For a long while after the 1976 Viking photographs, NASA and other scientific authorities continued to disseminate what one researcher calls "the bogus claim that the Face is a trick of light and shadow".
This notion began to be challenged seriously only when Vincent Di Pietro, a computer scientist and former NASA consultant, discovered another image of the Face on frame 70A13.
This second image, which had been acquired 35 Martian days later than the first one and under different lighting conditions, made possible comparative views and detailed measurements of the Face.
Complete with its distinctive Sphinx-like headdress, it is now known to be almost 1.6 miles long from crown to chin, 1.2 miles wide and just under 2,000 ft.. high. Image analysts say the bilateral symmetry of the Face, which has a natural, almost human appearance, is most unlikely to have come about by chance.
This impression is confirmed by other characteristics that have subsequently been identified under computer enhancement. These include 'teeth' in the mouth, bilaterally crossed lines above the eyes, and regular lateral stripes on the headpiece - suggestive, to some researchers at least, of the headdress of ancient Egyptian pharaohs.
According to Dr. Mark Carlotto, an expert in image processing, all 'these features appear in both the Viking images, and are coherent shapes structurally integral to the object. Thus they could not have been caused by random interference or artifacts of the image restoration and enhancement process.'
PYRAMIDS AND TOWERS
The same is also true for the 'D&M Pyramid' (named after Di Pietro and his associate Gregory Molenaar, also a former NASA contractor, who discovered it).
This five-sided structure stands about ten miles from the Face and, like the Great Pyramid of Egypt, is aligned virtually north-south towards the spin axis of the planet.
Its shortest side is a mile, its long axis extends to almost two miles and it is half a mile high.
Commenting on the proximity of the Face and the D&M Pyramid, American researcher Richard Hoagland asks a pointed question: 'What are the odds against two terrestrial-like monuments on such an alien planet and in essentially the same location?'
Hoagland has made his own detailed study of Frame 35A72 and has identified additional, possibly artificial, features. These include the so called Fort, with its two distinctive straight edges, and the City, which he describes as 'a remarkably rectilinear arrangement of massive structures interspersed with several smaller pyramids'.
Hoagland also points out another striking fact about the City: it seems to have been sited in such a way that the inhabitants would have enjoyed a perfect, almost ceremonial, view of the Face.
The impression of a great ritual center, shrouded under the dust of ages, is enhanced by other features of Cydonia, such as the Tholus, a massive mound similar to Britain's Silbury Hill, and the City Square, a grouping of four mounds centered on a fifth, smaller mound.
This configuration, so suggestive of cross hairs, turns out to be located at the exact lateral center of the City.
In addition, a group of British researchers based in Glasgow has recently identified what looks like a massive four-sided pyramid, the so called NK Pyramid, 25 miles west of the Face and on the same latitude (40.8 degrees north) as the D&M Pyramid.
In the same general area is a feature called the Bowl, approached by a tapered ram that has been likened to the stairway of a Mexican pyramid.
'Looking at the whole of Cydonia," says Chris O'Kane of the Mars Project UK, 'my gut feeling is that these structures have to be artificial.' O'Kane's hunch is strengthened by the fact that 'many of the structures are non-fractal'. In plain English this means that their contours have been scanned and assessed as artificial by highly sophisticated computers.
