While Hollywood released films this summer about alien invasions, NASA held a real-life press conference dealing with life on Mars. Featuring such high priests of science as Professor Richard Zare, Chairman of the National Science Foundation, and Wes Huntress, NASA's chief scientist, a panel armed with a Martian rock the size of a small potato promoted the idea that microbial life may have existed on Mars 3.6 billion years ago. And while public reaction barely rose above a murmur, the ebullient NASA administrator, Daniel Goldin, characterized the theory as amazing. The upcoming press conference, we were told, would be exciting and controversial. It was, of course, neither to the man on the street inundated with space operas and cable TV documentaries about flying saucers, complete with evidence that would hold up in a court of law. Considering the ongoing media swamp, the ceaseless stories about alien abductions, the Roswell cover up, and so on, in the eyes of the general public NASA's announcement amounted to small potatoes indeed.

More importantly, the announcement turns out to be old news. Martian meteorites and evidence of extraterrestrial microbial life have been around for a decade. Something far more telling, then, may lurk beneath the surface of the NASA press conference.

An asteroid, the panel of experts told us, struck Mars some 16 million years ago, sending a piece of rock into space that landed in Antarctica just 13,000 years ago. Retrieved by NASA scientists, or so we are told, the rock has been under analysis for years. What scientists say they may have discovered are ancient micro-fossils, remnants of extremely tiny biological life-forms from another planet. Given the fact that Carl Sagan, that pillar of scientific orthodoxy, once stated that such a find in our solar system would mean the universe is teeming with life, the Martian rock may hold revolutionary portent for the scientific community. The question are we alone? may finally be answered, and NASA scientists may have to play catch up with the rest of us ordinary Earthlings. Or is there more to this story than a space agency's political back-peddling? Some space researchers believe there is. Much more.

THE FACE ON MARS

Staring back at us from the Cydonia region of Mars, thanks to photographs taken by NASA's Viking Orbiter in 1976, we see what appears to be a mile-long human face. Cloaked in penumbral mystery, and sphinx-like, the face appears as a trick of light and shadow to most scientists. They may be right, and researchers such as Richard Hoagland, who believes that the face may be a 500,000 year-old monument, may be wrong. But along with scholar Zechariah Sitchin, Russian geologist/engineer Vladimir Avinsky, and space researcher Dr. Stanley MacDaniel, Hoagland perceives the ruins of an entire city on Mars, which he details in his book The Monuments of Mars, tell-tale remnants of which, worn by Martian winds, sport uncanny astronomical alignments, ratios and angles that are hard to explain in terms of natural geology. Some try to relegate Hoagland's ideas to the realm of seeing faces in the clouds. But at the NASA press conference, when a questioner asked about re-photographing Cydonia at high resolution during an upcoming Mars mission, as a group of scientists headed by MacDaniel have been insisting for years, NASA's Goldin and Huntress responded matter-of-factly, revealing they were hardly strangers to the Cydonia issue. While assuring us that better pictures would be taken of the region, Huntress nevertheless stated that microfossils, not monuments, would remain NASA's priority.

Reading between the lines, Hoagland believes otherwise. He strongly suspects NASA has known about the ruins on Mars since the Viking mission in 1976, and that in 1993 NASA's Mars Observer secretly photographed Cydonia after the spacecraft had allegedly been lost in the cold darkness above the Red Planet. According to Hoagland, four anonymous engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed his public statement, made shortly after Observer was lost, that a rogue group had taken the mission into the black. Rumors and hints within the space industry tell a similar story, Hoagland told us. Efforts by Dr. Stanley MacDaniel to expose NASA's true intentions, moreover, may have forced the rogue group to carry out their mission secretly. The recent NASA press conference, then, may be a first effort to condition public and even scientific opinion about the existence of extraterrestrial life, to release such information in a measured way for political reasons.

The plan is on the fast track, Hoagland said in a recent interview, in advance of far more startling revelations that are to follow, revelations that would turn the worlds of science, religion, academia and politics upside down. Hoagland backs up his assertion with several key facts. NASA, at the press conference, he said, released ten-year-old evidence, and then an announcement followed only days later about the discovery of an ocean on Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, water being the prime indicator of biological life.

[Carl] Sagan tipped us off earlier this year, Hoagland said, those of us who are watching, that the politics had changed, that something big was in the works. In Sagan's book, The Demon Haunted World, Hoagland told us, he (Sagan) spends an entire chapter explaining why those who pursue the mysteries of Cydonia have to be wrong, crazy, out in left field, as Hoagland put it. Yet in the middle of this diatribe, Sagan admits that he could be wrong, a highly unusual statement from one of the high priests of scientific orthodoxy, given that he's talking about ancient ruins on Mars. And then he goes on for two pages, Hoagland said, delineating all the reasons why the pursuit of the images from Cydonia and the monuments of Mars. . .is absolutely, solidly scientific. Sagan then urges the official agencies of the United States government and the Russian government, who are both sending missions (a total of three) to Mars this year, to place re-photographing Cydonia at the highest level of priority. This, to Hoagland, represents a heads up, indicating an attitudinal sea-change in the higher echelons of science and government.

An elite few, he told us, would rather release suppressed information, which is destined to be discovered anyway, on their own terms, in their own way, than have independent sources co-opt the issue. So doing, Hoagland suspects, these powers-that-be seek to retain their aura of authority over the issue of extraterrestrial life. The high priests of science and government, in effect, will stay high priests as long as they are the ones releasing revolutionary information to the public.

One of those [Mars] missions, Hoagland said, is going to get through. Unlike Mars Observer, Hoagland is telling us, the missions launched late this year may well confirm that the face on Mars and the surrounding structures are indeed ancient ruins, not geological features. Hoagland suspects that key people in science and government know this to be the case, and that in the not-so-distant future they may begin to reveal, on their own terms, what they have known for decades. He finds it especially significant that the Mars Pathfinder mission will release a 22-pound Rover vehicle at 19.5 degrees latitude on the Martian surface. NASA planners have landed spacecraft at 19.5 degree latitude on previous Martian and lunar missions, which Hoagland sees as evidence of knowledge known by the few and kept within the club, in that the coordinate may hold special but arcane planatalogical significance having to do with a fourth dimension and relative rotations between a planet's crust and core. The planatalogical mathematics, Hoagland has found, also turn up in the enigmatic designs of crop circles, intricate patterns impressed upon grain fields found in the British Isles and the United States, the stalks of which reveal structural alterations at the molecular level.

. . .Doing things. . .at that latitude strongly indicates you are aware of the physical significance of that latitude, but then why don't any of the national people publishing papers in the literature going back thirty years talk about it? Hoagland asked, implying that this knowledge had been deliberately kept from the public.

THE RUSSIA CARD

A Russian mission to Mars should arrive in the same time frame as the two American missions. The Russian spacecraft will enter into Martian orbit with cameras and drop Penetrators, javelin-like spacecraft that dig into the Martian soil and scan the surface. The Russians, in fact, have been interested in Mars, and possibly the Martian Sphinx, as Vladimir Avinsky called the Face on Mars, since the days of the cold war, possibly having signaled the West through an article in Soviet Life, an organ of the KGB, that the race was on to officially discover the ancient Martian monuments. Subsequently, the United States and Russia may have teamed up to explore Mars cooperatively. The article in Soviet Life, written by Avinsky and entitled The Pyramids of Mars, recommended such expeditions so that scientists could decide conclusively whether or not a complex of ancient pyramids exists on the Red Planet. And while Cydonia is a large area, perhaps as large as Texas, it seems more than coincidental that the Russian mission, leaving late this year, will land in that region.

It may not be our missions, it may be the Russian's that do it [photograph the Ruins], Hoagland told us, but not everybody can be controlled for all time. There are too many people looking, too many people participating, and too many people going there. If that's true, Hoagland believes, then NASA's only recourse is to claim as its own, politically speaking, Martian territory and what may be the discovery of extraterrestrial life, in the same way NASA took credit for finding the Martian meteor, when, according to Zechariah Sitchin, it was the Japanese who found the now-famous rock. That's what I project we are seeing happening, right before our eyes, Hoagland said. Recent cancellation of a manned mission to Mars seems to support Hoagland's view, in that controlling an astronaut, an eyewitness, may be far more difficult than controlling a camera and the photographs it sends back from Mars.

Hoagland obviously does not believe NASA or the United States government has dealt with the issue of extraterrestrial life honestly. He believes we are now witnessing an affirmation of that hypothesis. If that's true, he said, predictions can be made to test the hypothesis as events unfold.

The Mars missions leave late this year, he said, and the public will be able to monitor future actions and official statements about Mars, as well as inspect future photographs. Bill Clinton has for some reason put his reputation and the White House on the line. He has called a bi-partisan space summit on the theme The Search for Life on Mars. . . . He made a big deal that the Pathfinder mission will be landing on Mars on Independence Day (July 4, 1997). The next spacecraft gets there in September, which is Mars Surveyor. . .It will not be in position to photograph Cydonia officially, at the earliest, until January 1998. . .My bet is that between September and January they're going to be photographing the hell out of Cydonia, and that the press is not going to be looking for it. The press doesn't believe anybody else in government, but they believe NASA for some weird reason.

SITCHIN'S TAKE

Archeologist, scholar and researcher Zechariah Sitchin has written several books dealing with extraterrestrial involvement in human origins. Sitchin draws his views from his own interpretations of ancient Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Hebrew writings, his life's work, including The Gilgamesh Epic and The Old Testament. His cosmology of our solar system, as gleaned from these ancient texts and tablets, fills in large gaps in human pre-history that modern science has failed to explain, adding the factor of extraterrestrial genetic-engineering to the puzzle of human evolution. While emphasizing he does not speak for NASA, and that his views are his own, he told us that the Space Agency's recent announcements regarding the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe makes one wonder what they are up to.

The first puzzling thing about the NASA announcement [about microbes on Mars], Sitchin said, is that it is not a new thing at all. In Sitchin's book Genesis Revisited, written in the 1980s, he discussed NASA's now ten-year-old Martian meteorites. In his video, Are We Alone (In the Universe)?, he shows how the meteorites were found in Antarctica, collected, and then examined in a laboratory, pointing out that Japanese scientists, not Americans, first discovered them. Somehow, in the whole NASA story, Sitchin said, there's no credit given to the Japanese.

Sitchin also makes the point that in the press conference, which he saw as more of a controlled event rather than a true press conference, NASA's Daniel Goldin revealed the ultimate purpose of the microbes-on-Mars theory, which was to answer the question Are We Alone? In Sitchin's video, Dr. Cyril Panamburuma of the University of Maryland, a leader in the search for the origins of life, reveals that the discovery of essential amino acids and DNA nucleotides in meteorites have, for some time, clearly pointed toward the existence of life throughout the universe. So what NASA said [at the press conference] is not really news, Sitchin said. The news, rather, Sitchin told us, is that NASA said what it did, at this time, and that it is deliberately leading us toward the ultimate question, Are We Alone?

In regard to Wes Huntress circumspect statement that re-photographing Cydonia was a possibility, but not a priority, Sitchin finds this improbable, given that the curious land forms on Mars reveal themselves, in a way he says is obvious to casual observers, as being of artificial rather than natural construction. There are no straight lines in nature, he said. In nature everything meanders, seashores, mountainsides, rivers. . .But when you see a straight line, it's man-made, it's artificial. The photographs of Mars taken by NASA in the '70s reveal not just the famous face but ruins of other structures delineated by straight lines and right angles. Such phenomena exist, Sitchin said, not only in the Cydonia region but in many areas on the Martian surface. NASA has surely discerned the implications, he believes.

SECRET RUSSIAN PHOTOS OF MARS, AN ANCIENT SPACE BASE?

The ill-fated Soviet spacecraft, Phobos II, named after one of Mars small moons, sent photos of the Red Planet back to Moscow in 1989. Having acquired copies (a total of 38) of these photographs with great difficulty, Sitchin told us he has found a substantial amount of evidence for artificial development on Mars. One photograph reveals a grid, like that of a city. . .[with] streets, squares, rectangles which appears in both conventional and infra-red, heat-sensitive exposures. Another photograph reveals a mysterious elliptical shadow on the Martian surface, evidence, quite possibly, of something flying above the planet.

After having orbited Mars for about a month, Phobos II changed course to examine one of the planet's small moons, from which the spacecraft takes its name. Astrophysicists believe that Phobos, the small potato-shaped Martian moon, is hollow, in part because of a clearly discernible hole in the surface. Phobos, the spacecraft, was to hover above Phobos, the moon, at an altitude of only 100 feet. As Sitchin described it, the spacecraft was then to bombard the satellite with laser beams, part of a scientific experiment to establish the moon's density. But as Phobos II approached the Martian moon, taking photographs all the while, it went into a spin, ceased transmitting, and was lost.

I had obtained [all] the photographs, Sitchin said, except the last one. A few years later, a Soviet woman, Marina Popovitch, who was an officer in the Soviet Air Force and whose husband was a Soviet astronaut, showed the last photograph at a press conference arranged by the then Russian consulate in San Francisco. And that last photograph showed a missile-like object (emphasis added) hurtling toward the Soviet spacecraft. . . .Whether it was from the surface of Mars or from the moonlette is not clear from the photograph. . . But you see this missile-like object coming toward the spacecraft, and then it (Phobos II) went into a spin and stopped transmitting. This is all linked, of course, to the question of what happened to our spacecraft two years ago, the Mars Observer, that reached Mars, was supposed to start taking close-up pictures, and then vanished. That was never satisfactorily explained by NASA.

Given his discoveries, Sitchin believes NASA's purpose in returning to MARS, contrary to the statement made by NASA's Wes Huntress at the press conference, has been and remains photographing Cydonia, the ruins, and finding out who shot down the Soviet spacecraft, which Sitchin believes has to do with the reactivation of an ancient space-base on Mars.

All that has been brought out in my very first book The Twelfth Planet. I show a Sumerian cylinder-seal depiction that shows an astronaut on Mars extending greetings to an astronaut on Earth, and a spacecraft between the two planets. That depiction is about 4,500 years old, so the whole question of is there life on Mars? goes well beyond the question of microbes and goes well beyond a month, or whatever, (the time, as of this writing, since NASA's press conference). It goes back thousand of years. . . .I believe an ancient space-base has been reactivated.

Sitchin's and Hoagland's views about Mars, NASA and extraterrestrial life will soon be put to the test, as American and Russian spacecraft, armed with high-resolution cameras, embark later this year on missions to Mars. In late 1997 and 1998, if not earlier, these craft will hover above and land in Cydonia, provided they are not lost in the meantime. The photography beamed back to Earth through NASA's global network of antennae and computers may tell us, in an official sense, what Hoagland, Sitchin and others have asserted in books and on videos, that we are not alone in the universe, even that the science of human origins, of Darwinian evolution, premises upon which so much of modern science and academia rest, may have to be seriously reevaluated.

The Mars missions may also tell us, unofficially, that NASA has been in on the secret for some time.