Blackstar, please speak for yourself. I'm a layperson as well, and I don't think the pictures don't match up or anything suspicious is going on for which "they" have to give an explanation. Don't use "we" and "our" when you mean "I" and "mine".

__________________
Knowledge is a curse, but ignorance is worse

Even the Enterprise Mission folks disagree with the claim that the Face was altered between the Viking and MGS images.

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

That thing is a plateau, right? I think it would probably take something like several multi-megaton nuclear weapons to disfigure it.

Take a look here. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast24may_1.htm They look remarkably similar, to me.
Then you don't have any.

Do I need to cut a stamp out for this or something? The burden of proof is on you. You're the one with the hypothesis. How many times do we need to repeat that?

Interpreting natural looking features as natural is simply making use of science and logical reasoning, does this make someone "pro-Establishment"? Why is it "not scientific"?

Fallacy of argument from silence. What you you think was on them? Maybe they were just blank pictures.

Fallacy of guilt by association, or poisoning the well. During the Cold War, NASA was in a race with the Russians and everyone was keenly observing what they were up to out there at Baikonur. Now, do you care to answer these points I posed earlier:

Where is the evidence of a bomb explosion?
Where is the evidence a bomb was sent to Mars?
How was this bomb targetted?

__________________
"We need rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"

Can we add in my questions as well:

__________________

__________________
An open mind is like an open window...without a good screen you'll get all sorts of weird bugs!

Thanks for lively converasation! I crawl back under my rock now...

Your extensive response to our points has been duly noted. Do please stop by again when you have some evidence.

__________________
"We need rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"

I would guess that the disfiguring was done by the same people who broke all the noses off the Roman statues and broke Venus di Milo's arms.

__________________
At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

One would have to presume from the allegation that concealment of the "monument" on the surface of Mars was important enough to our government that we would *destroy* an artifact that would have to predate the most ancient histories of man on Earth. This must directly imply that we (our government) knew the nature of the artifact and that its destruction would have no lasting ramifications. Certainly no government agency would consider bombing it without knowing definitively what was under it that might be exposed by its destruction - where would we have gotten that knowledge? We would have to know that there were no possible technological marvels under the "face", which would require that

a) We had been there and checked for ourselves - I think it's pretty conclusive that we have not,

b) We were told by somebody else who knew (space aliens? Is this included in the gist of your post?) - and they were not at all bothered by us destroying such an ancient artifact, or

c) The government figured the removal of the facial features was of such great importance that it didn't matter what it contained or what the destruction uncovered - the face itself was too great a danger to allow it to remain.

Would you be willing to select a, b or c for me, or present your own theory about this?

__________________
If I'm wrong, you probably asked me the wrong question.

Thanks for all the information. I find that interesting ideas can come from exploring seemingly far-fetched or untenable ideas.

Yeep. So...NASA sends a bomb to hide a martian feature that only they will photograph. Doesn't it strike the OP this is going about it the long way around? Worse...from what the claiments say, the bomb failed to oblirate the feature, and left a big visible crater. So what does NASA do then...why, take a photograph of that and release it to the public!

Please, give me a couple hours and a copy of PhotoShop, and I'll save NASA a ton of money.

(For all those with a broken sarcasm detector, it still looks to me as it always has; an interesting geological feature with a slight resemblance to a face.)


This has to be the most typos I've ever committed on a single post. I think I'll just let this stand as another sort of disfigured monument.

__________________
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

That sounds like the image I see in the mirror every morning!

Me too. Besides, I doubt the Air Force have the smarts to put a bomb on target tup there even if they wanted to. It'd take away from JSF funds.

This thread finally turned me from a long time reader into a first time poster lol

Just a quick question for Blackstar, if the "face" really was something and NASA wanted to hush it up, wouldn't it have been easier to spend a bit of time with photoshop on the original pictures (or as you suggest they can just make pictures dissapear!) rather than trying to get a bomb big enough to desimate a 9 square mile area to Mars???

Also I'd be interested in why you think NASA would want to cover it up? Surely finding an ancient artifact of such enormity would help provide NASA with a huge amount of funding and public support??

First off...welcome to the board, Dragonbait!

It's a very good question, but you won't be receiving a reply from Blackstar...he has been banned.

__________________
"The facts gentlemen, and nothing but the facts, for careful eyes are narrowly watching." Isaac Asimov

Welcome Dragonbait. Interestingly your user has the same name as my hard drive. I guess we share a taste in books.

__________________
Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

I've just gotta ask because...well, I just don't know the answer, but is it unusual for a person to "name" their hard drive?

__________________
"The facts gentlemen, and nothing but the facts, for careful eyes are narrowly watching." Isaac Asimov

Yeah--I usually call mine "crap"

The name of my hard drive is called crap.

That isn't the name of the drive, of course. That's merely what the name is called.

__________________
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

I was wondering about that too. Names are usually reserved for computers on networks.

I've got my 160GB drive partitioned, so each is named DRV1_VOL1 ( C: ), etc. I suppose one could change those to something unique, but I already know which partition is used for what.

A friend once told me how she was so impressed when her husband asked her to come up with a name for her computer. She thought it was such a human touch for a person who was usually pretty much a rather mechanistic computer geek. I asked her if he was networking the computers in their house and if the OS was Windows NT 3.51 (this was a while ago). She said, "Yes, how did you know?" "Computers on a network have to have unique names, otherwise the network can't identify them. It has nothing to do with 'personalizing' anything. Instead it's a matter of necessity."

She seemed a little deflated after that.

__________________
A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

Heh. I name PCs for my home network, but I have a bit of fun with the names. An old PC happened to sound just like Orac from Blake's Seven when you shut it off due to the power supply fan, so, of course, it was named "Orac." I had two nearly identical PCs at one time, so they became Pollux and Castor ...

I usually name network drives after the PC, so you might have a Pollux_C or a Pollux_D. But sometimes I give them individual names.

By the way, for my next computer, I'm planning on an all-media system with some serious storage. I've already thought of a name: MAlpha (Memory Alpha).

__________________
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

LOL! Those are really good. I can almost hear those fan sounds as it winds down!

I had the home computers networked for a while. The one with max storage capacity was called "ATOZ".

__________________
A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

heh. I've always named my hard-drives. Cattie-Brie, Midnight, Dragonbait, Wulfgar.... If you're wondering, Forgotten Realms characters.

__________________
Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

Maksutov, I think your post was dead-on, however I doubt that with an object that large we'd notice any significant erosion during the relatively short time span (geologically speaking) between the two pics. Thus, lighting and resolution are the main factors.

Nor was your post trolling! Quite insightful, simple, yet elegant post of your informed opinion.

Agreed. Thanks for bringing up lighting. A good point (and one I missed). Lighting is a factor that not only affects our perception of the geometry and size of shapes, but their color as well.

I was just listing the actual forces working on the mesa. It's interesting though that the Mars Global Surveyor is seeing noticeable differences between our first observations of 30 years ago (and more recently) and the present. Here are some examples:

Link 1

Link 2

Plus anyone who has spent time in the mountains knows that steep slopes of loose material can let go suddenly, reconfiguring the landscape drastically in a matter of minutes. On Earth this has happened numerous times, for many of which I was able to witness the results, starting with a landslide that closed off New Hampshire Route 3 in Franconia Notch back in 1959 to the one that shut down I-40 for two months in 1998.

Some of those slopes on that mesa in Cydonia look like they've been subject to landslides. When these occurred, it's hard to tell. I suggest we send an expedition there to find out.

Thanks!

__________________
A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

But (since we are in Dodgson mode) what is it?

__________________
New Orion's Arm Site . The Starlark . Against a Diamond Sky (OA Novella Collection) . OA Flickr set

Further to that, what's the drive itself called?

__________________
"We need rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"

Basquiat and Turk-182 tell me that they are going to be tagging both the face and two little robots with some spray paint cans.

I name all my hard drive volumes (MacOS, you know...they don't have C: and so forth by default and you need some way to keep track of them). I'm not one of those silly people who names their drives after characters in some silly anime sentai show -- they have serious names like Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, and of course Moon.

__________________
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

I used to name computers in my department after lunar craters, but finally people complained when they couldn't remember how to spell Tsiolkovsky.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base