The Cydonia enigma has recently been given a very significant boost in the form of an endorsement by Hancock, Bauval and Grigsby in
The Mars Mystery.
Although mainly concerned with the possibility of the Earth being hit by an asteroid or comet, the authors accept not just the reality of Cydonia and other Martian anomalies, but also its encoded mathematical Message and connection with the ancient civilisations of Earth, particularly ancient Egypt. Once these alleged connections are scrutinised, though, great flaws appear in their logic. The basic argument is that, because there are pyramids and a Sphinx in both Giza and Cydonia, the two are connected. But of course that depends on the Face on Mars being a Sphinx. The Cydonia clique describe it as being Sphinx-like; indeed, James Hurtak was using such emotive language even before it was officially discovered.
This eagerness to call the Face a Sphinx is very odd. Even if the Face were genuinely artificial, the fact remains that it is just a face, not a lion’s body with a man’s head. Besides, the Face only ‘works’ because it stares out into space — the only angle from which we could recognise it - whereas, of course, the Sphinx can only be perceived from a position on Earth. This is no good for the Hoagland camp. They have to devise increasingly unlikely scenarios to fit their Face/Sphinx correlation, requiring some extremely tortuous reasoning. Hoagland states that, if the Face on Mars is divided down the middle, and each half is mirror-imaged on to the other, we achieve two, distinctly different new images. One, he claims, is ‘simian’ in appearance, the other ‘leonine’ — an anthropoid and a lion. The Great Sphinx at Giza is a man’s head on a lion’s body. Conclusion: we have two Sphinxes - in close proximity with pyramids — on both worlds!
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Serious problems are raised by this interpretation of the Face, and not merely the fact that the ‘simian’ looks, to us at least, much more like a cartoon dog, and the lion is similarly hard to see. One of the main problems with analysing the Face is that one half of it lies in deep shadow. Some of the image-enhancement techniques have been claimed to bring out certain details on the shadowed side, such as a second eye socket, but such claims are themselves controversial. There is no way in which the shadowed side can be reconstructed to show any fine detail, and certainly not half a lion’s face!
The argument about the Face may be extremely shaky, but the situation worsens when the clique tries to use linguistics to reinforce their case. Hoagland, and others such as Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval, make much of the fact that the name Cairo, in Arabic
Al Qahira,
means ‘Mars’.
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Hancock, Bauval and Grigsby go so far as to describe the naming as ‘inexplicable’.
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But in fact it is very easily explained. Al Qahira literally means ‘the Conqueror’, which was the Arab name for Mars.
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Cairo/Al Qahira was founded in 969 CE by the Fatimid general Jawhar al-Siqilli, following his conquest of Egypt. When the site of the new city was established it was noted that Mars was at an astrologically propitious point in the sky — and this, together with the fact that it was built to honour a conqueror, explains the choice of the name.
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It has no connection with any putative relationship between features on Mars and those on the Giza Plateau. In any case, Cairo was not always the capital of Egypt: until the time of the Crusades it was merely a satellite town of the more important city of Al Fustat.
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The populous suburbs of Cairo have only begun to nudge up to the Sphinx in the last fifty years. Before that, Giza was completely separate from Cairo, 6.5 miles (10 kilometres) out in the desert, effectively undermining the theory that connects Giza and Cairo/Mars.
Hancock, Bauval and Grigsby also point out that ‘Horakhti’, meaning ‘Horus of the Horizon’ — a name of the Sphinx - was also a term used by the ancient Egyptians for Mars. Their central argument in
Keeper of Genesis
was that Horakhti was a representation of the constellation of Leo, though. Which one is it to be?
Another linguistic ‘fact’ cited by Hoagland, Hancock and Bauval is that the original Egyptian name for Horus, Heru, also meant ‘face’, so Horakhti can, according to those authors, be translated as ‘Face of the Horizon’.
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Hoagland claims that, from the City of Cydonia, the Face would be seen on the horizon, so here we have a remarkable parallel. Two faces on the horizon, on two worlds ... But this is a highly contrived game: according to Wallis Budge’s
An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary
the two words, meaning ‘Horus’ and ‘face’, may sound the same phonetically (although as ancient Egyptian vowel sounds have to be guessed at, no one knows for certain), but that is as far as it goes.
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They are two entirely different words. It is like claiming that the English word ‘knight’ is interchangeable with the identical-sounding ‘night’. And in hieroglyphs the two words are ‘spelled’ entirely differently and represent totally different concepts. Besides, heru is plural, meaning ‘faces’, which significantly alters the hypothesis of Hoagland et al.
The advocates of the Mars — Egypt connection seem to be enthusiastically incestuous in their adoption of each other’s ideas and theories to prove their points and convey their message. Hoagland has eagerly taken up the New Egyptology, including that of John Anthony West, in support of his claims of a Mars — Egypt link. For example, he reports Robert Schoch’s redating of the Sphinx from water erosion, claiming that, like Hancock and Bauval, it is evidence for a much older date of construction than 7000 BCE.
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Hancock and Bauval based most of their arguments on Hoagland’s work and interpretation of the Mars material, which they seem to accept as if scientifically proven. Hoagland is given an especially warm acknowledgement in
Keeper of Genesis,
and it can therefore be assumed that the three had a close working relationship even at that relatively early stage in the development of Bauval and Hancock’s hypothesis.
Hoagland, too, had his much-admired source: Robert Temple’s
The Sirius Mystery,
which he has absorbed into his own belief system, lock, stock - and errors. For example, he often quotes the ‘fact’ that arq ur means ‘Sphinx’.
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This mistake - arising from that incorrect reading of Wallis Budge’s
An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary
— finds its way into the work of many of the Mars-Egypt proponents.
During his lecture at the United Nations in New York in February 1992 Hoagland stressed the significance of ‘radical new technologies’ that could be derived from the decoded Message of Cydonia. These claims rely on the challenging concept of hyperdimensionality.
Physicists today believe that the universe encompasses far more dimensions than just the four (three of space, one of time) we know about and perceive with our senses. The only way we can begin to visualise the concept of a multidimensional universe is by analogy. One of the best is that of an imaginary world called Flatland, a two-dimensional place inhabited by two-dimensional beings, where there is only length and breadth, no up or down - something like a sheet of paper.
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Imagine how Flatlanders would perceive a three-dimensional object that interacted with their world. For example, if a sphere passed through, the Flatlanders would only see it in cross-section; first a dot would appear, which would then become a circle that grows until the middle of the sphere passes through, and then it would decrease in size to become a dot again, and vanish. (No doubt such a ‘paranormal’ phenomenon would cause much consternation among Flatlanders and probably be hotly debated by learned Flatland societies as well as dismissed as a delusion by their ‘Skeptics’.) This analogy with the hypothetical Flatland enables us to understand that events taking place in the higher dimensions now acknowledged by theoretical physicists would have visible effects in our three-dimensional world, although the cause would remain beyond both our senses and even our most sophisticated instruments.
Physicists deal in such ‘extra’ dimensions because of certain phenomena associated with nuclear physics, although there is some debate about how many dimensions make up the universe. These hyperdimensions cannot be observed directly, since we and all our measuring devices are stuck in the three-dimensional universe, but they can be understood mathematically. Hoagland’s contention is that certain geometrical relationships in the Cydonia Complex are references to such hyperdimensional mathematics. The geometrical key is the repeated use of the angle of 19.5 degrees. For example, two sides of the D & M Pyramid are found at 19.5 degrees to Mars’s lines of latitude, and this angle recurs in the position of the small mounds in the same region.
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According to Hoagland - and others of like mind — 19.5 (more precisely, 19.47) degrees is significant because it is the tetrahedral constant, which means that it relates to the tetrahedron, the simplest of the regular solids, with four sides of equilateral triangles, including a triangular base. If this shape were put inside a sphere, for example a planet, with one point touching one of the poles, the other three points will each touch the surface at a latitude of 19.5 degrees on the opposite hemisphere. This is a fact.
It has been observed that on all the planets in the solar system where it is possible to see the surface — Venus, for example, is always covered with clouds — there is invariably some great disturbance caused by an upwelling of energy at either 19.5 degrees north or 19.5 degrees south of the equator. The great Red Spot of Jupiter is located at this position. On Mars, Olympus Mons, the largest known volcano in the solar system (350 miles across), lies at 19.5 degrees north. On Earth, it is the location of the heavily volcanic islands of Hawaii, and the largest volcano on the planet, Mauna Loa.
The phenomenon of 19.5 degrees is thought to result from the rotation of the planets, being in effect a ‘shadow’ of highly potent forces of higher dimensions. In other words, the site of 19.5 degrees is a point where the other dimensions break through, becoming manifest in the three-dimensional world as a revelation of hyperdimensional forces.
This, claims Hoagland, is why the 19.5-degree angle recurs so often in Cydonia. It is a clue intended to lead us to an understanding of the hyperdimensional cause of the planetary upwellings of energy responsible for Jupiter’s Red Spot and Mars’s Olympus Mons. This in turn enables us to appreciate hyperdimensional physics. Hoagland argues that if the energy generated by higher dimensions can be tapped, we will have an unlimited source of power as well as the ability to develop such technologies as antigravity propulsion devices and interstellar space travel. These technologies, he believes, will solve many of the world’s problems and bring about, in his words, a ‘new world order’.
There are problems with this. Even in Hoagland’s lecture to the United Nations, where he talks at length about the importance of 19.5 degrees and tetrahedral geometry, he admits that the upwelling of planetary energies at these points had already been worked out years before by mathematicians dealing in hyperdimensions. The Message of Cydonia, in fact, merely repeats what very terrestrial scientists have known for years.
More importantly, Hoagland and Erol Torun drew a number of significant conclusions from Cydonia’s latitude. One of their key claims is that the latitude of the D & M Pyramid — 40.868 degrees north — was not only chosen because it embodied important mathematical concepts (being the tangent of the exponential constant e divided by pi), but also because the same concepts appear in the geometry of other features of Cydonia. The complex is therefore, they concluded, ‘self-referencing’, which means that the mathematics in the ‘buildings’ relate to the Complex’s position on the planet, proving that none of it is a mere coincidence.
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A difficulty arises as the co-ordinates for surface features based on the Viking survey have a marked margin of error. They are certainly not precise enough to fix a feature’s latitude to three decimal places of a degree. New, and more accurate data from Mars Global Surveyor suggests that all the previous figures should be revised so that the features are in fact slightly closer to the Martian equator, meaning that the D & M Pyramid stands at 40.7 degrees north.
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This is not particularly significant in itself (it represents an error of approximately 17 kilometres on the ground), but it is enough to invalidate the precise mathematical relationships of Hoagland’s theory.
In addition, other researchers, such as Tom Van Flandern of the US Naval Observatory, have pointed out that it is accepted that the Martian poles have shifted significantly over millions of years, so Cydonia has not always been located at that latitude.
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(Interestingly, Van Flandern has calculated that, before the pole shift, Cydonia would have been on Mars’s equator.) There is also evidence that Mars’s crust has ‘slipped’ several times because of ‘crustal displacement’, again changing the position of the Cydonia region.
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Even the theoretical harnessing of the energy generated by hyperdimensional forces - as hypothesised by Hoagland — is nothing new, although there are no known ways to actually do so — and the Message of Cydonia does nothing to enlighten us about this. Neither does it even hint how workable technologies might be developed from harnessing this energy. The ‘amazing’ geometry of Cydonia has added nothing to our understanding — of Mars, Martians or of mankind.
The Hoagland camp’s confident theorising does not stop there. When Hoagland’s colleague David Myers claims that a line running from a particular mark on the D & M Pyramid to a ‘teardrop’ on the Face measures exactly 1/360th of the diameter of Mars
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(thus ‘proving’, incidentally, that the builders must have used the same system of measuring angles as ourselves), he is truly on a slippery slope. There is no justification for choosing to join these two insignificant points up except that they are, for Myers, the required distance apart. One would eventually find two points that would oblige somewhere in Cydonia.