To "Face" or not to "Face"?

Left: negative of the Face as seen by the MGS spacecraft in April, 1998. Center: Lighting source switched from SE to NW. Right: Viewing angle switched from 45° west to overhead.

As a direct consequence of this act, it has become extraordinarily difficult to get material on this subject considered in the scientific community. For example, a technical abstract on the subject of Cydonia submitted by this author in the summer of 1998 for oral presentation to the Division of Planetary Science (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society was rejected. This was the only rejection of an abstract by a member in good standing at this meeting, with over 600 other abstracts accepted. Rejection of a member-submitted abstract is a rare event (unprecedented for this author) because presentation of papers before peers is the primary means of getting feedback before submitting written versions of papers to journals for peer review, and because justification of conclusions is not normally provided in an abstract. The DPS abstract review committee based its decision on the evidence they had seen with their own eyes in the image released by JPL-PIO to the media. On appeal, they reversed their decision and accepted the abstract for a late poster paper; but the damage had already been done. The subject matter of Cydonia and the “Face” on Mars was by then on a list of topics not suitable for consideration by certain mainstream technical journals such as Nature magazine. By editorial policy, papers on the subject of the “Face” can no longer receive peer review at that magazine.

Whatever your opinion about the artificiality of the “Face” may be, and whatever the actual merits of the issue may be, it seems beyond dispute that allowing world opinion to be based on the image in Figure 3 was scientifically inappropriate. When considering why this happened, we appear to be left with an unhappy choice between dishonesty and incompetence.