The Stargate Conspiracy (19 page)

After searching through the Viking archives, DiPietro and Molenaar found a second image (70A13) of the Cydonia region also showing the Face. This had been taken thirty-five days after the first picture, from 1,080 miles above the surface of Mars, with the feature lit from a different angle by the sun. It showed the same apparent facelike structure as the first, apparently proving that, whatever else it might be, it could not be an illusion created by a simple trick of light and shadow.

DiPietro and Molenaar discovered another seemingly significant feature on frame 70A13: what appeared to be a five-sided pyramidal structure, about 10 miles south of the Face and approximately 1.6 miles long by 1 mile wide. This has become known as the D & M Pyramid, after the two researchers. DiPietro and Molenaar were convinced that these two features, located so closely together, were not accidents of erosion or tricks of the camera, but were artificial structures, presumably erected by some long-gone Martian civilisation. They made their conclusions known to the public on 1 May 1980.

The lead in promoting DiPietro and Molenaar’s discoveries and the issue, of the Face on Mars was taken up enthusiastically — not to say fanatically - by science writer Richard C. Hoagland, who, in 1997, sent ‘independent Egyptologist’ Larry Dean Hunter off to check Thomas Danley’s discovery of secret digging in the Great Pyramid.

Born in 1946, Richard Hoagland had worked for several science museums, such as the Hayden Planetarium in New York, and was advisor or consultant on space science for several television stations, including NBC and CBS, where he worked with legendary newsman Walter Cronkite. He is also the former editor of Star & Sky magazine, and a presenter for CNN. In 1971 Hoagland, with one Eric Burgess, came up with the historic idea of decorating the side of Pioneer 10 - the first space probe to leave the solar system — with a plaque bearing representational and symbolic information about the human race, including an upraised hand of peace and a diagram showing that man comes from the third planet from the sun. Hoagland and Burgess passed on the suggestion to Carl Sagan, and after that it became history.
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Between 1975 and 1980 Hoagland was a consultant to NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Maryland, organising media events, which is where his much-repeated ‘NASA consultant’ title originated. And he was also a prime mover behind the campaign to name the first Space Shuttle
Enterprise,
something clearly of personal significance: as we will see, he also changed the name of his Mars Mission to the Enterprise Mission as a tribute to his friend Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek.
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Since first becoming involved in the Mars debate in 1983, Hoagland has become the main advocate for the presence of artificial structures on the Red Planet. He fulfils the role of self-appointed oracle of all things Martian so successfully that, to the vast majority of the public, he is now the main source of information about the Face.

When he first became interested in DiPietro & Molenaar’s work in the summer of 1983, Hoagland was working on a project concerning the rings of Saturn at SRI International at their headquarters in Menlo Park in California.
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In July 1983 he was studying DiPietro and Molenaar’s enhanced images of the Cydonia region and noticed a series of other artificial-looking features to the west of the Face. To Hoagland’s eye there seemed to be a whole complex of pyramidal and other structures, covering an area of about 12 square miles. He excitedly termed it the ‘City’. This appeared to be made up of several massive, and some smaller, pyramids, plus some much smaller conical ‘buildings’ grouped around an open space that he called the ‘City Square’. In the north-east comer of the City was an enormous structure that appears to be made up of three huge walls, which Hoagland dubbed the ‘Fortress’.

Perhaps the most significant assumption Hoagland made — and surely the one with the least justification on such slight knowledge - was his association of these features with Egypt. As soon as he discovered the City, Hoagland wrote: ‘I was reminded overwhelmingly of Egypt.’
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He then went on to identify various other features in Cydonia: the ‘Cliff, a 2-mile-long wall-like feature near a crater 14 miles directly east of the Face; and several small (250-400-foot) objects dotted about the Cydonia plain that he called ‘mounds’.

The relationship between the City and the Cliff presents a significant example of Hoagland’s characteristically circular reasoning. He surmises that the Face, which lies east of the City Square, was built so that the City’s inhabitants, standing in the Square, would see the sun rise out of the Face’s mouth on the Martian summer solstice. Although the sun does not rise there on the solstice today, because of changes in the angle of Mars’s axis over time, it did so in the past - the last time being about half a million years ago. Hoagland concludes that the Cydonia Complex was built at least 500,000 years ago because the alignment with the sun on the summer solstice proves the dating — but the dating also proves the summer solstice alignment, and so on, round and round.
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Hoagland decided to set up a project to study these features further. He approached SRI and in October 1993 met its vice-president for corporate affairs, former intelligence officer Paul Shay, at the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley, California (founded by Arthur M. Young). This was to prove a significant meeting. Shay recommended that he collaborate with Lambert Dolphin Jr, the physicist who had led SRI teams in Giza between 1973 and 1982.
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In December 1983, Hoagland and Dolphin formed the Independent Mars Mission, with $50,000 from SRI’s ‘President’s Fund’, an internal funding source under the discretion of SRI’s President, Dr William Miller. Other key people involved in the Independent Mars Mission were Randolpho Pozos (anthropologist), Ren Breck (manager of InfoMedia, the computer conference company run by the thinking person’s ufologist, Dr Jacques Vallée), Merton Davies (a specialist in the cartography of Mars and other planets) and Gene Cordell (a computer-imaging specialist). One of the first to join the new project was physicist John Brandenburg of Sandia Research Laboratories (which specialises in nuclear weapons research). He was a leading scientist in Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (‘Star Wars’) programme, and had previously worked with DiPietro and Molenaar on their analysis of Cydonia.

The first lecture given by Hoagland and Pozos on the work of the Independent Mars Mission took place at the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in early 1984. One of those present was social scientist Tom Rautenberg, who later joined the project. His initial reaction to Hoagland’s revelation about the Face is highly significant:

The involvement of SRI in anything seems enough to ring alarm bells, at least among social scientists such as Tom Rautenberg. SRI’s connections with the CIA and Defense Department experiments — such as remote viewing — are too well known to be dismissed, and their reputation obviously precedes them. And now they were funding Hoagland’s Mars Mission, after having sent Dolphin to Giza in the 1970s ...

Another early recruit to the cause was a designer and illustrator named Jim Channon, a former lieutenant colonel with the US Army, who had been stationed at the Pentagon. Channon was the creator of the ‘First Earth Battalion’, which was, in Hoagland’s words, ‘a pragmatic proposal to combine the “spiritual warrior” goals of “the New Age” with the pragmatic grounded methodology of the military services’.
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Prior to this, Channon had been a member of an Army War College project called Task Force Delta, whose purpose was, in Jim Schnabel’s words, to ‘investigate alternative philosophic realms for anything militarily useful’.
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The Independent Mars Mission - with its SRI funding and resources — lasted for seven months, until July 1984, when it presented its findings at a conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Their conclusions were that the anomalous features of Cydonia were suggestive of artificial construction, and that efforts should be made to return to Mars to study them further.
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If the features on Mars are artificial, who built them? There are three possible answers:

Hoagland, at least, was in no doubt about which one of these options he espoused.

It is important to distinguish between the two main phases of Hoagland-led research into Mars. The first, seven-month-long, SRI-backed project — the Independent Mars Mission - took place in 1983 — 4, and concluded simply that at the very least there was a good case for believing that the features were artificial. Then came Phase Two, the Mars Mission (later called the Enterprise Mission), beginning in 1988, which was more concerned with actively promoting the alleged meaning of the structures at Cydonia, and their connection with the ancient civilisations of Earth, particularly Egypt. Underlying all of Phase Two is one, over-riding message, which is that the builders of Cydonia are back...

Between July 1984 and late 1988, nothing much seems to have happened. Then came a revival of the project, with an influx of new personnel, and, it seems, a very different agenda ... There was a notably close connection between the new Mars Mission and the US intelligence community.

The new project received support and encouragement from Representative (Congressman) Robert A. Roe, who was chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Roe agreed to support Hoagland and his team in their lobbying of NASA to rephotograph Cydonia in any subsequent Mars missions. (The official line from NASA was that it would not be making a special point of photographing the Face or other alleged structures again as it did not deem them worthy of notice.) Roe took the Mission’s side in its battle with NASA, even speaking to Hoagland quite explicitly about what he believed to be NASA’s ‘agenda’ in opposing the idea of a civilisation on Mars.
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Roe was clearly on Hoagland’s side and not NASA’s — which was very strange, considering that the Congressional Committee of which he was chairman had direct responsibility for NASA’s budget, and ‘oversight’ responsibility - and therefore major influence - over its policies and plans.
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Roe, it should be noted, was also a member of the Congressional Permanent Committee on Intelligence.
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In January 1991, nearly two years after his key meeting with Hoagland and other members of the Mission, Roe abruptly resigned from the Science, Space and Technology Committee, causing Hoagland to suggest that this was part of some conspiracy. Was Roe being ‘leaned on’ by some group whose interests he was failing to serve? Perhaps significantly, however, he remained on the Intelligence Committee.

The key members of the new project were David M. Myers, Erol Torun and Mark J. Carlotto. This trio introduced several new elements into the story, carrying the original ‘Message of Cydonia’ - that the ancient Martian civilisation has something to teach us now - into something much bigger and more far-reaching.

Dr Mark J. Carlotto is the manager of the intelligence section of The Analytical Science Corporation (TASC) in Massachusetts, and had been working on the Cydonia images since 1985, enhancing the interpretation of satellite photographs for defence and intelligence agencies, skills that were obviously of great use to the Mars Mission. Carlotto used a variety of image-enhancement techniques and processes on the Face to produce clearer images than those of DiPietro and Molenaar. He highlighted new — highly controversial - details, such as teeth in the mouth and the presence of a second eye socket on the shadowed side, thus apparently confirming the symmetry of the Face. His work also revealed what appeared to be distinct bands and lines on the forehead that some have taken to be a headdress, similar to those of the Egyptian pharaohs - which certainly seems to be running ahead of the available scientific data by miles.

Carlotto also enhanced other Cydonian features, most significantly the D & M Pyramid. It was his version of this, which had a much greater clarity of detail than DiPietro and Molenaar’s original, that enabled Erol Torun — a systems analyst with the Defense Mapping Agency in Washington, DC, whom Hoagland described as being ‘on loan’ to his private Mars Mission
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— to make calculations based on the angles between the different faces of the pyramids. His contribution to the Mars Mission was his study of the geometrical relationships in and between the various Cydonian ‘structures‘, particularly the D & M Pyramid. He concluded that not only did the geometry show that they were artificial but that they also encoded certain sophisticated mathematical concepts that appeared to be trying to ‘tell us something’.
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David Myers, who joined the team in 1989 and became full-time director of operations and editor of its journal, Martian
Horizons,
made further contributions to the discoveries about the significance of the geometry of Cydonia. (Together with his British colleague David S. Percy, he would add a whole new dimension to this work.)