With Mars Images, NASA Says: Face It, It's a Mesa
 04/07/98
 The Washington Post
  NASA scientists yesterday wiped the "face" off Mars and with it, the belief
in some quarters that it was the remnant of an ancient Martian civilization.
  At least they hope they did.
  More than 20 years ago, one of the U.S. Viking space probes took a
photograph of what appeared to some people to be a monumental sculpture of a
humanoid face, staring skyward from a hilly desert region of Mars known as
Cydonia. Since then, the Martian "sphinx" has generated tabloid headlines,
true believers and questions. For some, its stony stare carried intimations
of intelligent beings at work on the Red Planet and led more recently to "X-
Files"-style suspicions of a U.S. government conspiracy to keep this
knowledge from the public.
  NASA yesterday released images taken over the weekend by the Mars Global
Surveyor spacecraft, which is orbiting the Red Planet on a mapping mission.
The pictures show the same site in 10 times the detail and with the sun
shining from the opposite direction, compared with the 1976 image.
  It's a mesa, scientists have concluded, once again. And the only sculptor
at work there is nature. "There will always be a few die-hards, but I think
the American people will look at this and wonder what all the fuss was about,
" said Surveyor chief scientist Arden L. Albee of the California Institute of
Technology.
  "Anyone who has flown in an airplane will recognize that this is natural,"
rather than an artificially constructed feature, he added. "You could see
[something like it] in many places on a flight from Washington to L.A. It's
not an unusual feature."
  Albee said the new images, taken from 276 miles above the surface, confirm
previous NASA analysis indicating that the "face" is actually a natural rock
formation, an isolated mesa where ridges and gullies cast shadows. The
illusion of human features was produced by the combination of light and
shadow that prevailed when the original Viking picture was taken on a July
day in 1976.
  The first Surveyor image of the region, which NASA posted on a Web site in
midafternoon (East Coast time), was a dark rectangle with a muddle of lighter
shapes, including what appear to be small impact craters, at the location
where the mile-wide face had appeared in the Viking image. Subsequently, NASA
posted clearer versions of the image.
  Groups that believe in the "Case for the Face" (the name of a recent
publication that compiles 18 research papers on the issue) plan exhaustive
analysis of the new images in coming days and weeks, said Stephen Bassett, of
the Paradigm Research Group, a consultant for leading advocates of the theory
that the face is the unnatural product of intelligent activity. "There are
many layers to this. This is going to be analyzed to death," he said.
  In addition to extremely close scrutiny of the photos for such signatures
of artificiality as repeating patterns not found in nature (fractal 
nalysis),
 pro-face groups plan online chats and interviews with experts. The new NASA
images will be a topic of discussion at gatherings such as the 10th annual
Ozark UFO conference in Eureka Springs, Ark., which begins Friday.
  The supposed face has attracted the attention of engineers, computer
specialists and others with technical training, including some NASA contract
employees.
  But some of the more extreme speculation has frustrated mainstream
scientists. Some face partisans have claimed to find a city to the southwest
of the face, complete with temples, fortifications and monuments with an
astronomical orientation.
  And some have accused NASA of a vast coverup that included faking the
costly August 1993 failure of the $1 billion Mars Observer spacecraft just as
it arrived at Mars, so the agency could study the face covertly. NASA
scientists have consistently dismissed such a scenario as not only outrageous
but unnatural, against their own self-interest and, in any case, impossible
to pull off.
  NASA's latest attempt to resolve the controversy goes only part of the
distance for true believers.
  "The real issue is, `What's the next photo,' " Bassett said.
  "We're all waiting for them to take the city itself."
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