The so-called ‘tholus’
as seen in 1976

Other Martian ‘sites’

Claims for artificiality have been made for several other sites on Mars, mostly in the Cydonia Mensae region. The ‘tholus’ has already been mentioned, but there is little about its appearance to suggest an artificial origin. Whereas the 1976 Viking Orbiter photographs give it a smooth and near-circular appearance, the Mars Orbital Camera photograph frame m03/00766, taken on 4 July 1999 with a resolution of 3.11 m per pixel, makes it clear that the feature is entirely natural. There appear to be perhaps three relict shorelines around the feature that suggest it was once an island in the shallow ocean thought to have existed in this area in the remote past. There are also supposed to be further faces, an ‘Inca city’, runways and other features that cannot be explained in terms of geology. Again, many of these turn out to be based on enhancements of the Viking Orbiter images that cannot bear the weight of interpretation placed on them. Claims of this nature are not being made for the Mars Orbital Camera images, except for a few much smaller features that nevertheless also appear to be of geological origin. Much of the debate revolves around those features picked out from the Viking Orbiter photographs as being anomalous.

The ‘tholus’ as seen in 1998

There are at least two other claimed faces, in addition to the crater formation dubbed the ‘smiley face’ by NASA engineers keen to show that the original ‘Face’ was nothing more than an optical illusion. Neither of the two supposedly artificial faces is of a size comparable with the Cydonia Mensae formation, nor is either of them more than vaguely similar to a human face. Both are at very poor resolutions and both resemble pareidolic images of the face of Jesus seen in foliage. Similarly, there have been claims for images of dolphins. There is no need to examine these claims here, as most investigators outside the fringe have chosen to ignore them, and the claims rarely surface in the fringe literature (other than on websites whose content is often very bizarre). Claims have also been made for the existence of pyramids in Elysium Regio, but they suffer from exactly the same problems as the pyramids of Cydonia Mensae: poor resolution on the Viking Orbiter images and Mars Orbital Camera images that does not support the artificiality hypothesis.

On the other hand, the Mars Orbital Camera is revealing all manner of curious and unexpected formations. The discovery of such features as mottled surfaces apparently deriving from the partial erosion of light sand dunes exposing darker bedrock and so-called ‘glass tubes’ that seem to be volcanic in origin is important in adding significantly to our understanding of geomorphological (areomorphological?) processes on the planet. The Mars Sojourner roving vehicle also showed much the same sort of surface as the Viking landers had more than twenty years previously, but in greater detail and with the advantage of multiple perspectives. What is significant about recent photographs from the planet is the lack of visible artificial monuments, especially claimed new ‘sites’.

This page was last updated on 13 May 2007
Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews