How it goes down hill!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/farou...928161,00.html

Life on Mars

Mark Pilkington
Thursday August 11, 2005
The Guardian

No sooner had Nasa published images of an ice lake inside a crater on
the Martian plain Vastitas Borealis, than internet exo-archaeologists
were excitedly pointing out the crumbled ruins of a vast, ancient city
on the crater's banks.
Earthlings have been seeing things on Mars since at least 1877, when
Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli noted long, straight lines,
which he called canali, on the surface. Translated into English as
"canals", the markings led respected astronomer Percival Lowell to
propose the existence of an irrigation network, indicative of a
civilisation not unlike our own.

Ninety-nine years later Viking 1 beamed back images of Cydonia, what
may have been a coastal area in Mars' northern hemisphere. Among
several mountainous protrusions was what appeared to be a blank,
humanoid face wearing a hint of a smile and a crash helmet.

The image was singled out by Vince DiPietro and Greg Molenaar, who
cleaned it up and represented it to the world a few years later, this
time with the addition of a large pyramid. Their find drew the
attention of sometime Nasa consultant Richard Hoagland, who identified
more anomalies in the region, including walls, a "fort", several
smaller pyramids and something resembling the manmade mound Silbury
Hill. Through some fantastical over-interpretation by zealous
mytho-archaeologists, the Cydonian structures were soon being connected
to human sacred sites at Avebury in Wiltshire, and the pyramids and
sphinx at Giza, Egypt.

When Mars Global Surveyor was launched in 1996, Nasa agreed to settle
the debate by rephotographing the "face", once in 1998 and again in
2001, producing images 10 times sharper than Viking's originals. To the
dismay of its admirers, the images showed the face was actually a
raised plateau. While some diehards protested that Nasa's secret space
fleet had nuked the real face to prevent its exposure, most agreed that
the cyberman of Cydonia was a natural formation brought to life by a
trick of the light and 1970s digital imaging technology.

But, as Nasa continues to explore Mars, so do the armchair
exo-explorers, Arthur C Clarke included, who have added colossal sand
worms, beetles, numerous fossils and swaths of vegetation to the
increasingly crowded Martian environment