What’s the whole deal with the NASA-leaked photos of the pyramids on mars? I’m sure it’s all BS but I’m curious. I just heard on the radio about it today and someone was saying how Carl Sagan was associated with the theory somehow.
Hmm…
The only Mars pyramid - Carl Sagan link I am aware of comes from his book “The Demon-Haunted World : Science As a Candle in the Dark”. He is remarking on the fact that people find faces in everything, as partial explanation for the “face on mars” phenomenon. Also noted was the fact that a Mars photo showed what appeared to be well formed pyramids. The next few paragraphs are a discussion of erosion and people wanting to find the touch of intelligence, when sundry natural forces are actually at work. Excellent book, btw.
You can find what I call “the loony view” here. The site has pictures.
Here is a scientific answer from NASA.
Questions and Answers about Mars terrain and geology
click on the link labelled “Pyramidal formations on Mars”
Another site, that seems convinced these formations point to intelligent life, has this to say
from the original radio show, i heard that Sagan was in line to get a Nobel Prize, but that after saying those remarks he didn’t get it. is there any truth to that?
Rice:
Which category did your radio show say Sagan was in line for?
Nobel prizes are awarded for Literature, Physics, Chemistry, Peace, Economics, and Physiology & Medicine. That’s all.
I don’t think the late doctor qualified for any of those. Besides, it is hardly injurious to the Scientific Establishment for someone to say “I haven’t made up my mind yet, let’s look closer.”
Art Bell is not a reliable source for anything.
I looked at the “pyramid” photos. They look more-or-less conical, not flat-sided like a pyramid. Hey, wait a minute! Maybe Mt. Shasta is actually a pyramid! Like the Martian “pyramids”, it’s also conical and totally unlike a pyramid!
As for the “face”, I have a book about Mars that has two pictures of it. In one, it does look like a face. In the other, taken at a different time of day, it looks nothing like a face. It looks like a mesa.
Nonsense. He is a quite reliable source of amusement.
One of the main bellowers for this particular fire is Richard Hoagland. I read an excerpt of his book, which I think is titled The Case for the Face on Mars (or something similar), in Analog back in the 80’s. You have to hand it to this guy: he, at least, is completely convinced. He maps out the site using the two pictures the Viking project provided, claims that there are curious whole-number ratios involving the distance from the “face” to the “city” and other “artifacts” and all sorts of other neat, but borderline ridiculous, stuff.
One of the more interesting things that Hoagland claims is that the “face” had a mountainous wall behind it that would perform a curious optical illusion. He claims that from the “city” at sunset, the darkened “face” would be silhouetted against the sunset lit mountain backdrop, in profile. This dude should have been an attorney.
Sadly, the images from our latest mapping mission fail to confirm Hoagland’s claims. The resolution of the pictures from the Viking Orbiter missions was far poorer than the resolution of our current observer satellite. The new shots show what Sagan predicted: it is a random geological structure with a crater or two in it that forms a face at a particular angle at a particular time of day. But thanks to NASA’s chronic underfunding, Mr. Hoagland nevertheless managed to make a long and successful career from two relayed photographs and a commendable imagination.
Sure, it doesn’t look much like a Face now, after the three “lost” probes and the rover got through with it…
Yeah, Nasa’s like a good thug.
I have poured over the old and new photos of this region of Mars and am leaning towards the belief that intelligent life was once on the Red Planet.
Nasa’s recently released heavily cropped photos are a joke.
The Face never convinced me, but did intrigue me enough to investigate the whole Caledonian valley. The number of symetrical, immense, half buried structures is somewhat disturbing. We have found nothing like this on our planet or moon. It does not appear to be natural.
We may have to wait awhile to find out for sure, what with Don Knotts designing the probes and all. With the technology we currently have, there is no excuse not to have two dozen robotic explorers creeping all over the planet, collecting samples, gathering data, and anally probing everything they come across.
If we prove those structures are not natural, everything is changed and everything must be questioned.
You mean like the Giants’ Causeway?
Hell-Lo! Even the ancients knew that Finn McCool and his Ulster Warriors created the causeway! I’m talking about natural formations here. Get with the program.
Sagan never liked to make unfounded conclusions. Despite being a skeptic in a lot of matters, he was always open to possibilities until they were disproven. Read Demon-Haunted World.
There was some disapproval from the science community toward Sagan. Various reasons I have heard include that he was so good at communicating to the lay person, and actually devoted time to that, while the attitude of most scientists was more internally focused to the scientific community. Maybe. Another factor was Sagan’s diverse knowledge. He wasn’t just a specialist in one field, but would jump fields, become immersed in the new one, and then contribute something stellar to the state of affairs. So while most scientists are good in their one field of study, Sagan was good in many fields. Thus professional jealousy comes into play. Another factor was Sagan’s professional arrogance. While being eternally patient and understanding with lay people, he could be rather harsh and abbrasive to other scientists. I do not know if he was ever up for a Nobel prize, though.
The “pyramids” on Mars do show what looks like flat faced symmetry, 4 or 5 sided objects. Now go look around the desert and look at the natural shapes that evolve there - they take on remarkably similar shapes. It has been suggested that was the inspiration for the Egyptian pyramids - the right shape to withstand eons of weathering and not crumble or wear away.
Sake Samurai said:
Oh, brother.
And you’re qualified to say this because…?
Just one excuse - funding. Tell Congress to ante up, then we’ll get those rovers going.
True. Now go about proving that. If we show they are natural, then will you shut up about “NASA conspiracies”?
Oh, by the way, who exactly do you think is going to prove that one way or the other? Oh, say, the astronauts who eventually go to Mars, working for, I don’t know, perhaps NASA?
Touched a nerve, there, did I? You’re obviously deep within the blackest folds of the Conspiracy.
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My thug comment was a joke in reference to the good doctor’s line. You should try the “joke” concept sometime. Trust me, you’ll feel much better. Just remove the steel rod you’re sitting on, relax and having a good belly laugh. Tou can do it!
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I’m qualified to comment on doctored NASA photos because my doctoral thesis was: Photographic Manipulation and Computerised Enhancement and Artificial/Natural Masking on Planets and Planetoids.
That’s why because, you little big-headed, red-faced drunk.
- Funding, schmunding. One word: SeaLaunch
We do not level personal insults in General Questions. Knock it off or take it to the Pit.
Just trying to find out if you still read my posts, manhattan - 
I’m touched.
As my profile will tell anyone who cares to read it, I am a Photo Lab tech in an Aerial Photographic Lab. We use aerial photography to make maps for many purposes, from map-making to highway design to disaster relief funding studies. Right now, we are creating the photos of airfields in Tennessee for a pilot’s guidebook.
The only difference between orbital photography & aerial photography is the altitude from which they are taken.
In 1999, I personally processed over 52,000 aerial photos.
I’ve seen all kinds of strange stuff on the prints. One photo, taken from a helicoptere at 800 feet, actually showed the smoke trail from a cigar or cigarette thrown from the window of a car on the interstate. (This is, I concede, unique in my experience; & conditions were ideal.)
The Mars “face” & “pyramids” are pure BS; nothing more. Just a trick of the shadows; I’ve seen cr*p like this a thousand times.
Get therapy, Samurai.
Irishman typed:
Just like any good skeptic. A skeptic is a person who doesn’t accept something without proof. With no proof that the face is artificial, a skeptic does not accept that it is artificial. With no proof that it is natural, a skeptic likewise does not accept that it is natural. If you think about it, “skeptical” means the same thing as “open-minded”.
There’s a pocket book in most of the bookstores around here called The Mars Mystery by Charles Hapgood. Hapgood has several books out - Footprints of the Gods, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings. He’s a serious academic who enjoys questioning conventional scholarship. I don’t think he should be taken too seriously but it’s fun stuff and intellectually stimulating.
Hapgood believes the pyramids and sphinx in Egypt were laid out more than ten thousand years ago and are sending a message. I think one of the messages he thinks the ancients are sending is that a catastrophic meteor shower occurs every 35 thousand years or so. He also believes an ancient race sailed all over the world in prehistoric times and mapped the coast of Antarctica before it was covered in ice. As I say, it’s not to be taken too seriously but it is very thought provoking.
In his Mars book he says that Mars suffered a huge collision with an astral object that shattered its crust and blew off its atmosphere. Apparently the half of Mars on the side away from the impact site is about a kilometer thicker than the impacted half, from the crust shifting at impact. Then he goes on to observe patterns in the fractured breccia. There’s photos in the book. Around the “face”, which he thinks wears an Egyptian headdress, he also sees a “fort”, and a city. He plays around a lot with numbers and geometry to make obscure points. I call this the “and the two points can be joined by a perfectly straight line!” school of thought. Anyway, I have trouble visualizing the construction of a fort with walls a kilometer high or a face the size of a mountain, irregardless of the remarkable Inca stone works in the Earthly Andes.
After the most recent NASA photos showed the face to be undoubtedly an optical illusion I traded the book in at the used book store. But it was fun to read.
Another very entertaining book by a similar marginalized academic is Ancient Traces - Mysteries in Ancient and Early History by Michael Baigent. He tries to stir up all kinds of academic doo-doo with stuff like a photo of 100 million year old rock with dinosaur and human footprints overlapping. The chapter arguing against the theory of evolution from a totally non-religious perspective is alone worth the price of the book.
These guys, I suppose, should be considered nuts but they are right about one thing - conventional academic authority should be questioned and challenged and minds should be kept open. They won’t revolutionize human history but there are some real gems in their arguments.
If you are truly interested in the “structures” on Mars the “Mars Mystery” book is probably the best presented argument for artificial constructions. Unfortunately the truth is that they are just angular chunks of fractured rock.