Bauval and Hancock

The Mysterious Structures That May Upstage NASA’s Evidence of Martian Life
by Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock
(August 17-19, 1996 from the Daily Mail - London)

Could advanced life forms have existed on the Red Planet millions of years ago? Robert Bauval and bestselling author Graham Hancock, whose book, Fingerprints of the Gods, was the publishing phenomenon of last year, believe there is evidence to support this. Monumental structures on the planet's surface have mystified scientists for 20 years. Are they the result of natural processes... or the remains of a great civilization? Decide for yourself.

The sensational announcement that a fist-sized meteorite from Mars contains signs of life has so far been accepted by scientists as evidence that only "incredibly primitive" organisms may once have existed on the planet. Yet it could mean far more. The meteorite, billions of years old, is thought to have landed in Antarctica about 13,000 years ago after being "splashed off" the surface of Mars by a cosmic collision - probably with a comet - at least 15 million years ago. We know from our experience on Earth that life is always evolving to higher species. During the thousands of millions of years after that rock and its fossils formed on Mars there was ample time for incredibly primitive organisms to have become much more complex - perhaps even forms capable of developing a civilization. After all, the Earth and Mars are not thought to be much older than 4.5 billion years and the first incontrovertible evidence of life here - bacteria andalgae - does not appear in the fossil record until 3.1 billion years ago. From those primitive organisms, we evolved. So why should precisely the same sort of processes not have taken place on Mars?

What raises the stakes in such speculation is the existence of remarkable evidence that complex artificial structures - monuments, gigantic edifices - may have been built on Mars at some remote date. These structures, detected in NASA video images sent back by the Viking Orbiter in 1976, have never been photographed since but have become the focus of a widening controversy over the past 20 years. Because they include several enormous pyramids and a massive sphinx-like face, an apparently lunatic fringe argues that they must be the work of intelligent and technologically advanced beings. A civilization, in other words. Scientists have officially opposed this view, asserting that the structures are not structures at all but tandem geological patterns. Increasingly, however, even the most orthodox academics have begun to sound less sure.

Earlier this year, for example, several months before the discovery of signs of life in a Martian meteorite, Professor Car Sagan, of Cornell University in the U.S., made a significant admission. The "Face on Mars," he said, was "probably sculpted by slow geological processes over millions of years". Nevertheless, he also said: "I could be wrong. It's hard to be sure about a world we've seen so little of in extreme close-up." Sagan urged that forthcoming American and Russian missions to Mars should make a special effort "to look much more closely at the pyramids and at what some people call the "Face" and the "City." "These features merit closer attention. More detailed photographs of the 'Face' would surely settle issues of symmetry and help resolve the debate between geology and monumental structure."