Mars. Where this story began.

Updated 26th April 2008

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Introductioncccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccµµµ Click on "stargate" to skip to the menu

Oddly my own interest in artificial looking Martian anomalies was not sparked by Richard Hoagland, but by Dr. Carl Sagan. In 1981 my brother bought the British hardback version of Sagan's book Cosmos. Whilst browsing through this book I came across a small picture of the Martian surface imaged by the Mariner 9 spacecraft that stunned me.

Needless to say the image was rather fuzzy, but sitting nonchalantly side-by-side on the Martian plain were two equally sized, similarly aligned, tetrahedral pyramids with identical "design" features. Moreover, the "front" of each pyramid seemed to have a tall, dark, peaked entrance way. These "entrances" were set slightly below ground level with ramps sloping down into them. The impression they gave was of military aircraft bunkers on an airfield. Adjacent to one of the pyramids was a large hexagonal depression with four dark spots, arranged like the hot plates on an oven, visible on its floor. The text suggested that these mile wide formations were possible candidates for artificiality.

As a fan of Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey I jokingly called Sagan's pyramids TMA's (for Tetrahedral Martian Anomalies instead of for Tycho Magnetic Anomaly) little realising how important the humble tetrahedron was to figure in the future.

The pictures below show the original Cosmos illustration of the Elysium "pyramids" (on left), a Viking Orbiter image of a nearby "pyramid" (bottom), and a Mars Global Surveyor image of a more modest pyramidal formation just north of the Elysium volcano Hecate Tholus (right). I'm less impressed by Carl Sagan's pyramids now than I was in 1981. In light of Sagan's early work Intelligent Life in the Universe (click "stargate" µµµ), I wonder whether he was pushing an agenda.

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A special thanks to Holger Isenburg who has done more than anyone else on the internet to dig out imagery of Carl Sagan's Elysium Pyramids. Click this "stargate" for details µµµ.

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As the years went by I began to notice pictures of the "Face" appearing in astronomy books - but the original NASA processed version, which does not reveal the surprisingly symmetrical base on which it sits. This original picture did not strike me as particularly artificial looking. Sometime around 1990 I read that the Face was located next to some pyramid shaped hills and I became more interested. I assumed (wrongly) that these "pyramids" were the same ones in the Elysium region of Mars that Cosmos had introduced me to in 1981. The mystery of Sagan's pyramids continued to gnaw away and I looked forward to the arrival of the Mars Observer spacecraft around Mars in 1993, only to see my hopes dashed by its disappearance. Then in 1996 I came across a copy of Richard Hoagland's The Monuments of Mars in a bookshop and discovered the two decades old investigation of the Cydonia region of Mars.

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A position statement

Before proceeding further it is only fair that I state my own attitudes towards the question of possible artificial structures on Mars. Firstly, I would be very pleased if the artificiality hypothesis were to be proven - so I have an emotional bias in favour of artificiality. Secondly, I don't yet believe that there is overwhelming evidence for ruins on Mars or elsewhere in the Solar System. However, I do believe that there is overwhelming evidence of things that look like ruins. Therefore, the analysis in these Mars pages is based on the working hypothesis that there are indeed ruins on Mars. The analysis will therefore mostly draw attention to features that support the case for ruins over other explanations.

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The Cydonia Quest sections covering The Enterprise Mission's theories concerning hyperspace, official cover-ups and secret societies have been set out as long investigative essays. These are intended to stand as complete works in themselves with any new developments in these areas being covered in the Latest Developments section.

However, because new discoveries are being made all the time, I've adopted an articles based approach for the Mars section of Cydonia Quest. Just click on the appropriate "stargates" below to access each article.

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µµµ Context images of Cydonia from the 1976 Viking mission

µµµ Testing for the Hoagland Arcology Model of Cydonia (29th October 2000)

µµµ New image enhancements of Cydonian features (26th April 2008)

µµµ The Face that launched a thousand SPITs (6th May 2001)

µµµ The strange case of Cydonian geometry (1st June 2005)

µµµ The Cydonia Quest Occasional Journal (20th March 2006)

µµµ Mars - Latest News

µµµ Cydonia Quest Links Page

µµµ The Cydonia Quest Opinion Polls Page

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