On Wednesday, July 21, 1999 5:40 <Alintelbot@aol.com> wrote:
>I honestly think this issue is an emotional/social one; the nature of the
>Cydonian formations is a secondary issue at best. Paul was right in his
post
>of a few days ago. I have the distinct impression of being rejected by a
>hive mentality. The name-calling, the repeated refusal to correctly read
my
>posts...it's all characteristic of a communal aversion response. It's a
>shame that the minds behind these posts can't excavate far enough behind
the
>"laughter curtain" that's been built around the subject; there's real meat
at
>the heart of this issue (near-mantric references to Richard Hoagland and
>conspiracy theories aside), and while no one cares (or, more accurately,
>wants to care--which is excusable, but only to a degree), I'm not going to
>cave in.
>Examining planetary surfaces for ET artifacts is completely legitimate (it
>was, ironically, one of the stated agendas of the Viking mission). The
>business about Cydonia that causes the uproar among the self-proclaimed
>rationalists is that the "Face" is a face. If it's real--a big "if,"
>naturally--then some sort of terrestrial connection seems in order, and
>mainstream science just isn't equipped to deal with such an absurd prospect
>after "Chariots of the Gods" and countless other pseudoscientific attempts
to
>prove we're not alone. And so we've isolated ourselves to the possibility:
>if I mention a group of actual no-kidding scientists who are working on the
>subject, they're labeled "crackpots" or misguided hucksters.
>I'm apparently the only person on this list who _doesn't_ know if the
"Face"
>is artificial or not. Everyone else, it seems, has been there already and
>subjected the Cydonian enigmas to their own hands-on reality tests. In a
>perverse way, I envy their certainty.
I don't think it's a matter of certainty, but, in all likelihood, the Face is what the recent higher resolution photos have shown it to be, i.e., just a artefact of lower resolution imaging. I don't know about becoming a scholar of the subject... I mean, by the same token, should one also examine every case of the Virgin Mary appearing -- on the off chance that the latest one might actually be for real?
It's not a matter of sticking with the status quo... Surely, some people who reject your views are doing just that... But to use "status quo" is not going to advance this discussion. After all, if the polls are correct, there are large numbers of people who do believe in UFOs, alien abductions, etc. They are part of the status quo too. They have their magazines, their journals, their experts, their culture, their in group...
>I've said before that it's neither my intention nor my hope to "change
>anyone's mind" re. the "Face" (which, I should reiterate, is but one of the
>peculiar formations in the region and--to some researchers--one of the
least
>interesting!) I agree absolutely with the poster who asserted that the
"keep
>an open mind" crowd were a bunch of self-contradictory kooks. You can't
keep
>an "open mind" about everything. You _can_, however, keep a kind of mental
>gray basket for phenomena for which you have insufficient evidence.
There's
>nothing wimpy or un-extropian about this, and it's certainly as divorced as
>can be from the "I Want to Believe" mentality (with which my stand on
Cydonia
>has been confused by several reportedly intelligent people).
Fair enough.
>Fact: Throughout Cydonia there are bisymmetric formations perched on
crater
>rims, without any sign of being affected by impact ejecta (in fact, they
look
>quite sharp and relatively "new"-looking). These features (the "Cliff"
>feature to the far right of the "Face" and sharing its orientation, and the
>"Crater Pyramid," farther south and easily the tallest structure in a
>100-mile radius), are set at right angles to their respective craters.
>Faulting, etc. has been ruled out. Whatever these things are, they formed
>_after_ the meteor impacts. How? This is an unanswered question, and one
>that doesn't involve tedious bickering about facial resemblances and
pattern
>interpolation (as valid as this discussion can be when done
democratically).
>
>Prediction: List members who don't know what the hell I'm even referring
to
>will inundate this list with "skeptical" griping (and will probably work in
>the word "crackpot" while they're at it).
>The bottom line is that there is reason to seriously consider possible ET
>ruins on Mars. The "Face," at this point, becomes almost immaterial, the
tip
>of a vast iceberg of unprecedented weirdness that has yet to be explained
>geologically.
The short of it is this. It's a whole world. Imagine if instead of living on Earth, we lived on Mars and then started sending probes to Earth, say, a billion years ago. We'd spot a world with lots of things that could be classed as "unprecedented weirdness" such as plate tectonics. Imagine Martians trying to explain Earth's geology when all they had the bias of first understanding Martian processes (which seem to point to a catastrphic era of heavy water erosion followed by a longer drier period of mainly wind erosion and, of course, cratering). They might point the lack of craters as evidence of intelligence at work...
>Fortunately, we're dealing with objects we can demystify _this
>year_, with the Mars Global Surveyor.
And speaking of which, Cydonia is one of my favorite trance artists.:)
Daniel Ust
Check out the latest updates at:
http://mars.superlink.net/neptune/