by John Kettler

 

On September 11 Richard Hoagland and his Enterprise Mission flung a gauntlet squarely into NASA's face. The challenge was twofold. First, there was a morning protest on the traffic island directly opposite the main entrance to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena to demand NASA change its priorities and re-image Cydonia now! The second, held at the Pasadena Double Tree Hotel, was an eight-hour conference with evidence alleging that NASA has systematically censored and suppressed Pathfinder imagery to hide unambiguous evidence of a purported advanced, long-extinct Martian civilization. Additional charges were also made and evidence presented that NASA has been pursuing a hidden agenda on Mars, one allegedly involving weapons and the occult!

Admittedly, the above is a bit much for one paragraph, but nonetheless, it fairly represents what happened on the very date that NASA's Mars Surveyor entered Martian orbit. The timing was no accident.

Designed explicitly to embarrass NASA, steal its publicity thunder, and garner national attention for the cause of obtaining high resolution imagery from the newly arriving Mars Surveyor of the Cydonia region, site of the Face and many other anomalies, the protest was already underway by 9:15 a.m. when California sculptor and Cydonia enthusiast Kynthia arrived. Under the cameras of CNN, NBC, and local affiliates, the protesters first confined themselves to the traffic island. Later, Kynthia and Rick Savard, founder of the Near Pathfinder Anomaly Analysis Group, decided to have the protesters parade in the crosswalk while the walk sign was lit, returning to the island when the light changed. The tactic apparently succeeded in distracting the JPL security people. When six frustrated officers and several security vehicles confronted the protesters, Kynthia countered with the question, Do you want to arrest us for crossing the street with the light (while) on national TV? They didn't.

The protest, however, was peaceful and orderly throughout, so much so that upon conclusion the protesters thanked the officers and shook hands.

By 7 p.m. 600 people had convened to see and hear the latest Martian revelations. Most stayed until 3 a.m. the following morning. The videotapes, combined with Hoagland's Phoenix Conference, will be out, hopefully, before Christmas.

Within minutes Hoagland charged NASA with covering up nothing less than the confirmed existence of an ancient, now-extinct civilization on the planet Mars.

That is a grave charge, which, no doubt, is why the next eight hours were spent presenting purported proofs of such a civilization, and that NASA knew of it and was hiding that paradigm-shattering revelation.

Hoagland briefed the audience on the nature and capabilities of the Mars Surveyor, spending some time explaining how the highly elliptical insertion orbit would gradually be circularized. But, he insisted, in spite of repeated requests, NASA had no intention of imaging Cydonia from the Mars Surveyor at high resolution. Hoagland's assertion is based on the agency's cumulative public statements to date. NASA's approach to serving the public he finds novel in the extreme reimage Cydonia as part of a complete planetary mapping exercise at nearly five times less resolution than the original Viking imagery that first revealed the Face!

The question being asked by the public: If NASA has nothing to hide, then why won't it publicly commit to taking high resolution imagery of Cydonia, especially the Face, and provide an independent, verifiable, guaranteed procedure for same-day public release of the new imagery?

Readers will recall that the Mars Observer was supposed to take care of this issue back in 1993, only to be tragically lost fourteen hours from Mars orbit entry. This disaster was, according to Hoagland, reported by NASA directly to the Associated Press right after he had concluded a Good Morning America segment in which he had pressed for Cydonia and surrounds to be imaged at high resolution. AP was told NASA had lost contact fourteen hours prior. The Mars Observer team was informed after AP.

What followed was even spookier. On August 22, three days after the supposed loss of Mars Observer, Hoagland received four independent calls from NASA insiders with the same story. Mars Observer was okay, but had been taken stealth gone covert. This, it was felt, defeated the public pressure to reimage Cydonia and allowed NASA to quietly go about its real agenda, whatever that was.

Hoagland proceeded to lay out what he believes the agenda to be, emphasizing that it is a work in progress. He also pointed out that he had deliberately kept fellow researchers in the dark, so as not to bias their conclusions.

Hoagland introduced David John Oates, discoverer of Reverse Speech, believed by some to be a powerful new tool for learning the truth by analyzing the unconscious side of recorded human speech. He also introduced Rick Savard, of the recently formed Near Pathfinder Anomaly Analysis Group. Ronald Nicks, a registered geologist, professional geologist, and certified engineering geologist, was unable to attend, but was represented by homemade video. The final leg of the analysis effort came from Nick Skouras, whose years of careful research would shed light on a hitherto unsuspected dark side of the origin of JPL purported occult connections between its founder and the black magic of Aleister Crowley, and how they related to an alleged hidden agenda by NASA on Mars.

Hoagland's analysis seemed to have plenty of corroboration. Several times one researcher's stunning discovery would be confirmed by another's work.

Hoagland went on to detail the data path of the imagery from Mars to Earth, covering digital image processing and how the images were treated to extract information from them. To support charges of a cover-up, he produced extensive evidence of image tampering, including digital wallpaper to hide important areas, image cloning, image splitting, image removal in one notable case leaving a pronounced gap in the Martian horizon and deliberate mis- registration of color. Readers may recall detecting a transformation in the Martian landscape after the first color images came in from the crisp orange red soil and blue sky like the American Southwest, to something less natural looking.

Hoagland suggested that such crudity (in an era of seamless special effects) proved internal dissent in NASA and was an indication that something important was being covertly signaled. Using TV clips of JPL personnel, Hoagland attempted to demonstrate that they did not expect either the quantity of images received or the coverage. The original plan, he suggested, was merely to image the petals of the Pathfinder, in order to make sure Sojourner could debark unhindered by airbags. This led Hoagland to conclude that a revolt was occurring within NASA, since the software had to be written well before Pathfinder was launched. The camera sequence was preprogrammed before the mission, not commanded from Earth.

Ronald Nicks' video then made the point that there is no such thing as Martian geology per se, only Earth geology applied to Mars. In other words, the same geologic processes operating on Earth are assumed to operate on Mars.

Nicks found a whole series of things unexplainable by current geological theory for example, evidence of faceting on the left peak of the famous Twin Peaks, as well as possible terracing on the right peak. The suggestion is that the peaks may not be natural, but are, in fact, remains of two different types of pyramids, an Egyptian on the left and a Mesoamerican on the right, both severely eroded. Reinforcing this notion is reported orthogonality (right angles) on the right peak. Orthogonality is not common in nature. When it does occur, it typically does not occur on only one geological structure in a group, as is the case with the Twin Peaks.

The next shock came when Nicks checked individual rocks and clusters. One looked like a building cornice, with what appeared, from the writer's perspective, to be a bright, flat ribbon cable running atop it. The so-called cornice made no less than three right angle turns and was significantly taller than it was wide, resembling a beam in its proportions. On the black and white image the primary structure appeared dark gray, with the ribbon cable a dazzling, distinctive white. Another appeared to be a missile nose cone, complete with bits of debris protruding from its base. Other images presented by Nicks were carefully considered as potential geological occurrences. His conclusion: there was no way to explain the array of apparently structured objects with known geological processes. In fact, the suggestion accepted by the audience was that the objects most resembled a collection of technological debris.

The next came David John Oates with a whole new discipline of his own creation, Reverse Speech, a tool for detecting the hidden subtext of human speech, often expressed as metaphors and Jungian archetypes. It also serves as an effective but noninvasive lie detector.

In the course of normal forward speech we unconsciously every 10-15 seconds typically also utter backwards phrases and sometimes complete sentences which reveal what we are really thinking. The theory grew out of careful investigation into claims that Satanic messages were being reverse recorded onto rock and roll records. He found that there were messages, but that, except for the Beatles album, they were unintentional and not Satanic, covering a variety of subjects. Intrigued, and aided by a backwards playing Walkman (it had fallen into a toilet and never played normally again), he began to explore this strange new terrain. To date, he has spent over thirteen years at it and published three books, with two more due out this year.

Reverse Speech is in active use in applications ranging from child psychology to criminology. According to Hoagland's sources, Reverse Speech was used in a Congressional subcommittee and at least one intelligence agency as of 1988. Oates first published his work in 1987, but Hoagland had not heard of him until a recent appearance on Art Bell.

Oates provoked a laugh with one of his first examples of Reverse Speech. It concerned a partner who assured him of support for a book. The reversal said: I'm full of (expletive deleted). Far less amusing was the reversal of Bill Clinton's response to charges of dishonesty: Denied the habits and I said damn ya. Consider, too, the reversals at the Air Force's June 24, 1997, Roswell press conference in which the statement "We'll roll a short video" becomes "We faked it" and another affirming that "Once the public reads the report..." is even more specific: "And it's not true".

Oates soon noticed another level of reality in various space related audio coverage at press conferences and on talk radio. He started encountering references to weaponry, these on a supposedly peaceful scientific mission. What place do phrases such as Hide the weapon, Flyby the weapon, and Now it's safe. May research save that gun have in the mouths of NASA scientists and officials? A dumbfounded Oates found out at the conference when Hoagland interrupted and posted some dismaying images.

His researches, Hoagland said, had turned up evidence of weaponry, some present on Mars as apparently alien artifacts, and one which was covertly brought along with the Mars Pathfinder. According to Hoagland, the extra, unplanned-for weight caused the Pathfinder to overshoot its planned landing site by some forty miles. Unfortunately for NASA, it landed in the middle of an alien debris field.

Hoagland cautioned the audience not to assume the Martians were like us. The artifacts he claimed to have found were only a few feet long but were recognizably martial. Gun emplacements and the shattered remnants of a tank seemed apparent to this writer, a former military analyst. One of the vehicles looked very much like a World War II German Panzer I, right down to its peculiar track work. Others seen in the vicinity looked like a World War I rhomboid tank and a U.S. M-48 of 1960s vintage. Whatever these things were, it seems that in later frames they received the full NASA disinformation treatment in which they were made to disappear as apparent alien artifacts.

Worse was to come. Hoagland had a direct answer to the reverse speech quote Hide the weapon. He showed what he said was a stowaway on Pathfinder, a stowaway whose protective shroud was the reason for the problems debarking the Sojourner. His evidence lay in a high resolution color image and in several black and whites where a hinged lid like a clamshell can be seen. Housed within the assembly was what Hoagland said was a Searl disk, an electrogravitic craft, in plain English, a flying saucer using antigravity. It certainly looked like one. In any event, it was easy to see what appeared to be various efforts in the pictures to make it go away.

Oates said he had been extremely disturbed by bizarre occult references in the audio he analyzed. What was he to make of such reversals as Did you accept the Goddess? and Who will meet God? Nor was the cryptic advice It helps to see hidden particularly useful when he encountered Reveal the dark city combined with And the white man's skull we see it now hidden.

Imagine how he felt when yet another Hoagland rabbit was produced. This time an image of a plaque on the Pathfinder Lander, which had what appeared to be a flying saucer, a human skull, and an observatory dome upon it. The first two were fairly easy to see in the raw image, but the dome did not show up as well.

One leaked image was shot on a day in which, officially, no imagery was taken. Intrigued, Hoagland checked JPL's full-scale sandbox model. It had a plaque frame, but no plaque. Hmm.

The missing link came from Nick Skouras, whose independent research showed that John Whitesides Parsons, founder of JPL, was a devoted student of the notorious black magician Aleister Crowley and his Ordo Templi Orientis (Order of the Eastern Temple). Crowley personally made him head of the Pasadena lodge. Interestingly, some major themes in Crowley's life were war, prophecy, Mars, aliens, communion with the gods, even tanks! All of these elements repeatedly show up in the analyses presented at the Pasadena Conference. The American people would like to know why.

Helpful Web Sites

The Enterprise Mission (Richard Hoagland) http://www.enterprisemission.com  
Planetary Mysteries (Kynthia; Hoagland mirror site, Robert Fiertek) http://www.planetarymysteries.com 
Reverse Speech (David John Oates, Reverse Speech Enterprises) http://www.reversespeech.com 
Face on Mars Home Page (Dr. Mark Carlotto) http://www.psrw.com/~markc/marshome.html 
The McDaniel Report Newsletter (Stan McDaniel) http://www.mcdanielreport.com 
The D&M Pyramid of Mars (Erol Torun) http://www.well.com/user/etorun/pyramid.html 
Bruce Cornet, Ph.D http://www.orionworks.com/bcornet 
In Search Of (R. Daniel Woolman) http://www.in-search-of.com 

Note: The writer called both CNN and JPL repeatedly in an effort to check the claims made by the conference presenters and give both CNN and JPL an opportunity to present their views. Neither provided a usable response (either pro or con) by the time this story was filed. CNN did at least call back, but the individual had obviously gotten a garbled request, resulting in a useless response for the wrong day. A follow-up call from this writer correcting the garble brought no further response from CNN.