Illusions and conspiracies of Mars

Misinterpretations of telescopic observations have led to false notions of artificial canals on Mars. Visits by increasingly sophisticated spacecraft to the planet have resulted in detailed photographs in which some Mars enthusiasts saw faces and pyramids, but space scientists saw buttes and mesas. These fanciful misperceptions can serve as a cautionary tale of the tendency of observers with strong preconceptions to see what they want to see rather than what is really there.

Overview

Some astronomers see the history of their discipline as the supersession of erroneous beliefs (or illusions) by true ideas that, over time, become ever more faithful descriptions of reality. In this way, the spherical Earth replaced a flat one, heliocentrism superseded geocentrism, and an expanding cosmos of multitudinous galaxies supplanted a static, small Milky Way universe. Outside Earth, Mars (the Romans’ name for Ares, as it was known to the ancient Greeks) has been the subject of more illusions and conspiracies than any other planet. For centuries, this “Red Planet” has inspired the imagination of humankind. The invention of the telescope and visitations by orbiters and landers have not dampened the desires of many to see Mars as a locus of past or present intelligent life.

During the nineteenth century, ever more powerful telescopes allowed astronomers to see yellow clouds and white polar caps on the Martian surface. These astronomers commonly interpreted the polar caps, which expanded and diminished with the seasons, as frozen water. Others interpreted the dark areas as seas and the light areas as land. Pietro Angelo Secchi, a Jesuit astronomer who was the first to make multicolored drawings of Mars, was also the first to use the Italian term canale for a prominent feature (later called Syrtis Major). Beginning in 1877, another Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, began creating extremely detailed drawings of the Martian surface with hundreds of named features, including a growing number of rectilinear canali. Although canale may mean “canal,” as in Canale di Panama, Schiaparelli interpreted these Martian canali as “channels” or “grooves,” that is, as natural, not artificial, structures. He viewed these interlocking channels as a “hydrographic system” through which melting polar waters circulated throughout the planet, helping to foster organic life. He was absolutely certain that he had seen this intricate network, and he was even open to the possibility that the canali might be artificial, but he dismissed as imaginary the convoluted maps and interpretations of observers such as Percival Lowell.

For years, the American businessman and amateur astronomer Lowell had successfully managed the family’s great fortune, based on textiles, finance, and land, but, having read about Schiaparelli’s canali, he became passionately interested in Mars and used his wealth to build an observatory near Flagstaff, Arizona, whose altitude and dry desert air facilitated Lowell’s ability to see many more canali than Schiaparelli had detected. Lowell also became convinced that the complex system of hundreds of canals that he mapped was due to the constructive skills of intelligent Martians. He even invented a story to explain how these massive canals, which needed to be many kilometers wide to be visible from Earth, were built to bring polar water to the warm equatorial regions to support life on a planet growing colder and drier. He published his data, maps, and interpretations in three books, Mars (1895), Mars and Its Canals (1906), and Mars as the Abode of Life (1908), which were popular with the public, journalists, and science-fiction writers but were criticized by many astronomers and scientists. In the twentieth century, astronomers had the advantage of powerful refracting and reflecting telescopes. They were unable to see either Schiaparellian or Lowellian canals. In 1907, Alfred Russel Wallace, who had discovered natural selection independently of Charles Darwin, published a book that attacked Lowell’s hypothesis of a Mars inhabited by intelligent beings by showing that the planet was so cold and dry that it was absolutely uninhabitable. Although a few astronomers, such as Earl C. Slipher, came to Lowell’s defense, many were skeptical since they failed to find any water vapor in the Martian atmosphere and since those who saw the canals failed to agree on their locations or dimensions. Nevertheless, Slipher, who took 126,000 photographs of Mars at Lowell Observatory from 1906 to 1962, insisted that many of these pictures verified the existence of linear canals.

Illusions about Mars increased through publications such as Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision (1950), in which he used astronomical data, biblical stories, and folk legends to argue that the Earth, Venus, and Mars had exchanged atmospheres when only a few thousand years before, they nearly collided with each other. Even though the American scientific community vigorously attacked Velikovsky’s ideas, which were easily falsified by scientific information and analysis, he developed a cult following. He and his followers attributed the derision of scientists to a conspiracy to cover up the real truth behind the solar system.

In 1965, the American spacecraft Mariner 4 became the first to send back pictures of the Martian surface from a relatively close range. These pictures confounded the believers in canals, Mars cultists, the public, and astronomers, who were surprised by an extensively cratered world that was more Moon-like than Earth-like. Furthermore, Mars’s extremely thin atmosphere, only one two-hundredth as extensive as Earth’s atmosphere, was unable to support any liquid water. Other Martian probes, such as Mariner 6 and Mariner 7, appeared to confirm the view of Mars as lifeless and dull, far from the exciting vision of Lowell and his followers.

Knowledge Gained

The conception of what some astronomers called the “old Mars” was transformed by Mariner 9, which arrived at the planet late in 1971 and comprehensively mapped its surface in 1972. Its dramatic images revealed a new and more interesting Mars, with such fascinating features as Olympus Mons, the solar system’s largest volcano, and Valles Marineris, a complex of ravines so vast that it could hold nearly five hundred of the Earth’s Grand Canyon. Mariner 9’s many detailed pictures of mountains, craters, mesas, plains, valleys, and other features provided areologists—those who study Mars—with an abundance of data to construct a geological history of Mars. These images also, however, encouraged speculators to develop controversial interpretations of ambiguous features. These speculations became highly imaginative when sharper pictures of Mars were returned to Earth by Viking Orbiter 1, especially of Cydonia, a plain with scattered buttes and mesas in the middle northern latitudes. One photograph, taken on July 25, 1976, showed a mesa that, in a certain light, vaguely resembled a human face, and even though space scientists saw it as natural, similar to anthropomorphic geological features on Earth, others interpreted it as a remnant of a vanished civilization.

When, in 1979, computer scientists released enhanced images of the Cydonian region, some interpreters saw such new features in the “face on Mars” as eyes with pupils, a nose, a mouth with teeth, and a headdress reminiscent of an Egyptian pharaoh’s. These interpreters also claimed to see several pyramids in the region surrounding the “face.” These pyramids were hundreds of times larger than the Great Pyramids at Giza in Egypt, and, according to these interpreters, their geometrical shapes, which were a clever combination of pentagonal and hexagonal symmetries, as well as their architectural alignments, manifested a knowledge of astronomical and mathematical constants.

Magazine articles, books, and websites soon proliferated, advancing the hypothesis that the Cydonian region contained the remains of a colossal city. Richard Hoagland, a journalist who had become interested in the Cydonian structures in 1980, published a book, The Monuments of Mars (1987), which became so popular that it went through four editions in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. When space scientists ridiculed the interpretations of the “Cydonian cultists” by showing that their “pyramids” were actually natural structures that had been sculpted by wind and water, not intelligent beings, the “Cydonians” responded by founding such organizations as the Academy of Future Science and the Independent Mars Investigation Project to defend their views. Using publications, websites, radio and television appearances, and DVDs, these Cydonians alleged that a conspiracy of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and other governmental agencies had developed to cover up the evidence of intelligent life on Mars since this explanation challenged established social, political, and religious values. When such missions as the Mars Observer failed, some Cydonians accused NASA scientists of deliberately sabotaging the mission to prevent the public from learning “the truth” about the “face and pyramids.” When such NASA missions as the Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Pathfinder, and Odyssey succeeded, returning data that showed the “face” as an eroded conical butte and the “pyramids” as irregularly shaped mesas, the Cydonians reprimanded the scientists for interpreting these new photographs through their academic prejudices. Some critics wondered whether the evidence gathered by a lander or astronauts in the region of the supposed face and pyramids would be sufficient to resolve the conflicts between space scientists and the Cydonians.

Context

Throughout history, genuine scientists have often contended with pseudoscientists. Sometimes, a pseudoscience has evolved into a genuine science (as in the case of alchemy, which became chemistry), but astronomers have been unable to dispatch pseudoastronomies such as astrology. As planetary scientist Carl Sagan often remarked, even in such advanced societies as the United States, more professional astrologers were making a living than professional astronomers. Many space scientists considered any attention paid to pseudoscientific theories about Mars as a waste of their time and taxpayers’ money. For example, instead of spending valuable time, money, and human energy in fulfilling the assigned mission of the Mars Global Surveyor, scientists, because of pressure from the media, public, and politicians, were forced to divert the spacecraft to take pictures of the “face on Mars” and other supposed “alien constructs.” These new pictures clearly revealed, in the view of the scientists, that the objects in question were naturfacts, not artifacts.

Other scholars have studied these illusions and conspiracies for the insights that they provide into fascinating psychological and sociological phenomena. For example, the cases of Schiaparelli and Lowell are illustrative of pathological science, in which scientists erroneously convince themselves of the genuineness of what they are seeing and saying. Pathological science often occurs when threshold effects are involved—for example, when scientists attempt to interpret things that are barely visible. In these cases, humans tend to overinterpret scattered dark features into a line, as Schiaparelli and Lowell did. In the case of the Cydonian cultists, other forms of misinterpretation have surfaced. For example, modern computerized image enhancement can be overdone, sometimes leading to the appearance of features that were not present in the original. Sociological pressures often help explain how Cydonians see themselves as the victims of various conspiracies. They find pleasure and comfort in the idea that intelligent creatures once inhabited Mars, but these extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. However, scientists, relying on data collected by superior orbiters and landers, have seen nothing that cannot be better understood as the consequence of natural forces. History has shown that humans can fool themselves, but scientists, based on long experience, have found that Mother Nature cannot be fooled.

Nevertheless, the allure of science fiction-based illusions and conspiracies related to Mars continued unabated. In December 2012, many conspiracy theorists questioned the legitimacy of images being sent back by the Curiosity rover, suggesting that they were in fact taken on Earth. A similar incident occurred in 2022 when the Curiosity rover appeared to send back pictures of a doorway on Mars, though conspiracy theories that arose from these photographs were also debunked by scientists.

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