PAGE 3

     At about the same time that Toby Owen saw the Face and said, "Gee whiz, isn't that weird," a man named Richard C. Hoagland, who would later become an integral part in this investigation, was a member of the JPL press corps which was covering the Viking Mission for American Way Magazine.  Viking Project Scientist Dr. Gerald Soffen showed them The Face and said, "Isn't it peculiar what tricks of lighting and shadow can do.  When we took a picture a few hours later, it all just went away; it was a trick, just the way the light fell on it."  Mr. Hoagland accepted the explanation at the time.  

     Three years later, Vincent DiPietro, saw The Face in a publication that claimed to be a journal of extraterrestrial archaeology.  

He immediately dismissed it as a hoax, and accepted NASA's explanation as well.  Mr. DiPietro is an electrical engineer with 14 years of experience in digital electronics and image processing.  He also designed, built, tested, and ran the digital image recorders for the Landsat and Nimbus programs for the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center.

     2 1/2 years later while leafing through archived NASA photos in the National Space Science Data Center at the Goddard Spaceflight center, in Greenbelt Maryland, he once again found The Face in frame 35A72.  This time he sought more information but found nothing other than the frame's description, "oddity of light and shading."  

     Vince showed the image to his colleague, Greg Molenaar a computer scientist with a similar background to DiPietro, and he was also intrigued.  He suggested they work together in a private space research effort.  And so they did.

     DiPietro and Molenaar brought their computer skills to enhance the telemetry, using many of the same techniques that NASA uses, which today have become standard technology for similar applications.  Processes that allow the altering of contrast, removing errors from the original transmission, end even improving detail to a limited degree.  But to prove that the object was a real three-dimensional structure on the surface, they needed a second photograph of the object, lit from a different angle.

     One of the reasons for NASA's initial dismissal of The Face, was the lack of corroborating evidence, or a second photograph.  However NASA's official position was that images made of the area a few hours later revealed only an ordinary mesa.

     Fortunately, science does not depend on authority for its findings.  DiPietro and Molenaar correctly ignored Dr. Soffen's assertions, and searched through the entire Viking data set, number-by-number, frame-by-frame.  They eventually found, misfiled, frame 70A13, which was taken not a few hours later, but 35 days later of the area in question.  The picture was taken with a lighting change of 20 degrees, and from a different spacecraft angle allowing for a comparative stereo of the mesa and the surrounding areas.  

     The Face does not disappear under a change of a 10 to 37 degree sun angle.  The facial features do not disappear.  

     Incidentally, a picture could not have been taken a few hours after the original as Dr. Soffen asserts, because the picture that would have been taken a few hours later, would have been taken in total darkness, after night had fallen in that particular area of the surface.  

     The following points are some of the things that Vince and Greg discovered about The Face.  The Face is a mile long, and over three times taller than the Great Pyramid.  One of the arguments against the artificiality of The Face, is that people tend to see the face of God in a mountainside, or the face of Jesus in a tortilla chip.  What's interesting about this face and separates it from those sorts of instances, is that it has a 98 % bilateral symmetry.  Meaning it has a right half, and a left half and is seen in a full frontal view.  Most faces that occur in nature are either profiles, or where if you change your view by moving one way or another the face disappears.

     They also found where the other eye should be, the brow also seemed to conform to the geometry of a human face, as did the nose and mouth.  Image enhancements of the second frame brought out more details.  The researchers found a distinct chin, and a hairline.  Even more intriguing were the following discoveries.

      In the mouth, researchers saw what appeared to be "teeth" as can be seen here.  

     In the eye, there appeared to be an iris, and by using contrast controlled prints one could discern a pupil within the iris.  

     In addition to this, what appeared to be some kind of headdress seemed to display regularly spaced lateral stripes.  

     This is when Mark Carlotto came into the picture.  

Mark Carlotto attended Carnegie Mellon University, receiving his Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering in 1981.  Dr. Carlotto has over twenty years of experience in digital image processing and satellite remote sensing, and has held a variety of positions in academia and industry.  He has published over 60 technical and scientific papers in the field of his expertise, including several on anomalous phenomena.

     Dr. Carlotto decided to do a three dimensional reconstruction of The Face.  He did this two ways.

First, with Stereoscopy, comparing two images shot at different angles

Second, Photoclinometry, or Shape From Shading  

     Both methods provided similar results.  Using the 3-D framework, he could then view The Face from different angles to see if it would still look like a face at those angles; it did.  He then checked his results by changing his lighting direction.  Using the frame 35A72 image, he instructed his computer to imitate the sun angle from the 70A13 frame.  The image looked like the real frame.  He then reversed the process by changing the lighting angle of the 70A13 frame, to match the sun angle of 35A72.  Again it matched.  

     So it seemed that they were in fact dealing with a real 3 dimensional object, not a trick of light and shadow.

     In 1981 Richard C. Hoagland, was in the course of following up new leads on a collection of small satellites on the edges of Saturn's rings for an article he was writing.  

Richard C. Hoagland is a former museum space science curator, a former NASA consultant, and during the Apollo Missions to the Moon, was science advisor to Walter Cronkite and CBS News.  In the mid 1960's, he was nominated for a Peabody Award.  Mr. Hoagland, along with Eric Burgess, suggested to Carl Sagan the placement of a message from mankind plaque aboard the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, in the early 1970's.  Carl Sagan acknowledged this in the journal, SCIENCE (175[1972], 881).  Hoagland was the first to postulate theories regarding deep ocean life underneath the crust of ice, on the Jovian moon of Europa, published in Star and Sky magazine in 1980, and was the first to propose a Martian sea in his Mars Tidal Model.  In 1992, Mr. Hoagland was awarded the International Angstrom Medal for Excellence in Science, by the Angstrom Foundation in Stockholm Sweden.  

     Mr. Hoagland recalled having seen DiPietro and Molenaar's image enhancement techniques, and contacted them to see what could be done with the Saturn images from Voyager.  They responded by sending several copies of the image enhancement work they had done on The Face.

     Hoagland began to look more closely at The Face.  He became intrigued and immediately involved himself in the investigation.  He decided what the investigation needed next, was an artistic analysis of the Face.  He felt that there are established mathematical proportions for human images.  Ratios of the distances between the forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, and chin, that is evident in art from around the world.

     Jim Channon was the first artist to answer Hoagland's need.  Mr. Channon is a concept designer and illustrator with training in anthropology.  He's served as a consultant to many of the nation's largest corporations such as AT&T.  He was also formerly a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army and was stationed at the Pentagon.

     This is the summery of the results of his analysis:

"1) Facial Proportions:

     The artist uses classical proportions when constructing the human face.  The physical anthropologist recognizes a set of classic proportions that relate facial features in predictable ways.  The features on The Face on Mars falls within conventions established by these two disciplines.

2) The Supporting Structure

     The platform supporting the Face has its own set of classical proportions as well.  Having four sets of parallel lines circumscribing sloped areas of equal size, at right angles to each other, creates a symmetrical geometric rectangle.  These support structures alone suggest a piece of consciously designed architecture.

Conclusion:

     There is overwhelming evidence that the structure revealed in the photographs is a consciously created monument typical of archaeology left to us by our predecessors."  

     Another artist recruited by Hoagland, sculptor Kynthia, independently came up with results similar to Carlotto's shape from shading techniques.  

     Now, if The Face were the only anomalous object in the Cydonia region, it would be very easy to dismiss it as a freak of nature.  But it's not alone.