Following DiPietro and Molenaar’s rediscovery of the lost Viking images, an independent group of scientists was organized to analyze the imagery and develop a preliminary set of hypotheses concerning the Face and other objects on Mars. Subsequent publicity of the group’s findings was not well-received by the planetary science community.

In June 1985, an article appeared in Parade Magazine entitled “The Man in the Moon” that asks the question: “Why do people see faces in eggplants, tortillas, in the Moon and the planets?” The author was Carl Sagan, a world-renowned expert on space exploration and the search for extraterrestrial life. The article written for a popular audience was a thinly veiled attack on the independent Mars investigation.

In 1963, Sagan published a paper “Direct Contact Among Galactic Civilizations by Relativistic Interstellar Spaceflight” in which he estimates the frequency of extraterrestrial visitation using the Drake equation. Based on his estimates, Sagan hypothesizes that Earth has been visited many times (perhaps hundreds of times) during geological time and possibly once during historical times. He goes on to state that “It is not out of the question that artifacts of these visits still exist, or even that some kind of base is maintained (possibly automatically) within the solar system to provide continuity for successive expeditions.”

One has to wonder what happened to Carl Sagan between 1963 and 1985. Is it possible that as his reputation as an expert in his field grew and he become a spokesperson for the mainstream scientific community, as a representative of that community he became somewhat limited in what he could say in public?

The Other Side of Carl Sagan

The previous article described our use of a computer vision algorithm known as shape from shading (aka photoclinometry) to test NASA’s claim the Face on Mars was an optical illusion. After Pat Van Hove and I published a paper describing the SFS algorithm and results for craters, mesas, and other non-controversial landforms on Mars, I began to experiment with the images of the Face. At the end of the summer I decided to share some preliminary results with Dr. Sagan.

He replied a few weeks later:

Completing our analysis, we submitted papers to Icarus, a planetary scientific journal, and to Nature. Both journals rejected the papers on grounds of “insufficient scientific interest.” A revised paper was sent to Applied Optics. After undergoing peer review, the paper was published in their May 15, 1988 issue. Soon after I sent Sagan a copy per his request:

Although Sagan was unable to participate in a film that was never made, the producers of his Cosmos series asked if I could provide some of the computer generated images of the Face we had produced using our Pixar machine for a new edition of the show. Meanwhile, a colleague of mine at TASC developed a new approach for detecting manmade objects in terrestrial imagery using fractals. Applying the technique to the Viking Orbiter data, I sent Sagan a copy of a paper we had just published in The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society that showed the Face to be the least natural object in this area on Mars.

In return he sent a copy of his paper “The recognition of extraterrestrial intelligence” published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London that used an approach remarkably similar to our fractal algorithm.

In his last two letters a couple of years later, he asked if I could provide several examples of our work for his final book The Demon Haunted World.

Although Sagan never thought the Face could be anything other than an eroded mesa he did offer this:

“Unlike the UFO phenomenon, we have here the opportunity for a definitive experiment. This kind of hypothesis is falsifiable, a property that brings it into the scientific arena. I hope that forthcoming American and Russian missions to Mars, especially orbiters with high-resolution television cameras, will make a special effort – among hundreds of other scientific questions – to look much more closely at the pyramids and what some people call the Face and the city.”

The Demon-Haunted World

The next article discusses our fractal analysis of the Face and surrounding landforms in Cydonia.