War or Flood

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)

If there was a civilization on Mars capable of creating such monuments, then what might have happened to it? Since extensive damage typical of explosive penetration is apparent on some of the structures, notably the "D&M Pyramid," more than one researcher has suggested that the Martians might have destroyed themselves in a suicidal war. A geological cataclysm is another possibility. Analysis of the Martian meteorite suggests the Red Planet was warm and wet - an environment that is likely to have been hospitable to life. Today, it is permanently frozen. The change may have been caused by a very large and rapid slippage of Mars's outer crust, a phenomenon which has also been cited as a possible cause of the cataclysmic end of Earth's last Ice Age 13,000 years ago. Evidence reported in Scientific American in 1985 confirms that Mars did at some unknown stage in its history, suffer a catastrophic crustal displacement. If this had happened during the planet's warm and wet phase, any civilization present at that time would almost certainly have been wiped out in the ensuing global floods and earthquakes, leaving behind only whatever scattered ruins and monuments were massive and stable enough to survive.

The pyramids and the sphinx on Mars seem to fit the bill. And if they are artificial, then the implications for our idea of ourselves and our place in the universe are shattering. One top priority in President Bill Clinton's recently announced program of intensified Mars exploration should be a mission to find out for sure, particularly so since NASA has hitherto refused to include Cydonia in the list of more than 150 sites of scientific interest that it recognizes officially on Mars. Similarly, investigators would be unwise to ignore the fact that there is a region very like Cydonia on Earth - Egypt's famous Giza plateau -- which has its own distinctive pyramids and Sphinx. Associated with these ancient monuments is a tradition that they were built by an antediluvian race as repositories for scrolls and books of past ages, and intended "to prevent the ancient wisdom from being lost in the Flood." Could that flood have been the cataclysmic 400 ft. rise in sea levels that we know took place 13,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age? And could there be some sort of bizarre interplanetary connection, not yet understood, between the story of civilization on Earth and on Mars?