'Face on Mars' Gets a New Look

Sept. 21, 2006 -- -- In the Cydonia region of Mars' northern hemisphere is a massif, a large outcropping of rock that protrudes upward from the surrounding plain.

Or maybe it's a face.

That's the public relations crisis NASA created for itself in July 1976 when the Viking 1 spacecraft, orbiting Mars and systematically photographing the surface below, returned one image that looked, well, like it included a human face staring grimly up at Viking's camera.

Since then, conspiracy theorists and enthusiasts have written and talked about it on talk radio, offering all sorts of explanations for why some extraterrestrial civilization would have created a "face" on Mars' surface. Was it perhaps a signal, a warning or an invitation to us Earthlings to make contact?

"It has to be intelligent. It has to be self-aware," said Richard C. Hoagland, one of the most persistent champions of the face-as-signal theory, in talks on the subject.

Hoagland said he had been a consultant for CBS News during the Apollo moon landings, and later did public relations for New York's Hayden Planetarium.

The Viking science team didn't think much of the whole thing, believing it was probably an accident of lighting. But the firestorm of interest became so intense -- along with complaints that NASA was hiding something -- that in the 1990s an exasperated Daniel Goldin, then NASA's chief, promised that the next time an American spacecraft passed over Cydonia, it would take a picture.

So a new photo came from the Mars Global Surveyor probe in 1998, and another in 2001, and each time the massif looked less like a face and more like an outcropping of rock.

Or, the opposition maintained, perhaps NASA wasn't looking hard enough.