Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
The revelations are attributed to an anonymous Soviet source and
breathlessly describe discoveries made by a nonexistent Soviet
space vehicle.
But the story of 'The Face' is almost entirely an American one.
It was found by one of the Viking orbiters in 1976. There was an
unfortunate dismissal of the feature by a project official as a trick
of light and shadow, which prompted a later accusation that
NASA was covering up the discovery of the millennium. A few
engineers, computer specialists and others - some of them contract
employees of NASA - worked on their own time digitally to
enhance the image. Perhaps they hoped for stunning revelations.
That's permissible in science, even encouraged - as long as your
standards of evidence are high. Some of them were fairly cautious
and deserve to be commended for advancing the subject. Others
were less restrained, deducing not only that the Face was a
genuine, monumental sculpture of a human being, but claiming to
find a city nearby with temples and fortifications.* From spurious
arguments, one writer announced that the monuments had a
particular astronomical orientation - not now, though, but half a
million years ago - from which it followed that the Cydonian
wonders were erected in that remote epoch. But then how could
the builders have been human? Half a million years ago, our
ancestors were busy mastering stone tools and fire. They did not
have spaceships.
The Martian Face is compared to 'similar faces . . . constructed
in civilizations on Earth. The faces are looking up at the sky
because they're looking up to God.' Or the Face was constructed
by the survivors of an interplanetary war that left the surface of
Mars (and the Moon) pockmarked and ravaged. What causes all
those craters anyway? Is the Face a remnant of a long-extinct
human civilization? Were the builders originally from Earth or
Mars? Could the Face have been sculpted by interstellar visitors
* The general idea is quite old, going back at least a century to the Martian canal
myth of Percival Lowell. As one of many examples, P.E. Cleator, in his 1936
book Rockets Through Space: The Dawn of Interplanetary Travel, speculated:
'On Mars, the crumbling remains of ancient civilizations may be found, mutely
testifying to the one-time glory of a dying world.'
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