Pyramids have been identified elsewhere, notably in the region known as Elysium, on the opposite side of the planet where, as early as 1971, NASA's Mariner 9 spacecraft photographed a group of mile-high three-sided structures.
Other Martian features that are decidedly non-fractal include a straight line more than three miles long defined by a row of small pyramids, extensive rhomboidal enclosures in the south polar region, and a weird, castle-like edifice rising to a steeple more than 2,000 ft. high.
WHAT HAPPENED?
If there was a civilization on Mars capable of creating such monuments, then what might have happened to it?
A WAR OR A FLOOD MAY HAVE WIPED OUT LIFE ON MARS
Since extensive damage typical of explosive penetration is apparent on some of the structures, notably the D&M Pyramid, more than one researcher has suggested that the Martians might have destroyed themselves in a suicidal war. A geological cataclysm is another possibility.
Analysis of the Martian meteorite suggests the Red Planet was warm and wet - an environment that is likely to have been hospitable to life. Today, it is permanently frozen. The change may have been caused by a very large and rapid slippage of Mars's outer crust, a phenomenon which has also been cited as a possible cause of the cataclysmic end of Earth's last Ice Age 13,000 years ago.
Evidence reported in Scientific American magazine in 1985 confirms that Mars did at some unknown stage in its history, suffer a catastrophic crustal displacement. If this had happened during the planet's warm and wet phase, any civilization present at that time would almost certainly have been wiped out in the ensuing global floods and earthquakes, leaving behind only whatever scattered ruins and monuments were massive and stable enough to survive.
The pyramids and the sphinx on Mars seem to fit the bill. And if they are artificial, then the implications for our idea of ourselves and our place in the universe are shattering.
One top priority in President Bill Clinton's recently announced program of intensified Mars exploration should be a mission to find out for sure, particularly so since NASA has hitherto refused to include Cydonia in the list of more than 150 sites of scientific interest that it recognizes officially on Mars.
Similarly, investigators would be unwise to ignore the fact that there is a region very like Cydonia on Earth - Egypt's famous Giza plateau - which has its own distinctive pyramids and Sphinx.
Associated with these ancient monuments is a tradition that they were built by an antediluvian race as repositories for scrolls and books of past ages, and intended 'to prevent the ancient wisdom from being lost in the Flood'. Could that flood have been the cataclysmic 400 ft. rise in sea levels that we know took place 13,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age? And could there be some sort of bizarre interplanetary connection, not yet understood, between the story of civilization on Earth and on Mars?
THE MYSTERIES OF MARS:
COSMIC SEED AND THE ORIGIN OF LIFE
WERE MEN BROUGHT TO EARTH BY A METEORITE?
Is there an extraordinary connection between the Martian meteorite containing what scientists believe to be a fossilized organism and mysterious structures on the surface of the Red Planet? Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock, authors of the number one bestseller Keeper Of Genesis (Message of the Sphinx ), which was serialized in the Mail earlier this year, believe there could be. On Saturday, in the first part of their controversial series, they described the strange monumental objects in Cydonia, a region of Mars, and how they could be the remains of a long-dead civilization. They also pointed at the bizarre similarity between a structure called The Face and the Egyptian Sphinx. Today, in the second part, Bauval and Hancock focus on the other inexplicable links between Mars and ancient Egypt.
