Mark Carlotto has over forty years of experience in space-related applications involving remote sensing, mapping, image processing, pattern recognition, machine learning, and related technologies. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1981 and has written over one hundred technical and scientific papers and nine books. He was an assistant adjunct professor at Boston University from 1981 to 1983 where he taught courses in computer architecture and image processing.
Outside of his occupation in the aerospace industry, Dr. Carlotto’s journey as an independent scientist began in 1985 when he first learned of the infamous Face on Mars in a newspaper article. His first book The Martian Enigmas examines the Face and other unusual objects on the Red Planet first imaged by a Viking orbiter spacecraft in 1976. His research based on a method known as shape-from-shading to analyze the 3-D structure of the Face was included by Carl Sagan in his TV series Cosmos. Dr. Carlotto’s second book The Cydonia Controversy steps back from the science of the Mars investigation examining it within the context of the centuries-old search for life beyond earth and its possible implications.
His journey took an unexpected turn in 2003 when he got lost exploring the woods in a place called Dogtown – a deserted colonial settlement in the middle of Cape Ann – an island community north of Boston. There being no detailed maps of the area, he decided to map old roads and trails, stonewalls, cellar holes, and other features using newly emerging GPS technology. His next book The Dogtown Guide, a far cry from Mars, was a field guide and history of Dogtown that received a Preservation Award from the Gloucester Historical Commission in 2007. Relating history and landscape his next book, The Island Woods published in 2012 is a three-hundred-year-long spatial history of the forested interior of Cape Ann complementing other books written about Gloucester’s well-known maritime heritage. Combining maps and genealogy data, his third book in the series The Cellars Speak offers new insight into the early settlers who lived in the woods of Cape Ann hundreds of years ago. Another book written at this time Diary of a Serial App Developer is a tongue-in-cheek autobiography of a ten-year stint moonlighting as an early iPhone app developer during this time in his career.
Dr. Carlotto’s collaboration in a study of astronomical alignments at a Native American ceremonial site published by the Massachusetts Archaeological Society in 2015 was an inkling of things to come. While planning a trip to Mexico a few years later he found the archaeological sites he hoped to visit were not aligned in any obvious way. Before Atlantis published in 2018, describes his discovery that these and other ancient sites across the world appear to have been aligned to previous locations of the North Pole, and by virtue of their alignment could be tens of thousands to more than a hundred thousand years old.
Completing a book started in the 1990s, Not of This World, released in 2021, examines historical UFO cases and recently disclosed reports of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). His analysis reveals that some UFOs/UAP are likely real, exceed known aerospace capabilities, appear to defy the laws of physics as they are currently understood, and might not be extraterrestrial in origin.
Beyond Atlantis, his latest book is the culmination of research into the lost civilizations of the world that began in Before Atlantis. Dr. Carlotto analyzes hundreds of ancient sites and proposes a new theory of ancient civilizations based on an extensive body of evidence that challenges conventional paradigms.
.