The Face on Mars

Viking 1 frame 035A72 was taken on 25 July 1976. In it a mesa at about forty degrees north in Cydonia wears two eye sockets, a nose ridge and a mouth under a low sun. NASA called it a trick of light and shadow on the day it was released. The accounts the archive holds say something else: that the Face is a mile long in one telling and a mile and a half in another, that pyramid-like hills stand near it, and that together they are the ruins of a civilisation.

What is on the record

The archive resolves five claimants across three videos on three channels. Three come from one video: Vincent DiPietro, Mark Carlotto and Stanley McDaniel. None of them witnessed anything. They enhanced and analysed the frames and argued for artificiality, so this page records an argument, not an observation. DiPietro, a Goddard engineer who co-wrote the software that sharpened the frame, says the eye cavity holds what looks like an eyeball, and that Carlotto's three-dimensional processing brought out teeth. The telling's complaint about the 1998 Mars Global Surveyor re-image is that NASA threw most of the data away and enhanced what was left into a grainy picture that could prove nothing. A second telling on NewsNation was merged in from a heading the archive used to keep apart. It says the mesa has been re-imaged repeatedly by NASA and ESA and that Carl Sagan agreed it was not merely a trick of lighting. Its claimant is "NASA Viking team": a label for the mission that took the photograph, not a person. NASA's own release called the Face a trick of light. A third telling, also merged in, belongs to John Brandenburg. He is a physicist and an analyst like the first three rather than a witness. He reads the Face, a five-sided pyramid, a square structure he calls Mars Masada, an old shoreline and the isotope ratios as the remains of a humanoid people destroyed by a thermonuclear event. His hypothesis has its own page.

Outside the archive's holdings the public record is unusually complete. Mars Global Surveyor re-imaged the mesa in April 1998 and April 2001, Mars Express in 2006 and HiRISE in 2007. At those resolutions the explanation of record is an eroded hill, read as a face by pareidolia under a low sun. Sagan's position, in Parade in 1985 and again in The Demon-Haunted World, was that the Face was natural and worth photographing properly. That is narrower than the telling gives him.

Why it sits where it does

Five resolved claimants across three channels put the case at L3. Four of them analysed one set of frames and the fifth is the team that took them. The tier says how many people argued the point, not what the mesa is. What was photographed in 1976 is a hill in Cydonia. Whether anything was ever built there is not resolved here. Every later camera has returned the same answer.