The headlines of April 8, 1998 left little room for negotiation: "Mars
romantics face the truth -- there's nothing out there" (The Australian);
"Images form Mars scuttle face theory" (Courier-Mail). According to the
reports, the infamous Face on Mars mystery has finally been solved. But has
it? Such forceful pro-NASA/anti-anomaly media coverage should, rather than
settle us into complacency, set mental alarm bells ringing. We should be
asking the (interestingly portentous) question: if NASA did discover a Face
on Mars, would they admit it? This paper suggests the answer is 'no'.
In his essay "Social Intelligence about Hidden Events", sociologist Ron
Westrum noted that if a person perceives a phenomenon that the person's
society deems impossible, then the socially determined implausibility of the
observation will cause the observer to doubt his or her own perceptions,
leading to the denial or misidentification of the phenomenon (McLeod et al.,
156). When Europeans arrived in Australia and sent back descriptions of a
particularly bizarre creature they encountered here -- eventually named a
'platypus' -- biologists initially refused to believe it existed. Although
Australia was (to Europeans) an alien environment in which new, and perhaps
even radical, discoveries were expected and desired, an egg-laying furry
underwater animal with a duck's bill, four webbed feet and a poisonous spike
on its heel was just too much to handle. It was 'unacceptably new'.
We have, as this example shows, heavy expectations about the future and the
new, and are often reluctant to accept developments which differ radically
from those expectations. For western culture, the exploration of space --
the final frontier -- has become synonymous with progress, with future and
the new, and with moving away from a past and towards or into a future about
which we already have many expectations. One particularly brutal violation of
this conception of progress and the comfort of a confinable and predictable
future would be the discovery of a 1.5 mile long, 1.2 mile wide humanoid
face carved into the surface of Mars, staring back out into space (as was
apparently photographed by the NASA Viking probe in 1976). It's hardly
surprising, then, that the social institution perhaps most entrusted with
propagating the dominant construction of the new and the future -- NASA --
should be the most ardent anti-Face voice in the controversy. (Readers
interested in NASA's role in 'playing down' public curiosity in the Face and
adjoining pyramids are recommended Professor Stanley V. McDaniel's The
McDaniel Report, in which he cites many examples of NASA's deliberate
misrepresentation of the geological and geometrical data gathered concerning
the Cydonia region on Mars).
Official confirmation of artificial pyramidal and humanoid structures on Mars
would essentially dissolve dominant constructions of human civilisation's
past and future. We would be forced to confront the possibilities that human
civilisation has either had contact with extraterrestrial life some time in
its past, or that humans have been capable of space travel and
interplanetary colonisation before humans were thought to have even existed.
Our 'present' would be equally damaged; our most cherished 'new' technologies
would re-appear as inferior versions of those already developed -- they
wouldn't be 'new' at all. The cultural (not to mention psychological)
repercussions would be extreme. It is highly unlikely then, were such
objects photographed clearly enough to remove uncertainty as to the nature
of their origin, that NASA would release those photographs, since such a
discovery would severely threaten its claim (and the scientific tradition it
represents) to a monopoly of true descriptions of the nature of the physical
world and the public position of science (Westrum, "UFOs" 272).
I suggest that NASA's role in the public debate about the Martian enigmas
should be approached with extreme scepticism. NASA's treatment of the Viking
frames has indicated its willingness to misrepresent the data in a deliberate
attempt to suppress public support of further investigation. Some reasons why
NASA might take this course of action have been suggested above. We need not
succumb to 'conspiracy theory' to explain NASA's behaviour, as conventional,
if discomforting, sociological explanations are both simpler and more easily
applied. Depending on how much power we afford prestige, we may or may not
choose to accept the most recent NASA photographs of the Face as definitive.
What we should not overlook, though, is that we do have a choice.
References
Bull, Sandra. "Images from Mars Scuttle Face Theory." The Courier-Mail 8
April 1998.
Leech, Graeme. "Mars Romantics Face the Truth: There's Nothing Out There."
The Australian 8 April 1998.
McDaniel, Stanley V. The McDaniel Report: On the Failure of Executive,
Congressional and Scientific Responsibility in Investigating Possible
Evidence of Artificial Structures on the Surface of Mars and in Setting
Mission Priorities for NASA's Mars Exploration Program.. Berkeley: North
Atlantic, 1993.
Westrum, Ron. "Social Intelligence about Anomalies: The Case of UFOs." Social
Studies of Science 7 (1977): 271-302.
Westrum, Ron. "Social Intelligence about Hidden Events" (1982) qtd. in
McLeod, Caroline, Barbara Corbisier, and John E. Mack, "A More Parsimonious
Explanation for UFO Abduction." Psychological Inquiry 7 (1996): 156-68.
Citation reference for this article
MLA style:
Adam Dodd. "Unacceptably New: Cultural Factors in the 'Face on Mars'
Controversy." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.1 (1998). [your date of
access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/mars.php>.
Chicago style:
Adam Dodd, "Unacceptably New: Cultural Factors in the 'Face on Mars'
Controversy," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 1 (1998),
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/mars.php> ([your date of access]).
APA style:
Adam Dodd. (1998) Unacceptably new: cultural factors in the 'face on Mars'
controversy. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/mars.php> ([your date of access]).
The Personality Panorama: Conceptualizing Personality through Big Behavioural Data