The Stargate Conspiracy (22 page)

The angles Erol Torun claimed to have found in the D & M Pyramid provide most of the basis for the decoding of the Message of Cydonia. What he claims to have found is in itself highly debatable: a five-sided pyramid that he managed to discern from an enhanced image of a partly eroded feature half in shadow. All the measurements have to be treated with caution, so any conclusions based on them must, at the very outside, be highly speculative. (The Mars Global Surveyor has not, unfortunately, re-imaged the D & M Pyramid yet.) In fact, Torun himself admits that there is an unknown margin of error in the Viking images - which makes his whole case for precise geometric relationships completely redundant.
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Another prime mover in the Mars Mission is the British award-winning film photographer David S. Percy, who was appointed European director of operations by Hoagland (although they have since had a disagreement and no longer work together). In this capacity Percy enthusiastically promoted the Message of Cydonia in the United Kingdom and other European countries. He also produced the video of Hoagland’s address at the United Nations. Percy has lectured widely in Britain on the Cydonia — Mars connection, using state-of-the-art computer graphics to illustrate his points. Like Hoagland, whose media background enables him to present his ideas in a relaxed and professional manner, Percy uses his skills as a film producer to excellent effect. His images of Cydonia surpass even the earlier enhancements for clarity and sharpness. In particular, the all important D & M Pyramid — so crucial for the ‘decoding’ of the alleged geometrical and mathematical message - appears as a clearly defined feature, with the original blurred edges now in such sharp focus that they almost seem to be etched into the Martian landscape. In his lectures, Percy describes these images as being Mark Carlotto’s - but he adds vaguely that they have undergone ‘further enhancement and rectification in London recently’.
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He gives no details of this process, but when we asked what he had meant, he admitted that he had done it himself.
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Although professionals who have worked with the images of Cydonia — such as DiPietro, Molenaar and Mark Carlotto — have published detailed technical descriptions of the process they used, Percy has not obliged.

Percy added a new connection to the enigma. Hoagland had already noted the similarity between Silbury Hill — the largest manmade mound in Europe, which lies just south-west of Avebury in Wiltshire in England - and one of the Cydonian features called the ‘Tholus’, or Spiral Mound. In the library of his luxurious London flat, while looking at an aerial photograph of Avebury, Percy then experienced a great revelation, which he describes (somewhat mysteriously) as ‘far memory’.
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His newly inspired eye suddenly noted that the great circle of ditch and earthen rampart that encloses its standing stones was a representation of nothing less than the large crater in Cydonia! He went on to demonstrate that the Avebury circle and Silbury Hill lie in the same relative positions as the Cydonia crater and Martian Spiral Mound — if the latter is scaled down by a factor of 14:1.

Percy and David Myers (the Mars Mission’s director of operations, and later co-author with Percy of a book called
Two-Thirds),
worked on this correlation and concluded that the Avebury complex had been deliberately laid out, some 5,000 years ago, as an ‘analogue’ of Cydonia. Percy claims that maps of the two areas, appropriately scaled up or down, can be superimposed over each other to reveal a perfect match.

Perhaps not unexpectedly, problems arise with this hypothesis. The only real correlation between Avebury and Cydonia is the relative position and size of two features, the crater/Avebury circle and the Spiral Mound/Silbury Hill. Even then the match is not perfect. When scaled down and superimposed, the crater is smaller than, and not the same shape as, the Avebury circle. Percy also claims correlations between other features that are even less persuasive. For example, the D & M Pyramid’s Avebury analogue is a certain tumulus surrounded by a grove of trees. In fact it fails totally to match its alleged Martian counterpart, not corresponding in size, shape or relative position with the D & M Pyramid. In any case there are many similar tumuli in the area. No other Cydonian features are ‘analogued’ at Avebury, although Percy makes much of odd indentations, lumps and bumps in the ground that he finds at the approximate position of the City on Mars. None of these are at all convincing. But there is one spectacular omission: there is no analogue of the Face at Avebury. Could it be that nothing could be found at Avebury - even by forcing the data to fit - to even vaguely remind us of the location and features of the Face, so it has been quietly forgotten?

In fact, only two features of Avebury correspond to any at Cydonia: the earthwork circle and Silbury Hill. It seems odd that an analogue of Cydonia, built on Earth, should centre on reproducing a natural feature of Cydonia - the crater - while not including the many supposedly artificial features. Finally, many landmarks of the Avebury complex have no analogue in Cydonia, the most obvious being West Kennet Long Barrow. Yet despite all these discrepancies and convoluted hypothesising, Hoagland incorporated Percy’s ‘discovery’ of the Cydonia-Avebury connection into his United Nations lecture.

Another area that greatly excites Hoagland, Percy, Myers and their colleagues is the vexed subject of crop circles. They maintain that these ‘transtime crop glyphs’, as they prefer to call them, contain geometrical and mathematical ‘codes’ that duplicate, and reinforce, the Message of Cydonia. By linking the builders of Cydonia with this very visible, yet enigmatic, modern phenomenon, Hoagland is effectively saying that the Martian builders are still around, and are active on Earth now. He describes ‘the fact that someone -
demonstrably not from Earth
— is now attempting to drive home the “Message of Cydonia” as a “message in the crops”, before our very eyes right here on Earth!’
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One particular crop formation is given pride of place in the work of Hoagland and Percy because it incorporates tetrahedral geometry: the Barbary Castle formation, which appeared in a Wiltshire field in 1991. This ‘crop glyph’ was even featured in Hoagland’s UN lecture because, he claimed, it includes geometrical features that match some of the code of Cydonia. If this were true, it would confirm not only the terrestrial connection, but also the return of the builders of Cydonia. Hoagland in particular invests great personal belief in the ‘They’re Back’ interpretation of this formation, in which he and his team claim to have identified some of the same key angles they detected in the plan of Cydonia. David Percy goes even further, managing to overlay the Barbary Castle pattern on Avebury, to demonstrate how its geometry was used as the. plan for the layout of the roads!

Whatever the truth about crop circles in general, there seems little doubt that this one is a hoax or - as many of the circlemakers themselves tend to think of it - a work of art. The inspiration for the design is actually known. It is not a specially constructed design to encode some of the secrets of hyperdimensional physics, but is based on a design in a sixteenth-century alchemical treatise by Steffan Michelspacher,
Cabala, speculum artis et naturae in alchymia.
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The identity of the makers is well known among the confraternity of circlemakers, and the
modus operandi
has already been described by Rob Irving, a writer, photographer and occasional circlemaker. Irving told us:

With just a few simple implements and the application of some basic geometrical rules, such a formation could be made ‘within a couple of hours’, he said.

The formation wasn’t even executed with any finesse: there are kinks in some of the lines and mistakes in the geometry. Significantly, Hoagland and Percy actually use the errors in their reconstruction of the grand design of this pattern!
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So what is the Message of Cydonia, according to Hoagland? He says:

It seems, certainly in Hoagland’s case, that data - itself by no means conclusive - has been forced to fit his preconceived ideas that somehow involves both Martian anomalies and the monuments of ancient Egypt. The most significant part of this scenario is the idea that there is a ‘Message’ somehow essential to mankind’s present and immediate future. But why? Where does this belief originate?

There are only two possible reasons for these ideas: entirely spurious notions have been superimposed on a genuine mystery in order to give them an apparent feasibility; or the proponents of these ideas somehow knew, or thought they knew, in advance that these connections exist.

Perhaps the release of this information is an exercise in deception, or in ‘softening up’ the public to accept certain ideas, even to the point of promoting those ideas when the facts (as currently known) do not support them. There seems to us to be an air of desperation to make us believe, whether we want to or not and whether the evidence fits or not. And that is worrying.

With all of its monumental implications for our understanding of Man’s recent past
and
our immediate future — the ‘radical new technologies’ it promises and the implicit suggestion that the builders of Cydonia are about to return, if they have not already — the Message of Cydonia promoted primarily by Hoagland is not supported by the evidence. Clearly, it has been deliberately grafted on to what is, admittedly, a very intriguing enigma, in much the same way that Hancock and Bauval have grafted the date of 10,500 BCE on to the genuine ancient Egyptian mysteries.

The way that the Martian enigmas are being promoted by the likes of Hoagland presents a striking parallel to certain investigations of ancient Egypt. The common features of both are:

We have noted that Hoagland’s work appears to fall into two distinct phases: the first, backed by SRI in 1983 — 4, was concerned with promoting the idea of the existence of a very ancient civilisation on Mars. But, since 1989, the second phase has been about the ‘Message’, the connection with humanity’s own ancient history and our present and future.

Was Phase One, as social scientist Tom Rautenberg thought at first, in fact a sociological experiment to determine public reaction to the concept of life on Mars? And then did someone realise that the Mars material could be used more effectively to put across another message, part of a separate but interlinking agenda?

Another motive may have lain behind the 1983 — 4 SRI-backed project. The Iron Curtain was still in place and the attendant suspicions of Soviet plotting was very strong: the Eastern Bloc countries were perceived to be keeping many secrets very close to their chests. Perhaps Hoagland/SRI’s Phase One was an attempt to draw out of the Soviets their knowledge or suspicions about Mars. It is certainly a curious coincidence that, within a month of the Boulder conference at which Hoagland announced his initial findings, the Russian English-language propaganda newspaper, Soviet Weekly, carried an article by Vladimir Avinsky on his research into what he termed ‘the Martian Sphinx’ and ‘pyramids’.
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Hoagland and his team then tried to establish a line of communication with the Soviet Academy of Sciences to exchange data on the subject. Significantly, their intermediary in this was Jim Hickman of the Soviet Exchange Program of the Esalen Institute in California (of which more later).
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