With what appears to be evidence of a possible prior civilization on Mars, why did the Jet Propulsion Laboratory prevent the scientific community from seeing the best available data? Since 1988 we have presented regular interviews on our radio programs, 21st Century Radio® and The Zoh Show, with dozens of Mars researchers who all agree that the Cydonia region of the planet Mars is the most likely location where evidence of intelligent life might be discovered. Yet, the "ridicule factor" is high with this area, thanks to the over-hyping of the investigation into the "Face" in Cydonia. Because of the more sensationalistic reports and popular press, mainstream scientists like those at JPL have been biased against the careful work being done by serious researchers in diverse fields of science that continues to grow more interesting daily. All are independently indicating an intelligence on Mars.

Since the early 1990s on Hieronimus & Co. broadcasting we have presented the academic findings of a group of credentialed scientists who have since banded together with the organizational help of Professor Stanley McDaniel to form the Society for Planetary SETI Research, or SPSR. These diplomatic and congenial academics have expressed growing frustration with their struggle to convince NASA and JPL to consider their peer-reviewed and qualified research. As current President, Dr. Horace Crater, shared with us:

SPSR is primarily an organization that fosters and promotes research into planetary anomalies. Our group members publish, research, and teach in numerous fields such as astronomy, geology, archeology, philosophy, engineering, image processing, anthropology, mathematics, and physics. We are committed to keeping the Mars investigation in particular as much in the "Mainstream" as possible. To this end we encourage members to submit their work to peer review within our group and for possible publication in appropriate peer reviewed science journals. Most recently we have published two articles in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Volume 13, Number 3 (Summer 1999).

But since NASA and JPL have a head lock on the corporate media, the good science performed by SPSR is generally dismissed with the same bath water that threw out the spectacular, but sometimes unsubstantiated and hypothetical claims being broadcast on other popular mediums. Most unfortunately, however, the level of damage has elevated from simply ignoring their positions to playing really unfair ball and distorting the evidence that came from the April 1998 Mars Global Surveyor images of The Face — the first photographs in over 20 years.

Meticulous scientists are not generally interested in being used as rating ploys. During our twenty years of broadcasting on the "paranormal," we can attest that some of the best researchers into anomalous phenomena are extremely prejudiced against talk radio, and mostly for good reason! It is widely known that most broadcasters in the electronic media are not students of the subjects they are reporting on, nor do they even read their guest's work, preferring instead to hype up the airwaves with sensational conclusions. For that reason, most people in the general public, if they have considered the Face on Mars at all, know it either from the cover of the National Enquirer's reporting on someone who sought out the publicity by claiming to have deciphered Nazi coded messages in the Face on Mars, or some other unsubstantiated theories.

Our point is that if the group of 20-plus scientists who make up SPSR had been given the same amount of ink and airtime in the popular media, it's probable that a paradigm shift would have occurred by now and the public hue and cry would have forced NASA and JPL to make a legitimate priority of rephotographing and studying the Cydonia region. Instead, we have hundreds of scientists in this country being denied access to data acquired from publicly-financed space missions, and worse still, we have JPL releasing tampered photos. Some might call it scientific fraud.

"I would personally stop short of using a word like fraud," said astronomer Dr. Thomas Van Flandern on a recent edition of The Zoh Show. "Let's just explain what happened with the picture that they released to the press. The Society for Planetary SETI Research is a group of independent scientists who have donated some of their professional time, researching the issue of anomalies on Mars and the possibility of artifacts such as the famous face on Mars. In the Fall of 1997, they approached NASA with enough evidence to justify giving priority to taking high resolution pictures of the Cydonia region of Mars, and NASA agreed, offered to do that and asked the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to get these pictures. After the incident where they first refused, they finally took the first of those pictures on April 5th of 1998. In a press conference on the afternoon that the pictures were released, instead of releasing the actual image that came down from the spacecraft, the JPL Public Information Office released one that had been passed through a high pass filter.

"The purpose of a high pass filter is to suppress detail in an image. It is used ordinarily only with line art or with something where you need to sharpen up borders, or something that is in black and white, but not gray scale. We know of no appropriate reason for its use in connection with this image, but it is documented on their website that that is indeed how they obtained the image that they released to the press. Many people in the world saw only that image. And everyone looking at that image would agree that it doesn't show much more than a pile of rocks, or anything that someone could imagine was artificial.

"For the explanation about why they did it, I am not as convinced that there is a conspiracy to keep us from knowing, as it's more of a reaction to being accused of being conspirators. That happened before these recent pictures were taken, and it so angered and upset the scientists involved, that I think they went into taking these pictures with the view that they were finally going to put this nonsense off the table. When the initial pictures didn't seem as though they were going to end the controversy, they let their good judgment slip away from them and released a filtered version picture that they hoped would kill the controversy in the media. They were very successful at doing that. I think it was more because they were insulted by being accused of being conspirators, than there was any intent to keep us from knowing." We will return to the remarkable conclusions Dr. Van Flandern is presenting after meticulous study of digitally enhanced versions of these 1998 photos later in this article, and they can also be found at www.metaresearch.org.

In June of 2000 on 21st Century Radio Vince DiPietro, another member of SPSR, also drew the line between solid science and media hype. "I think you hit it right on the head. We do not support anything that the author you just spoke of talks about. In fact, some of the things were so outlandish as to talk about cathedrals on Europa and Nazi army helmets and swastikas on Mars. And we don't support any of that nonsense. That's ridiculous. And because these people who write these things and are featured in the limelight because they're sensational, has said these things, then, NASA has tended to lump us together with them, and that's inaccurate." DiPietro is one of the pioneers in this work and together with his colleague, Greg Molenaar, is responsible for saving the original Viking Mission 1976 Face on Mars photographs from obscurity. His background is in digital electronics and image processing and he has designed several electronic control devices currently in use producing film products from satellite image data. He is the co-author with Greg Molenaar and Dr. John Brandenburg of Unusual Martian Surface Features.

SPSR member Dr. Mark Carlotto has over 20 years of experience in digital image processing and satellite remote sensing and has held a variety of positions in academia and industry. He is the author of The Martian Enigmas: A Closer Look, and contributor to A Case for the Face. In a recent interview on 21st Century Radio he shared opinions on Richard Hoagland and his Enterprise Mission and on NASA. Concerning Hoagland, "Following the early work of Vince DiPietro and Greg Molenaar on the Face, Dick did make significant contributions to the science of Cydonia. He found other objects of interest and noticed some interesting relationships between them. More recently, however, his work and that of the Enterprise Mission is "muddying the waters." He has made Cydonia much more of a public issue, raising public awareness and so on, but at the same time, he has made the debate over the Face a very complicated one."

Dr. Carlotto goes on to say "It's really a simple question of science. Is the Face artificial or not? By bringing in conspiracy theories and terrestrial connections and all sorts of possible implications Hoagland's made it much harder to get to the key question of artificiality. In response to this, NASA has behaved badly. They have "danced around" the controversy over the Face and continue to appear to be not totally honest with us. There have been many opportunities to image Cydonia. NASA promised that they would image Cydonia on every opportunity during the mapping mission, and would announce when they would be flying over Cydonia in advance. They have not done this. Apparently that one picture taken of the Face taken in April 1998 has shown the Face to be clearly of natural origin. In their mind the controversy has been resolved."

Carlotto does not agree with this conclusion citing extensive evidence in support of artificiality in both the 1998 MGS image of the Face as well as the older Viking images taken in 1976. His analysis along with a number of other useful resources can be found on his website at www.psrw.com/~markc/marshome.html.

In September of 2000 on The Zoh Show, astronomer Dr. Thomas Van Flandern announced incredible odds indicating the Face on Mars must be artificial. Van Flandern, a world renowned astronomer and author of Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets, is also a former director of the Celestial Mechanics Branch of the Nautical Almanac Office of the U.S. Naval Observatory and former consultant to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He emphasized the distinction between NASA and JPL, under contract to NASA on these trouble-ridden Mars Missions of the past decade. "The problems, I think, can be attributed directly to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, rather than to NASA itself. I am referring, of course, to the Mars anomalies, where JPL was asked to get additional photographs, at first refused, and then when bribed with money and personnel, took some pictures and then disclaimed them on the grounds that they are a waste of public funds and a slap at the integrity of the scientists."

Not only a slap in the face, this public contractor deliberately tampered with scientific evidence. Van Flandern has made a careful study of what the April 1998 images would have looked like had they not been passed through a filter. "The unfiltered image gives a very different impression. Now that we have been able to bring advanced computer processing techniques to bear on it, as to reconstruct the view as it would have been if it had been photographed from overhead, and with proper lighting, we see that the actual object looks remarkably like a humanoid face. There are some things about it that have enabled us to prove, that indeed, they are artificial rather than of natural origin.

"It's important to realize that if you just look at something and it looks very much like a face, that is not a proof, because there are things that look like faces in clouds, mountain side profiles and other natural settings by chance. All kinds of regular shapes can occur. In science there is a distinction, between the kind of statistics that you cannot trust and the kind that you can. The kind that you can is distinguished by making a prediction before the data is in, and not altering it afterwards, according to what you see.

"The Viking pictures of 1976 showed us something that looked like a face on Mars, and we were impressed to see that it was an actual three dimensional face and not a profile, not a light and shadow thing. And we were impressed to see that it was symmetric, the impression of a face in those low resolution photos, an eye, a nose and a mouth. We made a prediction then, that if this was intended to be built as an artificial object, there would be secondary facial features. Whereas, if it was a natural object when seen in high resolution, it would look much less like a face."

Just the opposite turned out to be the case. "When we got the high resolution photos, every single secondary facial feature you would expect to see is actually present in the mesa. So, there is an eyebrow over the eye socket, an iris inside the eye socket, a symmetric eye on the other side with an eyebrow. The mouth that consists of parted lips, the nose has nostrils at the end tapered towards the forehead, and so on. In other words, when you look at this in high resolution, there is just no question it was actually built to portray a humanoid face. All of these additional features, the eyebrow, the irises, nostrils and so on, could not surely have arisen by chance in a natural feature when they were predicted in advance."

And here's the clincher. Sit down, because it's a bombshell. Van Flandern has concluded that, "Statistically, the odds are a thousand billion, billion to one against this being a natural phenomenon on the surface of Mars."

It seems we can be just as certain that JPL's efforts to dissuade further examination of this issue and the hypothesis of prior intelligent life on Mars were not by accident. The ramifications of releasing a filtered photograph could be disastrously long-ranging. As Van Flandern pointed out, "The spacecraft continues to orbit Mars and take high resolution photographs. It can only, in the remainder of the spacecraft's lifetime, photograph less than 1% of the total surface of Mars. So, we have to hope for a combination of good luck and scientific goodwill on the part of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the team that operates the camera, that they will point at these interesting objects and photograph them during the remaining part of the mission. If we miss this opportunity, by the time this spacecraft runs out of control fuel in six months to a year, then, even though we are planning other missions to Mars, they will not have cameras capable of doing this. We face the risk that it could be another generation before we learn the truth about the matter. Just as it's been that long since we've had astronauts fly to the moon." A grim reminder of how a few men's decisions can impact billions of people's lives.

"I would have to agree that the outcome has been very unfortunate for the advancement of science," Van Flandern continued. "At this point, all any of us are asking for is additional, fresh, high resolution photographs overhead, under good lighting conditions, and let the results speak for themselves. The scientists interested in investigating this are calling for that every day. JPL has shown no inclination to go out of their way to take such pictures, unless perhaps the spacecraft were to pass right over one of these targets by chance."

To support the work of SPSR, you can contact Dr. Horace Crater by email at hcrater@utsi.edu or visit the website of SPSR founder Dr. Stanley McDaniel at www.mcdanielreport.com where you can link to several other sites of SPSR members including those below. Dr. Crater notes that they can always use help in analyzing the 57,000+ images released by NASA, so if you are qualified to help in this effort, please contact him.

You can order Vince DiPietro's book, Unusual Martian Surface Features, by sending $18.00 to Mars Research, P.O. Box 1345, Sykesville, MD 21784.

Visit Dr. Mark Carlotto's website at http://www.psrw.com/~markc/marshome.html.

Visit Dr. Thomas Van Flandern's website at www.metaresearch.org, Meta Research P.O. Box 15186, Chevy Chase, MD 20825.

¹In case you should consider our selection of the word "tamper" a bit too harsh, we provide these fitting definitions from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary: "To interfere so as to weaken or change for the worse; to alter for an improper purpose or in an improper way." They may not have tried to hide their description of the "enhancement" procedure on their website, but 99.9% of the people who saw that filtered image in the newspapers never knew there was a filter used or that it worked to suppress detail.