Blood On Mars http://www.strieber.com
The first time that I came across a possible hidden government policy devoted to concealing evidence of
extraterrestrials was in 1984. Early that summer, Dr. John Gliedman, whom I had then known for about a year, showed
me a photograph that appeared to be of a gigantic sculpture staring up from a desert.
My first thought was that aerial archaeology had uncovered an incredible find in the Sahara or the Gobi or
somewhere. But the image had been discovered some years before by two NASA scientists, Vince DiPietro and Greg Molnaar, in the data that the Viking orbiter had returned from Mars.
Staring up from Mars' Cydonia Plain was the haunting image of what appeared to be a human face. I was well aware of NASA's early expectations regarding the possibility of finding extraterrestrial artifacts as we expanded into the solar
system, and of the policies it planned to follow when this happened.
In 1960 NASA had co-operated with the Brookings Institution to publish a report that said, "many cosmologists
and astronomers think it very likely that there is intelligent life in many other solar systems...artifacts left at some point in time by these life forms might possibly be discovered through
our space activities." Carl Sagan had theorized in a 1963 paper that probability theory suggests that our solar system is likely to have been visited an average of once every ten thousand years by space-traveling civilizations.
So I thought that NASA would be ecstatic that these images had been uncovered in the mountain of data sent back by the Viking Orbiter.
NASA, as it turned out, would not deal with the pictures. They had rejected them as a trick of light. This
perplexed me, since the importance attached to finding the remains of a non-human culture obviously mandated taking every chance that presented itself, no matter how long the odds.
In the years between 1960 and 1984, however, a great deal had changed at NASA. The most important evolution was
that the space shuttle program had brought the agency into direct and extensive co-operation with the military.
In the 1960s, the notion that alien visits had probably taken place in the past was a commonplace of science. If
artifacts had turned up, nobody would have been surprised. On the contrary, they would have felt the same elation that I experienced when I gazed at the Mars face.
By 1984, however, virtually the entire planetary science community was marching to the military band: we are
alone here, we have always been alone, and there are no artifacts of intelligent visitation remaining from the past. Sagan, once a reasoned supporter of the simple mathematical probabilities involved, was now a fierce public exponent of the idea
that--while artifacts might be found somewhere some time--nothing under present study, no matter how compelling the evidence, qualified. He went to some quite startling lengths to 'debunk' the Mars face--lengths to which, in fact, a scientist would not
generally go, and seemed to me more related to propaganda than scientific discourse.
As that face stared up at me from the Cydonia plain, my imagination embraced the NASA of the past--that
grand and so gloriously American organization, full of vigor and
excitement--that had taken us to the moon and laid plans to go to Mars.
Any further work would have to be done privately, and Dr. Gliedman was hoping that I might give a donation. I
was soon involved with the group, which was known as the Mars Anomalies Research Society, Inc.
On the committee were former NASA scientist and member of Reagan's National Commission on Space, Dr. David C. Webb, John Brandenburg, Vince DiPietro, who was one of the original imagers, writer Dan Drasin, astronaut and planetologist Dr. Brian O'Leary, imaging specialist Dr. Mark Carlotto, Randy Pozos and Dr. Gliedman. Dr. O'Leary is the original Mars astronaut, and, if our Mars exploration program had not been abandoned in favor of military objectives, he would have been
to the red planet and back by now.
Dr. Carlotto, who was a contractor for an intelligence agency involved in reconnaissance, was in possession of imaging equipment so advanced and so secret that many of its controls had to be shielded from the eyes of committee members without proper clearances. The primary purpose of the equipment was to transform satellite pictures into clear and accurate images with high detail content. The fact that the Mars face
was re-imaged on the best equipment known to man in 1985 and came out looking even more like a sculpture has been efficiently suppressed. However, the results of studies made with the
TASC Corporation's equipment were routinely used in the most sensitive of reconnaissance projects. Except for what he did on the face, Carlotto's work was routinely assumed to be completely accurate.
My specific role was to finance the new analysis of the data and subsequent study that Drs. O'Leary and Carlotto
undertook.
On December 13, 1986, the group met at Carlotto's lab in Boston. At that meeting they re-imaged the face from the original Viking data. The picture that resulted has become known world-wide, but the power of the equipment that was used to obtain it has been studiously ignored in the press. Even though the public has in general only been allowed to see false-color images compared to normal-contrast ones in the mass media, interest in the face has stayed high.
I did not attend the Boston meeting, because by that time I was struggling with the Communion experience and had withdrawn from direct participation in the committee out of concern that my connection with the UFO subculture would embarrass the other members and compromise the already tenuous standing of the project in the scientific community. The fact
that "UFO zealots," in Dr. Sagan's words, are excited by the face was and is a major bar to science taking a serious interest. It should be remembered that my encounters started after I became interested in the face, not before.
I received in the mail a copy of the image that O'Leary and Carlotto had derived from the Viking telemetry.
Staring up at me from the distant past and the depth of mystery was the strangest single thing I had ever seen, stranger far than the original Viking image, even stranger than the face of the alien I had peered into the year before. This was truly an enigma from another place and time: the face was no longer shadowy and tentative, it was quite clear. It glared up, teeth barred, as if raging at the very heavens.
Drs. O'Leary and Carlotto eventually published a paper in the Journal of the British Planetary Society that makes an impeccable case for the face being a truly anomalous object. This duly peer-reviewed monograph drew the interest of additional open-minded scientists to the face, and they were hopeful that
the Mars Observer that was scheduled to go Mars orbital in late 1993 would provide much more detailed imagery.
Their hopes were dealt a blow by the apparent destruction of the spacecraft just as it was making its orbital insertion maneuver, but NASA had already gone to such extraordinary lengths to keep the data it sent back secret that it probably wouldn't have mattered anyway.
To make certain that public access to all images from Mars would be strictly controlled, NASA secretly altered its long-standing policy of complete public access. By so doing, it
defied its most fundamental public mandate, which is to operate as openly as possible. This is why we went live to the moon, and why America used to brag that space exploration in a free society should be open, in contrast to the Soviet Union's secretive approach.
Shifting to a more Soviet approach (ironically, as the Soviet Union collapsed) NASA granted a private company, Malin Space Science Systems, complete authority over all Mars Observer data returns. It did this through a legal fiction that Malin actually 'owned' the pictures. In other words, these pictures, paid for in full by the American people, were to be first examined by Dr. Michael Malin, the owner of this company, and then released, if at all, only on his say-so.
Dr. Malin, of course, is a violent opponent of even photographing the face again. He was intended, in effect, to
operate as a censor. But the public pays for NASA, and the public has an absolute right to know everything that NASA discovers, whenever possible at the moment the discoveries are being made. NASA's attempt to violate this principle would appear to be a
fundamental repudiation of its public trust.
In the weeks before the Mars Observer was slated to go into orbit, public pressure to release all the images became stronger and stronger. But, like both of the Soviet Prometheus
probes before it, which also had the potential to re-image the face, the Mars Observer ceased to report right before it arrived. There was suspicion that NASA may have aborted the mission rather than continue it and risk being forced by an outraged public to
photograph the face. Others speculated that the mission continued in secret, that the people NASA had working on it were fired and a shadowy intelligence-gathering organization, the National
Reconnaissance Office, allowed to take over.
I normally receive electronic mail from ham operators quite soon after they hear any unusual telemetry from
space. As of March, 1995, I am fairly sure that the Mars Observer has not started reporting again on any of its publicly known frequencies. However, the National Reconnaissance Office possesses the capability to control the mission from the intelligence installation at the Goldstone tracking station, which can be patched into a 200-foot deep-space dish antenna and
bypass all civilian information channels. Whether the Observer can communicate on unlisted frequencies or not I was unable to determine.
What, between 1960 and today, has transformed NASA from the enthusiastically public agency it was when it was founded into the secretive bureaucracy that exists today? Why was
it so intent on controlling what we were allowed to see of Mars that it was willing to go to extraordinary, possibly even illegal lengths, to censor the pictures even before the Observer apparently failed?
The reason may well be that the data from Cydonia strongly suggests that the face is not natural and if the Observer had confirmed the existence of artifacts on Mars, hard questions might soon begin to be asked about what is happening here on earth.
Do we understand so much about our world that we only waste valuable public resources by studying things like the Mars face? Is the scientific community's narrow--and very recent--vision of mankind as an evolutionary isolate really true?
The Mars Committee and its various offshoots have struggled consistently over the years on behalf of the public
interest. Their work is presented with great documentary force in Dr. Stanley V. McDaniel's 1993 book, The McDaniel Report, published by North Atlantic Books of Berkeley, California. This
report should be required reading for anybody who cares about the future of public science.
As I write, the battle rages. NASA is attempting to make censorship of incoming data a permanent part of the
exploration process--in other words, to institutionalize compromise of the public trust while appearing to serve it.
Frankly, the battle will only end when the treasure that our nation lavishes on space exploration is being expended by a new scientific organization that is staffed by open-minded and adventurous researchers and divorced from the military and the intelligence community. In the ideal, it would be exclusively devoted to the free, open and genuinely scientific exploration of the vast cosmic unknown, and everything it found would be
available to all.
by Whitley Strieber © 1995
May not be Reprinted Without Permission