The pictures don't look any more artificial than the others, but they
are quite spectacular in their own right. I am looking at the bottom
of http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/target/CYD3/cydonia3m_mipl_bot.gif and
the variety of formations is amazing.
The region just to the left of the "fort", down towards the "main pyramid",
has some very interesting terrain. Hoagland described it like this in
his study of the Viking prints:
"I noticed a small smudge between the Fort and the main pyramid that
I hadn't caught before, just southwest of the abrupt and maddening
cutoff of the 'rocket motor' aspect of the Fort. I focused the
magnifying glass...
"And realized I was staring at a tiny pattern of honeycomb-like cells.
"Several seconds passed as I slowly comprehended what I was seeing.
Moving the magnifying glass down a bit I traced the 'honeycomb'
across the two-mile region which had nagged me for so long... and
saw the shadow of the main pyramid falling across this tiny region,
clearly outlining a raised, three-dimensional relief.
"And suddenly, it all fell into place.
"'Oh my God,' I said softly, in the night with no one to hear me
except the clock and the cat."
Hoagland interpreted this region as an open-topped pyramid honeycombed
with tiny cell-sized "rooms". He goes on to describe it as a multi
level structure, "decking" or "open girder framework" or "scaffolding".
Now the new pictures reveal that actually this terrain is covered with
small craters. It is more heavily cratered than anything else I have
seen in the Mars pictures, with craters touching craters in many places.
It must be very old terrain, perhaps protected from erosion by the large
structures nearby. It is this cratered area, which was not visible in the
Viking pictures as other than a hint of unusual texture in the surface,
which Hoagland interpreted as a honeycombed structure.
In a way it is to Hoagland's credit that his many hours of staring at
the Viking pictures identified this region as unusual. It's too bad
though that he immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was an
artificial construction.
Hal
