From: UFO UpDates - Toronto 
 for ; Tue, 14 Apr 1998 09:03:23 -0400 (EDT)
The Toronto Star, Sunday, April 12, 1998
Context Section, p.F8
Mars Loses Face With New Photo
It was a long time coming, but finally, 22 years after it was
first seen, the famous "face" on Mars has been revealed in enough
detail to show what it really is a rumpled kilometre-wide
plateau of rock.
Not that this comes as much of a surprise to Mars experts who
long ago pointed out that the Cydonia sector of Mars where the
face is located is littered with similarly sized eroded plateaus,
known as mesas, a geologic feature familiar to anyone who  has
travelled the U.S. southwest. One of the mesas on Mars happens
to look like a face under certain sun-angle lighting conditions.
Those conditions prevailed back in 1976 when the Viking Orbiter
spacecraft was mapping Mars looking for a smooth touchdown site
for the Viking lander.
The Viking Orbiter image shows the face feature illuminated from
above the right forehead'. The Mars Global Surveyor image is
illuminated from the opposite direction, from below the left side
of the chin.
But the main difference is that the new picture takes advantage
of two decades of technological progress and is more than 10
times sharper. The eye sockets, mouth and nose are not smooth, as
in the Viking image, but rough and irregular in their details as
would be expected of an eroded natural rock formation.
The new image was taken from an altitude of 444 kilometres using
the 3500mm focal length f10 telescopic camera on board the Mars
Global Surveyor spacecraft, which has been orbiting the red
planet since last September. The scene shows features as small as
a house.
Two decades ago, the apparently symmetrical and strikingly
humanoid appearance of the feature in the Viking image got some
researchers wondering if it might be the product of alien
intelligence rather than a natural feature. In the spirit of
scientific inquiry, this group of four scientists and engineers
concluded in 1982 that the face might be the artefact of
extraterrestrial intelligence. The late Carl Sagan noted the
unusual nature of the feature and suggested that it should be a
high-priority target for the next spacecraft mission to Mars.
Although the majority of Mars experts rejected any possibility
that the feature could be anything but a natural formation, the
Mars-face question ballooned into a field day for supermarket
tabloids ("Elvis' face found on Mars") and conspiracy theorists
who insist that NASA is concealing images that prove that the
face was built by aliens.
With this background, NASA took extraordinary measures to use the
Mars Global Surveyor to get a high-resolution shot of the face as
soon as possible, and to make sure it was released to the public
immediately to deflect accusations of a cover-up. Although
nothing will convince the most rabid conspiracy theorists, the
clarity of the Mars Global Surveyor picture has finally put this
controversy to rest.
--- Terence Dickinson is editor of Skynews magazine and the
author of several guidebooks for backyard astronomers.
[And astronomy commentator for The Discovery Canada satellite
 channel]
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