta, high toward the top and lower down on the flank of its eastern face; the violence of the higher impact had thrown debris clear over onto the western face. From high contrast photos in the NASA files, ironically unretouched by DiPietro and Molenaar, Hoagland saw numerous geometrical features in an area of roughly five square miles of right angle aligned structures in a rectangular area: objects on the perimeter were oblong, one in the center was exactly circular, additional aligned four sided pyramids were at exact right angles to the face, a square shaped complex precisely on an east west right angle to the bridge of the face's "nose," and two pentagonal pyramids (one of enormous size), among others, all at precise angles to the face. Some of these, like the central pyramid, showed evidence of violent damage.

Detailed analysis showed the entire complex to be built on what is called a Fibonacci, or "golden mean," spiral. This is a precise mathematical configuration deriving from the e/pi ratio, which equals the number 0.865. In its relation to Mars, this recurring geometrical constant is referred to by Hoagland as the "tetrahedral Message of Cydonia." Defense Mapping Agency cartographer and systems analyst Erol Torun confirmed this formula in 1989, also demonstrating that the Giza complex in Egypt ~ the pyramids and the Sphinx ~ were built on exactly the same principle. Torun also did extensive geometrical analysis of the largest pentagonal pyramid (approximately ten times the size and one thousand times the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza), called the "D&M Pyramid," and found overwhelmingly redundant mathematical constants both internally and in relation to the Cydonia complex. Chief among these constants was the 19.5-degree angle ~ which is the latitude north or south of any planetary body, at least by superficial observation, where maximum volcanic activity occurs, as previously mentioned. Translated into the simplest of what are called Plato's geometric solids, these mathematical figures become a spherically circumscribed tetrahedron ~ a three-sided pyramid of four equilateral sides (one the base), which intersect at sixty degree angles ~ in Mars' case, specifically oriented to the magnetic poles. The most striking evidence of this in Cydonia is the 19.5 minutes of arc between the D&M Pyramid, the Face, and the complex itself, the distances between them equaling 1/360th the polar diameter of Mars.

In 1991, Carl Munek publicized for Hoagland's group (the Mars Mission) his finding of this same geometry in Britain: at Stonehenge. The northeast avenue of this famous megalithic complex ~ by which it is used as a solar solstitial marker ~ is off true north by 49.6 degrees, which is the radians of e/pi. He also claims to have found a geodetic pattern connecting megalithic sites in Britain and the Americas. As of 1992, Munck was at work, with the aid of David Myers, in extending what he calls "the Global Grid" of other e/pi megalithic sites to the Near East and Japan. Myers discovered that if the best (and longest held) estimate as to the original exterior angle of the Great Pyramid of Giza (~51.9 degrees) is divided by the tetrahedral sixty degree angle of Cydonia, the result is e/pi. He also discovered that a "great circle" drawn to pass through the Great Pyramid and intersect the equator 19.5 degrees east of Giza will have a precise sixty degree tilt to the equator, and that a great circle drawn to connect Stonehenge and Giza intercepts the equator at precisely 22.5 degrees east (22.5 divided by 19.5 equals e/pi). Livio Catullo Stecchini, a specialist in ancient measurements, wrote in 1971 that ". . . the [Ancient] Egyptians used a system of right triangles, in which one side was one of the three axes of Egypt and the other a perpendicular to it; the hypotenuse usually indicated the course of a segment of the east coast of Africa. The most important of these triangles was one obtained counting from Behdet 19 degrees 30 minutes south along the central axis of Egypt and then 19 degrees 30 minutes to the east..." Nineteen degrees 30 minutes is 19.5 degrees.

In 1974, civil engineer Hugh Harleston, Jr., gave a paper on Teotihuacan to the Forty-first International Congress of Americanists, reporting his discovery that the values e and pi were redundant; the 19.5 degree angle was found on the fourth-level angle of stones at both the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon, the latter showing several redundancies in geodetic markers throughout its site. He also found the number 19.69 encoded in the fourth-level steps of the Pyramid of the Sun, which is important because that is the exact latitude on which that pyramid is built, proving that the builders knew precise spherical measurements of Earth.

Hoagland found the tetrahedral Cydonia Message popping up in crop circles as well, which have long been connected to UFO activity. The August 3, 1990, Cheesefoot Head crop circle in central England, for instance, contains a great many redundancies of the Cydonia figures. More impressive, on July 17, 1991, in an English field called Barbury Castle after a medieval ruin, a number of "bullseye" arranged circles appeared, which Hoagland turned into a cosine polar projection of equivalent latitudes. The numbers which appeared were 19.5, 22.5, 45.0, 49.6, 52.0, and 69.4 degrees, which amounted to a three-dimensional representation of Cydonia's geometry. It may be a matter of some interest that six days before, on July 11, 1991, a total solar eclipse occurred in Mexico City, precisely on the date predicted in stone by the Mayans as the Prophecy of the Sixth (New) Sun, which was the day on which a new age of enlightenment would begin. At least 110 people videotaping the event picked up UFOs on their cameras that day, which appeared in "wave after wave" according to TVs Sightings. They have not departed since. So many videotapes of these UFOs have been taken, week in and week out, that no one is even interested in seeing them anymore. They are discussed openly on Mexican TV and have gained international attention.

Another extremely important feature of Cydonia is an artificial cliff on the edge of a crater, precisely along a sightline so as to form a backdrop beyond the Face for the setting sun, when viewed from the center of the main pyramid complex. Mars Mission member Daniel Drasin discovered that its proportions were incremental in relation to the rest of the complex. Drasin and Carlotto noticed that a photo taken of the same cliff from the south at about twenty degrees off the surface, blown up for detail, showed that the cliff also appeared to be a stylized human face. Eyes, a long nose with round nostrils, prominent cheekbones, a short, smiling mouth, and the cleft in the chin are clearly visible. Given their situation, both faces appear to have been positioned for precise monitoring of the rising and setting sun, as do the pyramids of Earth, Stonehenge, the Anasazi sun-dagger near Holly House at Hovenweep National Monument between Utah and Colorado, and various other temples and mounds. The only evident difference in Cydonia is its incredible size and complexity, and its use of actual faces instead of the simpler markers on our planet.

It is my own contention that the two faces show sufficient detail to darken the lines and reveal extremely clear images of precisely what they are, which is in neither case a human face at all, but the faces of a hawk and a baboon ~ the Egyptian gods Ra and Thoth, respectively.







Once delineated, the details become clear to the naked eye even on unretouched photos, except for the main Face, the Ra face, which has to be computer enhanced to see plainly. The lines are so clean that the additional details of a five pointed, star shaped, human faced diadem is evident on the center of Ra's helmet, similar in design to the golden sun face found in Cuzco's Temple of the Sun which was melted down by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century, after the conquistador Leguizano lost it in a gambling match. That famous sun face bore a human expression with a radiant smile, as is witnessed by old Spanish woodcuts reproduced in the works of Potsdam astronomy professor Rolf Muller and in Zecharia Sitchin's The host Realms, and so it appears does the face of the Ra diadem. The overlapping of the projecting beak can be seen in the "figure-eight" formation of the mouth with a definite point hanging over its center line. The Thoth face shows marked and even horizontal striping across it ~ making it clearly a mandrill ~ and has two other simian faces above it, a chimpanzee over the right eye and a gorilla over the left. Baboons, and so possibly other simians, were sacred to Thoth.

Though their identities have not been officially verified (plainly not a possibility, when the faces themselves have yet to be officially acknowledged), the faces will be referred to in this study as being those of Ra and Thoth. Hoagland believes the central Face to be an image of Homo erectus, the theoretical evolutionary stage of man at the estimated time of the Cydonia complex construction, circa 450,000 years ago, but admits in his text that the central Cydonia Face may indeed be "Horus of the Horizon" from Egyptian mythology, and Horus is essentially another manifestation of the hawk god Ra. He makes mention of the fact that the actual Egyptian name for Horus is Heru, the sun god, which Robert K. G. Temple comments in his book The Sirius Mystery is also synonymous with "face." Egyptian hieroglyphs communicate on more than one level at once and are extremely sophisticated, employing what many researchers have referred to as "sacred puns." As Temple puts it, "In Egyptian the letter `I' and the letter `~' are entirely interchangeable and have the same hieroglyph. Consequently, Heru could just as reliably be Helu. If one takes Helu and puts a Greek ending on it one gets Helios . . .~who was the Greek god of the sun.

One geometrical feature publicized by NASA as early as August 18, 1976, was "parallel contours [that] look very much like an aerial view of ploughed ground . . . in a shadowed depression or basin," found on Viking frame 52A35. These are a series of what seem to be concentric semicircles, about a half mile from end to end, not unlike those in the mountains of Peru's Sacred Valley. There are a great many more mathematical and geometrical points of interest in this ongoing study, such as evenly spaced mounds indicative of aerial runway markers and a cleanly pentagonal (or imperfectly seen heptagonal) structure in the Utopia region. Interested readers should consult the aforementioned researchers for more details. For the purposes of this study, it is sufficiently demonstrated that the faces and complex in the Cydonia region of Mars are clearly the product of a designing intelligence. The findings of the Mars Mission have been independently verified by scientists in other countries, including geologist Dr. Vladimir Avinsky in Russia in 1983.

Predictably, while public interest on the subject has moved in cycles, official interest has been lacking. It cannot be doubted that behind the scenes, as in UFO investigations, there is a team of some sort that is the equivalent of Hoagland's Mars Mission, or that at least keeps tabs on their research. The ever-debunking Carl Sagan, who once observed that "Intelligent life on Earth first reveals itself through the geometric regularity of its constructions," referred to the central Mars Face as "merely seeing Jesus Christ on a tortilla chip" in a Parade article. Once he publicly scoffed at Hoagland's findings, only to privately corral Hoagland later to ask him just what findings he had, anxious to be the first to read his manuscript before it was submitted for publication, as he did at a 1985 conference. Articles periodically appear in various popular science magazines such as Omni and Discover, but no public scientific debate has occurred on the subject other than at amateur meetings and conferences such as Hoagland's Mars Mission group. One place the Face and pyramids did make frequent guest appearances was in the tabloids, which Hoagland has charged is a deliberate move to deflect public attention by ridiculing the subject. It should be mentioned that one of the biggest disinformation sources on the UFO subject, William Cooper, has stated outright that tabloids are sometimes used for precisely that purpose. Hoagland published his book on the subject in 1987, updating it in 1992 before the failure of the next Mars probe, the Observer, in August of the following year.

As Hoagland's book was being published, NASA put out an article and photograph in the September 1, 1987, New York Times: the picture was of a football shaped fragment of rock ~ one of several discovered in Antarctica in 1979 ~ that could plainly be seen to be the corner connection between four separate blocks, not unlike the appearance of pre Inca ruins on Earth or the aptly named "Inca City' on Mars. The Antarctic rocks had formerly been believed to be SNC meteorites, the name given to eight fragments discovered in India, Egypt, and France from 1815 to 1865 that had been unique for their 1.3 billion year old age where most meteorites are 4.5 billion years old. The Antarctic and SNC rock samples (the Times article no longer made any pretense to their being called meteorites) both proved to have rare gas content virtually identical to the atmospheric composition of Mars, containing traces of isotopic Nitrogen 14, Argon 40 and 36, Neon 20. Krypton 84, and Xenon 13. The possibility of such combinations occurring randomly is astronomical, leaving the conclusion that these are, in fact, Mars rocks. Any remaining ambiguity is removed by U.S. Geological Surveyist Jeffrey S. Kargel's unequivocal comment, on the May 20, 1995, edition of Sightings on CBS, that "We have in our laboratories and museums chunks of Mars that have come to the Earth. Maybe terrestrial life has its roots on Mars. Maybe we're all evolved Martians." That fragments of Martian rock should be on Earth at all is a mystery, to say the least, let alone that they should be nearly 1.5 billion years old, and it is especially amazing that one sample (that we know of) should plainly show evidence of intelligent construction.

Between the publication of Hoagland's book and the launching of the Observer probe, the Soviets sent a mission to Mars on July 12, 1988: the probes Phobos 1 and Phobos 2. Several other countries had an investment in the Phobos project, including the European Space Agency, France, and West Germany. After two months, Phobos 1 was reported lost, presumably due to loss of the radio link ~ the same reason given in 1993 for the loss of Observer by the Americans. Phobos 2 arrived at Mars in January of 1989 and established stable orbit. On March 28, it left the Martian orbit to establish a new orbit around its curious moonlet Phobos ~ the probe's primary mission, hence its name ~ and then "failed to communicate with Earth as scheduled," according to the news service Tass. Again, the stated reason was loss of the radio link, but no explanation as to why the link should have been lost was available. Despite reassurances that the probe link would probably be reestablished, Glavkosmos (the Soviet NASA) agent Nikolai A. Simyanov stated that he believed the spacecraft was lost for good.

The Soviets were no strangers to failed Mars probes: they lost six starting in October of 1960, ending with Zond 2 in April 1965. These failures did not go unnoticed by American scientists, who uneasily began joking about the "Great Galactic Ghoul," but managed their own successful Mariner series following the loss of Mariner 3 in November of 1964 when its protective shroud didn't open. Mariner 4's twenty two successfully returned images of Mars in 1965 were followed by almost ten times as many from Mariners 6 and 7in 1969. As Mariner 9 orbited Mars in 1971, the Russians succeeded in being the first to land on the Red Planet. Their missions, Mars 2 and Mars 3, arrived about two weeks after Mariner 9. Mars 2 crashed, reportedly due to a Martian dust storm, but Mars 3 landed its rover, becoming the first transmitter of images from the Martian surface. It was not revealed until the Americans lost their Observer probe in 1993 that Mars 3's rover ceased transmission just twenty seconds into its debarkation, for reasons unknown.

On March 31, 1989, the European press ran a number of articles concerning an inexplicable object that Phobos 2 had photographed between itself and Mars in its last few seconds of transmission. A thin ellipse with sharpened points (the points in a shape gem cutters call a "marquise"), about twelve and a half miles long, was the object in question. It was symmetrical, unlike the shadow Phobos itself casts, which is in a larger potato shape. Nor was this the only object of its sort that Phobos 2 had photographed: a few days earlier, an identical shadow between sixteen and nineteen miles long was captured by the cameras. The Soviets were clearly convinced it was not the shadow of the moonlet Phobos, as they referred to this recurring, symmetrical shadow as a "phenomenon." A Vremya reporter inquired directly whether or not this was a rocket ship of some sort, and the space agency representative refused comment, other than to say it would be "to fantasize." Aviation Week and Space technology's April 3, 1989, issue ran a story about the loss of the radio link, and the April 7 issue of Science ran the same story but added one new detail: that the probe's signal was weakly detected for a brief time a few hours after its loss, implying that it was in a spin. Further confirmation of this came from Paris in the April 10 Aviation Week and Space Technology, from sources quoting the Soviets as saying they were "tracking a spinner," which greatly puzzled the French because the satellite's stabilization system had performed so well for the Soviets on their Venus missions. It did admit to the presence of the unknown shadow, but implied that it was the satellite's jettisoned propulsion system (which was an impossibility). Aside from these, American news carried no stories at all on developments in researching the Phobos 2 loss for some time.

Again ignored by the American media were further reports issued by the Soviets in response to international pressure about three months later, which ran in Europe and Canada as curiosities. Except for the final few frames, which still have not been released, Phobos 2's final transmissions were aired on television. In the equatorial region of Mars (where all the unusual surface features so far discovered on that planet occur, and over which Phobos regularly orbits), what appeared to be an intelligently designed area of more than 230 square miles was plainly visible, consisting of rows of parallel straight lines and rectangles of varying length. The most curious thing about them was that only infrared cameras, and not standard cameras, had photographed them ~ meaning that they were a heat source, and by implication beneath the Martian surface, though this suggestion tends to remain unvoiced by most. Radio Moscow's science correspondent Boris Bolitsky said that the "quite remarkable features" were either on the planet's surface or "in the lower atmosphere," a strange comment indeed. Dr. John Becklake of the London Science Museum made comments on Canadian television about them, describing them as puzzling and saying that he certainly didn't know what they were. "The city like pattern is 60 kilometers wide," he said, "and could easily be mistaken for an aerial view of Los Angeles."

Of the actual probe loss, Becklake confirmed the "thin ellipse" seen between Phobos 2 and the Martian surface and added that it was picked up both by visual and infrared cameras, verifying that it was not the shadow of the Martian moonlet, to anyone who may have been in doubt. He also gave out some additional information, such as the fact that the ellipse had been seen just as Phobos 2 was aligning itself with Phobos, and that "As the last picture was halfway through, (the Soviets) saw something which should not be there. (They) have not yet released this picture, and we won't speculate on what it shows." Where Becklake would not speculate, the Soviets themselves confirmed in the October 19, 1989, issue of Nature that one of two things took out their probe: it was a computer malfunction, or else some object "impacted" the probe. Computer malfunction seems unlikely, since the probe was spinning at one point and its signals were detected pointed at Earth ~ which would mean that radio contact should have been reestablished, or at least could have been. The Glavkosmos chairman reluctantly admitted, in explaining the probe loss to Aviation Week and Space Technology, that the last frame taken by Phobos 2 "appears to include an odd-shaped object between the space craft and Mars." All possible known sources-including "space dust" were ruled out as causes for the photographed object or the loss of the probe that imaged them. Which leaves, by strict definition, an unidentified flying object ~ or more than one, given the differences in size and dates of the objects photographed.

One item of importance was noticed before the loss of Phobos 2: there were more of the regular grooves or trenches in the moonlet's surface than had been there at the time of the Viking mission thirteen years before. "New grooves can be identified," were the Soviets' exact words. The mission had confirmed that they were in fact regular, of a uniform width of seven hundred to one thousand feet, and seventy five to ninety feet deep. The material in their sides is brighter than the surface of Phobos, and they run parallel to each other, all converging on the gigantic crater "hole" at Phobos' tip. Something else the Viking mission discovered was that chains of small craters were in tandem with the grooves. How these could occur in nature, on an astral body with no volcanic activity, is a mystery. Similar craters have been discovered on our own Moon, believed to be the product of volcanism, but those seen on Phobos bring this interpretation into question. As to the fabled canals of Mars itself, there is no clear answer concerning them. Where the prevailing opinion is that astronomers had simply been perceiving an illusion since first spotting them, there is presently no proposed explanation as to just what landforms or conditions could have caused such an illusion, let alone one perceived by all observers in all ages, including our own.

NASA launched the last probe to Mars on September 25, 1992, at the cost of more than a billion dollars. Having first been delayed by Hurricane Andrew, NASA discovered on a safety check that the specially filtered nitrogen hoses, meant to keep out any external debris, had somehow failed in their job: bits of fiber, metal filings, dirt, paper, and even plaster of paris were discovered inside. The probe's special high resolution camera was similarly contaminated. NASA investigated the highly suspicious debris, obviously more indicative of deliberate sabotage than hurricane damage, but never announced their findings publicly. Shortly after launch, the probe was believed "blown up" when it failed to respond to radio signals for over a half hour, according to Reuters news service. Somehow contact was reestablished, and Observer winged its way to Mars. Then, on August 21, 1993, three days from its destination, Observer was permanently lost. The radio link was first to be blamed, followed by later speculations that one or another system had leaked and caused an explosion. No final determination was possible.

Nor could the Observer loss even be considered an exceptional incident. Since the explosion of the shuttle Challenger in 1986, NASA was unable to accomplish a successful major launch until after the Observer disappearance. A number of satellites were lost, including a $1.5 billion CIA satellite that exploded less than a minute into launch, recalling such "deflections" as the Juno 2 in 1959, the tracking by Cape Kennedy of a UFO which followed a Polaris missile over the south Atlantic in 1961, and the sabotage of Atlas and Minuteman missiles in 1966 and 1975 at Malmstrom Air Force Base. In fact, until the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope after the Observer loss ~ -which also initially failed ~ NASA had nothing but a string of seemingly cursed ventures. NASA's official stance has always been (like all other government agencies) that it has no interest in (or investigative body into) UFOs, though its 1967 Management Instruction states plainly that "it is KSC (Kennedy Space Center) policy to respond to reported sightings of space vehicle fragments and unidentified flying objects as promptly as possible," adding that "under no circumstances will the origin of the object be discussed" with any observer reporting them.

Charges of sabotage and withholding of evidence were inevitable in the wake of Observer's loss, especially when it was discovered that, against protocol and the advice of the manufacturers (though NASA claims it was General Electric's and Martin Marietta's idea), the radio link had been ordered shut off at Mission Control, ostensibly because it would somehow assist the probe in the automatic pressurizing of its fuel system. This is utterly inexplicable, since telemetry (as it is called) is simply never shut off during any mission, for exactly the reason that became apparent with Observer: it may never come back on.

Richard Hoagland and Professor Emeritus Stanley McDaniel from Sonoma State University (Department of Philosophy), another major proponent for increased study of Cydonia, were quick to point out the tremendous convenience in timing concerning Observer's telemetry loss. It occurred on the eve of a press conference in which McDaniel's lengthy report challenging NASA candor with the public was to be discussed between Hoagland and Observer Mission scientist Dr. Bevan French (who did not read or discuss the report on the air) on Good Morning America, and was not announced until the day after the telecast, despite the fact that the radio link was lost the night before. It also did not go unnoticed that the link was intact until Observer's controllers had managed to upload the probe's commands and complete all necessary manipulations to get it into its prearranged orbit, meaning that Observer would automatically continue its mission, but Mission Control would not be able to receive the images it transmitted ~ or, that someone at Mission Control might know exactly how to retrieve those images, but without the public (or possibly even most of NASA) ever knowing it. In short, that Observer could be privately monitored.

It didn't help matters any that the head of NASA, Admiral Richard Truly, was fired by President George Bush while he was investigating Congressman Howard Wolpe's (D-MI) allegations that the Space Agency had been officially ordered to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act. Wolpe had discovered a two page set of instructions while Congress was looking into ways to develop the SP-100 nuclear space reactor. "This NASA document," he was quoted by Associated Press from his letter to Truly, "instructs government employees to: 1, rewrite and even destroy documents `to minimize adverse impact'; 2, mix up documents and camouflage handwriting so that the document's significance would be `less meaningful'; and 3, take steps to `enhance the utility of various FOIA exemptions." Truly, who was committed to openness and honesty, was replaced by Daniel Goldin, a quarter-century TRW defense industry contractor of top-secret satellite equipment with a history of "black-op" (secret operations) experience.

The subject of Professor McDaniel's concern was a 1958 NASA commissioned Brookings Institute report (available to Congress three years later) on potential pursuits in space. Exceeding two hundred pages in length, the document discusses the possibility of encountering "artifacts left at some point in time" by intelligent extraterrestrials, which "might be discovered through our space activities on the Moon, Mars, or Venus." Like the 1968 NSA paper on "UFO Hypothesis and Survival Questions," it asked which circumstances would justify withholding information from the public, citing anthropological examples of "societies sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways. . . ."Fundamentalist religious and other "anti-science" sects were considered the highest risk group to exposure of such information, followed by ~ interestingly enough ~ scientists and engineers, since "these professions most clearly associate with the mastery of nature," and so might be "the most devastated by the discovery of relatively superior creatures." Another study, done by Marshall Space Flight Center's design engineer, Joseph F. Blumrich, concluded after eighteen months that we would eventually find evidence of extraterrestrial visits on the Moon, and that both it and Earth had been regular visitation sites. Yet another study ~ Technical Report R-277 ~ also undertaken by NASA, compiled by Barbara M. Middlehurst and called the "Chronological Catalogue of Reported Lunar Events" (currently available through the Sourcebook Project), listed 579 reliable sightings of unusual lunar phenomena from 1540 to 1967.

It should be noted that, like all other agencies involved in any of the myriad aspects of UFO investigation, NASA is demonstrably somewhat schizophrenic. There was never any attempt to conceal either the Elysium or Cydonia pyramids, or the now-famous Face in that region, only an attempt to downplay them, and to "ignore them and maybe they'll go away." The photos are published and discussed, at quite some detail and length, in many sources, and copies of the pictures can be obtained by interested researchers. The Space Agency has even volunteered such information as the rocks of Martian origin discovered in Antarctica, without any external prompting. Yet, on the Observer probe, evidence of possible sabotage before launch, inexplicable breach of protocol and suspicious activity during, and cover-up following can be seen, with papers brought to light by a congressman proving attempts to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act after the fact. The lattermost could easily be explained by there being a former CIA head as president of the country at the time, but the no less conservative Ronald Reagan was in office when NASA publicized the Antarctic Mars rocks ~ though, it should be noted, Reagan witnessed a UFO while governor of California and is on record as having a great interest in the subject, and so may have been less hostile to openness concerning it. It most appears that there is no standardized policy on how to treat such information, and its availability is entirely dependent on who is asked about it.

Written coincidentally with the formation of NASA, the Brookings Institute report stated that man will not come face to face with intelligent extraterrestrial life "within the next twenty years," as though this were somehow an eventual certainty, but emphasized the likelihood of encountering artifacts on our three nearest celestial neighbors. And, given the current evidence for there having once been a civilization, or at least a base, on Mars, the obvious question should arise: wouldn't such a race, if they had built structures on Earth as well (as the evidence indicates), also have used our Moon as a base? And where we have sent only robot probes to Mars and Venus, information on which is only now beginning to be processed and studied, we have actually set foot on the Moon. Our astronauts never reported finding any artifacts there. But we have reason to suspect NASA has not told us everything they discovered on the Moon.

Again, we have evidence not so much of cover-up, but of less than total candor. The Brookings Institute and Joseph Blumrich seem to have actually anticipated our finding artifacts beyond Earth. On what might they have based that assessment?

As with Mars, but stretching much further back, the Moon has been the subject of a variety of anomalous historical reports. The discoverer of Uranus, Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel, saw many small, bright, luminous points on the Moon, in 1783, 1787, and finally on October 2, 1790, during a total lunar eclipse. On March 7, 1794, Dr. William Wilkins of Norwich saw a light so bright he equated it with a star, on the dark of the Moon's disk, visible to the naked eye. "It lasted for 15 minutes," he said, "and was a fixed and steady light which brightened. It was brighter than any light part of the moon, and the moment before it disappeared, the brightness increased. Two persons passing also saw it." So did a servant of Sir George Booth, in England, who reported it in virtually the same words, as "a bright light, like a star, in the dark part of the moon."

Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, reports of such strange lights continued, growing in complexity due perhaps to the improved technology of telescopes. To mention a few: an intermittently appearing bright light, at times flashing, was seen on the dark part of the moon from Holland on October 20, 1824; on January 22 of the following year, two officers aboard the HMS Coronation in the Gulf of Siam witnessed two different lights, one in the crater Aristarchus; Thomas G. Elger reported in the Astronomical Register of April 9, 1867, that he saw a light like a star of the seventh magnitude flare out of the moon: "I have seen lights before on the moon, but never so clear as this," he wrote; in 1869, Great Britain's Royal Astronomical Society began a three year investigation into a "sudden outbreak" of mysterious lights witnessed in the Mare Crisium (itself anomalous, in that the Mare Crisium is in a cleanly hexagonal shape); on May 13, 1870, several English astronomers saw lights in the crater Plato, numbering from four to twenty eight at any given time; in March of 1877 there were several reports of bright lights in the craters Proclus and Picard, specified not to be reflections of the sun; and shortly after, on June 17, 1877, New York's Professor Henry Harrison saw a light "like a reflection from a moving mirror" on the dark of the moon, as England's Frank Dennett saw the same thing in the crater Bessel.

UFO activity about the Moon was also plentiful: September 7, 1820, numerous French observers reported seeing objects flying precise maneuvers in a straight line and at regularly spaced intervals from each other during a lunar eclipse; Le Monde of Paris and The Journal of the Franklin Institute reported that a Professor Swift of Illinois and Professors Hines and Zentmayer in Europe witnessed the same phenomenon, in several formations, moving in straight and parallel lines during a solar eclipse on August 7, 1869; Monsieur Lamey reported vast numbers of dark bodies crossing the Moon, in an 1874 L Annee Seientifique; on April 24, 1874, Professor Schafarik of Prague "saw an object of so peculiar a nature that I know not what to make of it. It was dazzlingly white, and slowly traversed the disk of the moon. I watched it after it left the moon's face"; the Journal of the Liverpool Astronomical Society reported South African Colonel Marwick's sighting near the Moon of something like a comet that moved rapidly; in 1892 and 1896, the same phenomenon was witnessed in the Netherlands and in America, of an object one-thirtieth of the Moon's diameter traversing the disk of that planetary body in three to four seconds; Arizona gave several reports during 1899 of luminous objects moving across the Moon; in November of that year, France reported an enormous object that moved like a kite and changed color from white to red to blue; on May 10, 1902, Colonel Marwick reported many brilliantly colored objects like little suns about the Moon; on November 26, 1910, the Journal of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and La Nature in France both reported a brightly luminous object seen during a lunar eclipse, one publication adding that it left the Moon's surface; F. B. Harris reported in England's January 27, 1912, Popular Astronomy that he saw an incredibly black object about 250 miles long and 150 miles wide on or over the Moon "like a vast crow poised . . . An extremely interesting and curious phenomenon must have happened"; and the Bulletin de La Soc. Astron. de France of August 29, 1917, reported bright objects seen traveling close with the Moon.

And, as with Mars, unusual geometrical features were also witnessed on the Moon. Baron Franz Von Paula Gruithuisen thought he had discovered a lunar city between 1822 and 1824, based on a series of parallel mounds and configurations north of the crater Schroter. Over the years, scrutiny of the area in question gave conflicting results from different observers. Another astronomer named Gaudibert saw a similar enough configuration to produce a remarkably close sketch to that made by Gruithuisen, but given the lack of consistency, Gruithuisen's discovery was deemed fanciful. Madler, one of the authors of the classic 1838-39 lunar mapping work Der Mond, drew a geometrically shaped enclosure with surrounding structures or marks remarkably similar to Gruithuisen's, only on the shore of the Mare Frigoris to the immediate west of the crater Fontenelle and northeast of the crater Plato.

Controversy occurred in 1866 over Athens Observatory director Julius Schmidt's reported disappearance of the crater Linne, an extremely deep depression, to be replaced by a small whitish patch for a brief time. Later observations confirmed that it had not changed, and any observers who discovered a difference were considered for whatever reason to simply have been incorrect in their assessment. Yet Linne, originally described in Beer and Madler's Der Mond as "the second most conspicuous crater on the plain," at four and a half miles across and a depth so great its bottom could not be seen, is today a smallish white crater of merely one and a half miles across, with almost no height or depth at all. In 1877, two different observers at two different times noticed strange objects in craters: Meudon Observatory's Monsieur Trouvelot saw what appeared to be a luminous cable in Eudoxus on February 20, and a Doctor Klein reported in L Astronomie seeing a luminous triangle on the floor of Plato on November 23; on the same night, observers across the United States reported seeing "flakes" of light converging from all lunar craters into the floor of Plato, where they formed into a triangle.

Between February of 1885 and December of 1919, a great many geometric and other unusual phenomena were noted in craters of the Moon, including what appeared to be a curved wall, a luminous cable in Aristarchus like that witnessed by Trouvelot in 1877, synchronous lights, color areas on the surface changing from light to dark or vice versa, a black wall in Aristillus, reddish smoke and shadows, intense black spots in and about various craters (some with cleanly defined, bright borders), and shafts of light projecting from given areas (witnessed at two different geographical locations). Sky and Tetescope recorded a cross seen at the crater Fra Mauro, and volume 20 of the Astronomical Register mentioned "a geometric object shaped like a cross," or possibly a letter "X," seen in the crater Eratosthenes, along with "an acute angled triangle" formed by the three lower embankments of a group of hills.

One feature was spotted by so many astronomers at so many times that in the last century it was simply referred to as "the Railway." Almost seventy miles in length, it is a straight wall approximately five hundred yards high, with steep edges rising steadily for about twelve hundred feet at about forty-five degrees from the Moon's surface. The consensus today seems to be that this is a fault line, caused by something pushing its way up through the surface. No logical proposal as to what or how that might be has been forthcoming. It is perhaps of note that around the wall are a great many of the seemingly symmetrical domes that still mystify lunar landscape watchers. Almost exactly opposite the wall, on the backside of the Moon, is a gigantic crack stretching approximately 150 miles, up to five miles wide in places. Soviet scientists Vasin and Shcerbakov seriously suggest that the crack and wall are evidence that the Moon is a hollowed-out asteroid being used as a spaceship, the wall being an armor plate that buckled under the force of some impact, the crack a resonant structural failure. Such a proposition may not be so far fetched, given that the Moon does indeed show signs of being hollow, and NASA has reported that it "rings like a gong or a bell" when hit by spent rocket stages or landed upon by modules ~ reverberations of from one to four hours were picked up by Apollo 12.

The modern era brought far better observations of the lunar surface, and accordingly far more unusual reports. Arizona's American Meteorite Museum director, Dr. H. H. Nininger, discovered a twenty mile tunnel in 1952 with walls smooth as glass connecting the two unusual craters Messier and Pickering in thc Sea of Fecundity. The craters differ from other craters in having unnaturally extended lips in the same direction. The entrance and exit of this tunnel, he asserted, were clearly visible with any good telescope. Nininger suggested the formation of the tunnel was the passage of a meteorite moving twenty to thirty miles per second on almost a perfect horizontal plane, vaporizing and making into smooth glass the dust in its wake. The logistical problems behind this suggestion are immense, and it is questionable whether anyone really believes it or not, but the only other possibility is intelligent construction ~ then as now a forbidden topic to discuss in public, or even in most private confines. But the mountain range separating these two craters is fifteen to twenty miles wide and several thousand feet high, extremely unlikely to have been cleanly breached by a meteorite in the proposed fashion.

On July 29, 1953, former New York Herald Tribune science editor John O'Neill saw an approximately twelve mile long bridge like structure over the Sea of Crisis, which was confirmed by more than one leading astronomer within even a month. The British Astronomical Association's Lunar Section head, H. P. Wilkins, referred to it as an artificial structure, not a natural one, and alluded that he thought it looked like an engineering job made fairly recently, owing to the fact that the oft observed lunar surface had not formerly revealed it. He stated on BBC radio that sunlight could clearly be seen streaming in beneath it.

Soon more regular shapes began to be seen. Apparent structures seeming to form squares or rectangles were reported ~ not unlike those drawn by astronomers over a century earlier-as well as "domes" that were seen first in one spot, then another, as though they were moving. Science writer Joseph F. Goodavage noted in 1954 that "more than 200 circular dome shaped structures have been observed on the moon and catalogued, but for some strange reason they often vanish from one place and reappear somewhere else."

On September 29, 1958, Dr. Kenzahuro Toyoda of Japan's Menjii University discovered actual letters on the Moon's surface, so huge and black that he could easily read them: PYAX JWA. The newspaper MaCnichi carried the report, Toyoda not being the type to perpetrate a joke. The probe Ranger 7 crashed into the Moon in 1964, but not before relaying pictures of the inside of a crater filled with a cluster of objects that have yet to be satisfactorily, identified, appearing to be round, smooth, and symmetrical. Other craters seem to show similar features at different times.

On February 4, 1966, the Soviets' Luna 9 probe photographed in the Sea of Storms regular, towering structures that Argosy's science editor Dr. Ivan Sanderson called "two straight lines of equidistant stones that look like markers along an airport runway," similar to what was later discovered in the Utopia region of Mars. In both cases, the structures are identical, and positioned so as to produce tremendous shadows. Russian Laureate State Prize winner Dr. S. Ivanov compared photos taken at two different times for stereoscopic effect and discovered that the spires were approximately fifteen stories high, evenly spaced and identical, concluding that "in 3-D [they] seem to be arranged according to definite geometric laws." The news was not published in America, and the authors of Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain claimed that NASA was "not at all happy about its publication," apparently there or anywhere else. In his authoritative Our Moon, the same Dr. Wilkins who publicly discussed O'Neill's artificial land bridge in 1953 described a gigantic hole in the center of crater Cassini A, on the edge of the Sea of Storms, more than six hundred feet across, the surrounding crater itself being "as smooth as glass" and a mile and a half across at the outer rim. There are many other holes of this sort visible in craters of the Moon. Wilkins was convinced that the Moon had substantial subterranean pits or hollows, with openings to the surface. The Sea of Storms is also a hotbed of UFO activity.

If NASA was unhappy about the publication of details about spires on the edge of the Sea of Storms, their own publication on November 2, 1966, of what have since been dubbed "the Blair Cuspids" seems schizophrenic. Boeing Institute of Biotechnology's William Blair discovered these objects in the Sea of Tranquility in a photograph taken by Lunar Orbiter 2. Seven obelisks (as they have since been called) were found in all, one of extreme height (about 213 meters) and six smaller ones, arranged in such a fashion that the three outer ones form an equilateral triangle, the other four triangulating to create a prismatic-pyramidal configuration. Blair countered arguments that the obelisks were natural landforms by saying that if they were, "the triangulation would be scalene or irregular, whereas those concerning the lunar objects lead to a basilary system, with coordinates x, y, z, to the right angle, six isosceles triangles and two axes consisting of three points each." In other words, their mathematical / geometrical correlations could not have occurred by accident. In close proximity to the obelisks is a gigantic rectangular depression with four 90-degree corners "persuading one to think it is like an excavation whose walls have been eroded or fallen inwards," as Blair put it. Soviet space engineer Alexander Abramov claims these markers are positioned identically to the Pyramids in Giza.

Discoveries made since man's landing on the Moon have added more to its mystery than brought desired answers. The odd resonation the Moon makes when struck has already been mentioned, arguing, as does other evidence, for its being completely hollow ~ or, as Wilkins suggested, containing a great many substantially hollowed pits or subterranean chambers accessed by "plug holes." There is considerably less dust on the surface of the Moon than should be present for its age. Now utterly devoid of discernible water, sinuous rilles in the Moon's surface (and that of Mars) attest to the likelihood that water was once present, and inexplicably, after Apollo 15, NASA experts detected one hundred square miles of water vapor on the Moon's surface that still has not been accounted for. Almost 100 percent of the Moon's rocks are older than 90 percent of Earth's rocks ~ from 4.6 billion years old, compared to Earth's 3.7 billion year old rocks ~ making the Moon far older than our own planet, probably captured in our orbit from elsewhere in antiquity and not generated from Earth as was once believed. The soil of the Moon seems to be a billion years older than the rocks on its surface. Though the Moon is considered to have little or no magnetic field, its rocks seem to be highly magnetized, and there are massive concentrations ("mascons") of matter beneath the Moon's seas sufficient to gravitationally affect passing satellites. Among the rock samples brought back by both Soviet and American missions were found pure iron particles, which have not oxidized (rusted) at all. Though rustproof iron is completely unheard of in physics, the Moon's iron particles have an earthly counterpart in the thirty foot-high solid iron Ashoka Pillar of indeterminate age (at least sixteen hundred years old) in the courtyard of Quib Minar in New Delhi, India, that is also completely free of rust.

But the most curious of our lunar neighbor's mysteries are a series of anomalies that seem to tie together. Many of the Moon's craters appear too round and too symmetrical to have been formed by meteor impacts, as was long supposed; Mars and Venus have similar craters, dispelling the idea that their perfection on the Moon was caused by its utter lack of atmosphere. The Moon's seas are fused plains of soil, requiring there at one time to have been a temperature of forty five hundred degrees Fahrenheit or greater; this fused soil is loaded with rare metals and elements such as zirconium, titanium, yttrium, and beryllium, and is next to impossible to drill through. Substantial areas of the Moon's surface seem to be "paved with glass," as one scientific expert put it, positing that heat from a fantastically awesome solar flare may have scorched the Moon's surface about thirty thousand years ago. But there is also tremendous radioactivity in the upper eight miles of the Moon's forty miles of crust. Uranium, thorium, and potassium are present there in great quantities, creating an "embarrassingly high" radioactivity level read by Apollo 15's thermal equipment that caused one expert to exclaim, "My God, this place is about to melt!" The Moon's desolate and radioactive surface, according to NASA, was brought about in antiquity by "the violence of [multiple] cosmic bombardment[s]" which "exploded with the power of billions of H bombs."

We have seen such fusion of sand into glass in our own age, at Trinity test site with the atomic bomb. Some of the Gobi Desert near Lob Nor Lake, where the Chinese have run their atomic tests, also has become glassine. But there are large areas of the Gobi, equally scarred, that were never visited by atomic weapons in the present day. The Gobi has long been a place of mystery. French Astronomer Royal and mayor of Paris, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, determined in 1778 that star maps brought back by missionaries in India were not only "many thousands of years old," but that "they showed stars which could not have been visible from their place of origin"; his conclusion was that the Indians had taken them from some more ancient civilization, and that the maps had to have been drawn from somewhere in the Gobi. The Gobi figures in ancient legends from central Asia concerning white men who came from the skies, about which Peter Kolosimo writes: "Many Soviet scientists are convinced of the existence of such visitors and have devoted much effort to finding their traces upon earth, and the Gobi Desert has been one of their favorite hunting grounds." There and in the caves of Ilmkestan, Russian investigators found what they believed could have been navigation instruments for cosmic vehicles, in the form of cone shaped objects of glass or porcelain with a drop of mercury inside, corresponding to descriptions in the Sanskrit Samaragansutradhara and the Ramayana and Dronaparva texts of the Mahabharata.

In 1960, mathematician and physicist Professor Mikhail Agrest published in Moscow's Literaturnaya Gazeta his belief that Sodom and Gomorrah were nuclear blast sites, and that the mammoth Baalbek terrace of antiquity (in present day Lebanon) was designed as a spaceship landing platform. Zecharia Sitchin concurs with this assessment of Baalbek, and cites a miles wide area of scorched, blasted, and broken black rocks in the Sinai Peninsula that defy explanation. The Baalbek terrace is the most massive megalithic structure known in the world. Called the Heliopolis by the Greeks ("Sun City"), it consists of Roman temples built in succeeding ages to Jupiter and Venus (mostly destroyed in a 1759 earthquake), erected over an original prehistoric structure that was the temple dedicated to Astarte and Baal referred to in the Bible's Book of Kings. It is composed of limestone blocks too massive to accurately gauge in size or weight, but by the most conservative estimate they are approximately ten by thirty by sixty feet and 750 tons each, some estimates reaching as high as 1,500 tons. Baalbek's enclosure includes three of the largest stones ever used for such construction, called the Trilithon. About 13 feet high and 10 feet thick, they are 64, 63.5, and 62.5 feet long. These were somehow raised and put into place at a height of twenty six feet. In their nearby quarry is another such stone that was never transported, thirteen by fourteen by seventy feet (approximate), conservatively estimated to weigh a thousand tons. The quarry is half a mile away. There are no cranes or instruments in the modern world capable of lifting, let alone transporting, more than perhaps one hundred tons.

The Russian investigators also considered North America's Death Valley between California and Nevada to be another possible nuclear site. "Around an imposing central building are the remains of a city that extended for about a mile," summarized adventurer William Walker, in 1850, of damage to an unspecified area in this region. "There are . . . carbonized or vitrified blocks, the result of some terrible catastrophe. In the center of this city is a rocky spur twenty or thirty feet high, on which the ruins of gigantic constructions can be seen. The buildings at their southern extremity look as though they had been in a furnace, and the rock on which they are built itself shows signs of having melted. Strange to say, the Indians have no tradition concerning the people who once lived here. The dismal ruins fill them with superstitious terror, but they know nothing of their history." Walker attributed the damage to volcanic eruption, not knowing that Death Valley has never experienced such activity, and couldn't have suffered the type of destruction evidenced even if it had.

There are a great many vitrified sites around the ancient world, for which there has never been a satisfactory explanation. Vitrification is the fusing of brick or stone into glassine glaze by extreme heat, which is common to nuclear destruction but has otherwise never been duplicated artificially despite many attempts. It is still considered a "phenomenon." In addition to the locations already mentioned, the ancient Hittite cities of Turkey are vitrified, as are forts found in Peru, Scotland, Ireland, France, and India. Historical sources in the Mediterranean attribute vitrification to the unknown chemical substance called "Greek Fire," which was reportedly able to burn underwater and was catapulted by ships against fortress walls. It was a weapon employed by the "Sea Peoples" (believed to be the ancestors of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians), who were as advanced, unknown, and migratory a race as the mysterious Aryan Indo Europeans historically credited with the building of the Old World megaliths and the founding of Western civilization.

Among the most important of the world's vitrified sites is the advanced city of Mohenjo Daro ("Mound of the Dead") in modern Pakistan, estimated to date from 2,500 BC or earlier. According to ancient texts and esoteric tradition, it was one of the seven cities of India's Rama Empire. When the city was excavated, skeletons scattered about the site were found lying together openly in the streets, unburied, no visible damage evident to signify what killed them. They were holding hands, as if having died suddenly and in full anticipation of their swift end. A. Gorbovsky's Riddles of Ancient History reported that skeletons found by Soviet scientists at nearby locations tested fifty times above the normal level of radioactivity. Thousands of clay vessel fragments were fused together into what have been labeled "black stones." There is no indication of volcanic activity having occurred in the region.

Accepting India's historical epic, the Mahabharata, at face value, descriptions of what happened to the site are reminiscent of the destruction wrought by modern weapons in 1945: ". . . [it was] a single projectile / Charged with all the power of the Universe. / An incandescent column of smoke and flame / As bright as the thousand suns / Rose in all its splendor . . . / . . . it was an unknown weapon, / An iron thunderbolt, / A gigantic messenger of death, / Which reduced to ashes / The entire race of the / Vrishnis and the Andakhas. / . . . The corpses were so burned / As to be unrecognizable. / The hair and nails fell out; / Pottery broke without apparent cause, / And the birds burned white. / After a few hours / All foodstuffs were infected . . . / . . . to escape from this fire / The soldiers threw themselves in streams / To wash themselves and their equipment." Not only is this description of destruction identical to that at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the survivors of those explosions also threw themselves into the water to try and ease the burning. The A-bomb's inventor, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, famous for his familiarity with ancient Sanskrit literature, was asked seven years after Alamogordo by a Rochester University interviewer whether that had been the first atomic detonation in the world, and he replied, "Well, yes, in modern history." After the first atomic test, Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita. "Now I've become Death-the destroyer of worlds.'' He later added, "I suppose we all felt that way."

Other cities and sites of antiquity, and the substantial apparent impact damage on many of Mars' surface structures, would lend credence to the biblical "war in the heavens." These include an extremely dramatic hole, one thousand feet in diameter, in Cydonia's D&M Pyramid, with structural and surface damage and debris, looking very much like it was caused by explosive penetration. Numerous midair explosions, usually attributed to meteorites destroyed by the atmosphere, also have left their mark on the surface of Venus.

The list given of the anomalies on Mars, and on both its moons and Earth's, is only partial. NASA has investigated them, officially in some instances and most assuredly unofficially in others. A package of seventeen photos was given to the Apollo 15 crew for study in 1971, with instructions to observe and report on them. These are mostly the areas mentioned so far where anomalies exist. It is noteworthy that the Sea of Tranquility, where the Blair Cuspids are located, was the first landing site of the Apollo missions. One drawing made by the astronauts of an eight foot high layered outcropping of rock near Apollo 15's landing site bears a remarkable resemblance to the polygonal walls of Sacsayhuaman in the Peruvian Andes. The mission's findings were not made public, and probably will not be without congressional pressure, but the areas in question and instructions for study are indicative of NASA's awareness of their significance.

Occasional glimpses of what might have been witnessed by the astronauts can be found in transcripts, such as Apollo 17's Ron Evans' report of a flashing light at the edge of the Oriental Basin, and the firsthand confirmation by Apollo 11 astronauts of independently corroborated fluorescence on the lunar surface of up to fifty thousand square miles at a time, a phenomenon often observed from Earth and never adequately explained. In 1979, the former chief of NASA communications specialists, Maurice Chatelain, alleged that Neil Armstrong filmed UFOs on the Moon during his historic Moon walk, backing similar statements made easier by another former NASA employee, Otto Binder. "The encounter was common knowledge in NASA," Chatelain said in his book, Our Ancestors Came from Outer Space, "but nobody has talked about it until now." The Space Agency and Armstrong himself dismissed the claim, but physicist and professor of mathematics at Moscow University Dr. Vladimir Azazha, ancient astronaut theorist Alexander Kazantsev, and Professor Sergei Boshich in Russia were certain it was true. Chatelain went on to say that, since astronaut Walter Stirrer and Gemini 8, the term "Santa Claus" was employed to signal NASA that UFOs had been spotted, and that "all Apollo and Gemini flights were followed, both at a distance and some times also quite closely, by space vehicles of extraterrestrial origin, flying saucers, or UFOs . . . if you want to call them by that name. Every time it occurred, the astronauts informed Mission Control, who then ordered absolute silence." Apollo 14 lunar module pilot Edgar Mitchell, in a December 1972 BBC radio interview, answered in the affirmative to a caller's question as to whether or not NASA had any provisions for encountering extraterrestrials on the Moon or anyplace else in the solar system. Astronaut Gordon Cooper never claimed to have seen UFOs while in space, but testified to a United Nations committee that other astronauts had, and that he had seen them himself while still only a pilot in 1953 in Germany. "NASA and the government know very well that intelligent beings from other planets regularly visit our world to enter into discreet contact and observe us," Cooper is on record as saying. "They have an enormous amount of evidence, but have kept quiet in order not to alarm people."

The last live launch broadcast from NASA, done primarily to foster public and financial support for the Space Agency, was the Hubble repair mission on December 8, 1993. Since that time, all space transmissions have been scrambled and time delayed before release to the public. The repair shuttle photographed two rapidly moving white objects across Earth's horizon around 11:30 PM that startled the live commentator into silence. A few moments of confusion followed, the camera suddenly going fuzzy, shots of Mission Control and what was perhaps a cargo bay being shown with no word spoken before the crew of the shuttle were put on camera, all looking intently at their panels until one turned around to face the lens, smiling and saying, "You have to see this to believe it, J.T.!" Two years before, on September 15, 1991, the shuttle Discovery photographed strange glowing lights on Earth's horizon, which first slowed and stopped, then sharply changed both speed and direction in response to an unidentified flash from the lower left of the screen leaving a visible streak of light shooting through the space vacated by the central object. To all appearances, it looked like nothing less than a controlled object intelligently avoiding a hostile shot.

Mere weeks after WW II's end, the U.S. War Department secretly imported Nazi scientists in "Operation Paperclip," overseen by none other than Hitler's master spy, Reinhard Gehlen, who went on to become one of Allen Dulles' closest confederates when the CIA was formed two years later. SS elite Major Wernher Von Braun was brought to America with about 120 other German rocket scientists, lionized as one of the "100 Most Important Americans of the 20th Century" by Life magazine in 1990 for his building of the Saturn V rockets that took man to the Moon. Twenty to sixty thousand slave laborers at Von Braun's Mittelbau Dora factory died under the Nazi "extermination by work" program, with his full knowledge and unrepentant consent, building his V2 rockets that murdered about five thousand people in Belgium and Britain during the war. How could so execrable a record be sanitized as to make Von Braun a great American hero, when so many others were executed and imprisoned at Nuremberg for exactly such acts? "Can there be any justification . . . for using men who worked with conviction for a criminal system?" asked Germany's Museum for Transport and Technology, at the fiftieth anniversary of the downfall of the Third Reich. "It was as if they, had only ever thought of going to the moon," was the museum director's answer. Obviously, there had to be some practical reason for their wanting to do so.

Military involvement in space considerations has been intense from the beginning, and the suggestion made in 1994's sci-fi block buster film Stargate may not be as fictionally removed as it appears. In it, the military secretly send a nuclear device to the Egyptian planet of man's origins, in anticipation of a war with its occupants. Howard Koch, the playwright of Mercury Theatre's famous 1938 The War of the Worlds "Invasion from Mars" show, wrote in The Panic Broadcast (1970) that, "Not long ago there was a chilling prediction by an official in the American State Department. He projected a plan, which apparently his science advisors considered feasible, for launching a spaceship armed with nuclear missiles that could push the moon Phobus [sic] out of the Mars gravitational field across space and into our orbit." He suggested that the military would intend to use the satellite for a ready made orbiting defense station. But given that the government must have strongly suspected at least by the time to which Koch was referring, that Mars, and Phobos in particular, was the primary base of operations for the flying saucers visiting Earth on a regular basis, it could instead be interpreted that there may have been a more immediate and practical military reason for our probes to Phobos having been taken out by someone else's spaceships. This theory becomes all the easier to accept when it is realized that United States defense experts complained about a laser and ion emitter the Soviets had placed on Phobos 2, so powerful that they believed the Soviets were simply looking for an excuse to experiment with their own Star Wars weaponry. The ostensible reason for the probe's lethal equipment was given as the need to pulverize part of Phobos' surface for analysis of the gas that process would produce, and the dissenting experts were overruled by the White House "due to the improvement in Soviet-American relations."

What can we safely conclude from the evidence? The masses, including the vast majority of the scientific community, comfortably accept that there are no geometric anomalies on the surface of Mars at all, let alone on its moons or our own. But mathematics does not lie. It cannot. No natural formations could accidentally create precise angles and shapes, let alone relationships between objects. The faces of two Egyptian gods could not inadvertently erode into place, any more than could Mount Rushmore. A dying Pharaoh could not accidentally design his burial chamber according to mathematical correlations with the planet Mars, which in any event should have been beyond his ability to know. Rocks from the surface of a planet 34 million miles away, at its closest, some even joined together artificially in an intelligent structure, could not have gotten to Earth blown on a summer breeze.

Tricks of light and shadow do not consistently remain at 19.5 degrees, or rocks line themselves up at uniform height. And that megalithic structures of precise astronomical orientation could be identical on two separate worlds is absolutely impossible . . . unless the builders on both worlds were the same, or at the very least in contact with each other.

That coincidence could play any part in all this becomes all the more unlikely when Ian Ridpath's Journal of the British Interplanetary Society article, "Signpost to Mars," is taken into account.

Ridpath writes that the name "Cairo" was originally "El-Kahira," from the Arabic "El-Kahir" ~ which means "Mars." The city was renamed in the tenth century AD, from a word loosely translated to mean "the camp," that has the same Arabic root-stem as "Mars" ~ Masr ~ which is confirmed by J. Aldridge's Cairo: Biography of a City. Its full name, according to the Encyclopedia Americana, is Masr e1 Kahira, the latter two words translated as "the victorious." With Masr being derivative of "Mars," the meaning becomes perfectly obvious.

In addition to the overwhelming geometrical and linguistic evidence, we have Vallee's Mars correlations to take into account, which are more astounding when combined with the fact that other UFOlogists noted the major flaps of 1967 and 1973 also occurred during the closest passings of Mars to Earth. There was unquestionably a link between Mars and Earth in antiquity, and the modern UFO evidence seems to indicate as strong a link in the present, as well. What remains to be seen is if the modern astronauts, piloting craft in our skies beyond twentieth century terrestrial man's ability to construct, are the same as those from centuries past ~ and if so, to determine as much about them as possible from the ancient records in order to better understand their motives and relationship with us today.