We have looked at everything from Mercury out to Saturn, and in the back of everyone’s mind, at least most of the lay public, there was this hope that with every new picture they would see a city, or a McDonald’s, or something that would indicate that we weren’t alone. HOAGLAND: For the last twenty-five years this culture has been mesmerized with the idea that there is, or could be, someone out there. GROSSINGER: Could you describe the history of the Mars project?
THE FACE OF MARS NEW PLUS
The Face on Mars: Evidence for a Lost Civilization is a chronicle of the computer conference which Hoagland and Pozos convened in order to have an interdisciplinary team of scientists look more closely at the “face” and the “city.” It’s available from the Chicago Review Press, 814 North Franklin, Chicago, Illinois 60610, for $12.95 plus $1.00 for postage and handling. The revised edition is available for $12.95 plus $1.00 for postage and handling from North Atlantic Books, 2320 Blake Street, Berkeley, California 94704.Īnother book on Mars has just been written by anthropologist Randolfo Rafael Pozos. Planetary Mysteries contains, in addition to the interview with Hoagland, an article by Rolling Stone writer Jeff Greenwald on the social and political issues involving Mars, as well as other provocative essays on megaliths and glaciers. His own book, Monuments on Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever (to be published next year by Grossinger’s North Atlantic Books) is a voluminous study of the search for life on Mars since the nineteenth century, the various space missions and their discoveries, and the different scenarios and interpretations of the “face.” Hoagland, who helped design the Pioneer 10 Plaque - humankind’s first interstellar message - is as knowledgeable as he is impassioned about Mars. What follows is an edited version of Grossinger’s interview - which appears in its entirety in Planetary Mysteries - with Richard Hoagland, reporter and science writer and former consultant to Walter Cronkite and CBS News. If not, if the “face” is artificial - left behind, perhaps, by intelligent beings from outside the solar system - now isn’t too soon to start asking why. If so, no one will be laughing but us lonely humans. And I’ll confess to some ambivalence about printing this: I’m sure the “face” isn’t a hoax, but it may turn out to be a big joke, just another pile of rocks, about as historic a discovery as the man in the moon. Certainly many reputable scientists have dismissed the “face” as a play of light and shadow. Perhaps even more extraordinary than this “proof” of extraterrestrial intelligence is the capacity of humankind to deceive itself. It now appears that one of those probes may have turned up something after all - a discovery so improbable, so controversial, so mind-boggling, that NASA and the scientific establishment have disclaimed it, and it’s been left to a group of maverick scientists to sort through the scanty but highly suggestive data that points to the existence of a carved, mile-high, upward-looking human “face” on Mars and an adjoining “city” of pyramids. Planetary Mysteries by Richard Grossinger has rekindled my interest, to put it mildly. Either “they” would find us, or it would be quite a while before we could extend the search to other stars. But as one planetary probe after another turned up nothing but rocks or swirling, poisonous gases - no life and no evidence of any ancient civilizations, at least in our own solar system - I lost interest. Common sense suggests it (as well as every science fiction book I’ve read since I was twelve). I’ve never doubted there was life on other planets.
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