Thirty-three years ago, in one of the first images sent back from Mars, people thought they detected the likeness of a human face rising from the dust of the red planet. The photo was captured by Viking 1, the first spacecraft to successfully travel to and land on Mars.
The image inspired tabloid headlines like “Monkey Face on Mars” and books like Richard Hoagland’s The Monuments of Mars, in which Hoagland claimed, based on the photos, to have seen “an entire city laid out — on Mars! — with the precision of a Master Architect. I had indeed discovered some kind of artificially constructed Martian ‘complex.’”
Once the public saw the “Face on Mars,” as it came to be called, people became interested in the neighboring planet and possible life there. The trouble, says Smithsonian geologist John Grant of the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies, is that people assumed it was a sign of advanced alien life.
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