April 14, 1998: Mars Images - Richard C. Hoagland & Dr. Tom Van Flandern
Dr. Van Flandern presents his statistical analysis, concluding that the odds of these features appearing by chance in their correct size, shape, and orientation are approximately one in a billion. He declares this the strongest conclusion of his 35-year career. Hoagland adds that fractal analysis reveals complex rectilinear substructures on the mesa, suggesting an architectural origin rather than natural erosion.
The program also covers the just-received second Cydonia imaging pass over the area known as the city. Geologist Ron Nix joins to confirm geometric patterns inconsistent with natural processes. Hoagland identifies what he calls an obviously technological object amid the ruins and notes that President Clinton's visit to NASA that same day may signal a move toward disclosure.
Key Moments
Van Flandern: 'no longer room for reasonable doubt' on the face mesa: After Mark Carlotto enhances what was thought to be irretrievably bad MGS data and overlays it with the original Viking face data, Dr. Thomas Van Flandern states 'in my considered opinion, there is no longer room for reasonable doubt of the artificial origin of the face mesa' - a conclusion he says he has never reached about anything in 35 years of science.
Carlotto's fractal analysis: face is the most non-fractal feature for thousands of square miles: Hoagland describes how Carlotto's fractal-analysis algorithm - the same self-similarity technique used in Desert Storm to find Saddam Hussein's tanks in the desert - flagged the face on Mars as the most non-fractal, non-self-similar object across thousands of square miles of Cydonia imagery.
April 14 imaging strip across the City pyramid complex: Hoagland reports that today MGS imaged a 2-mile-by-14-mile strip across the City complex of Cydonia - missing the City Square (four Giza-sized pyramids) by about two miles to the west, but capturing massive collapsed pyramidal ruins. The new strip has over 100 grayscales versus 42 last week, comparable to the 20-year-old Viking 70A13 frame.
Why Malin's haze excuse fails: infrared cuts through clouds: Hoagland dismantles Malin's cloud-and-haze explanation for last week's degraded face image: the MGS camera detectors run from green (5,000 angstroms) into the near-infrared (9,000 angstroms), and infrared cuts through haze. The City pyramid complex is also 30x the surface area of the face - yet Malin still released images at 1024 pixels instead of the camera's full 2,048-pixel width, throwing away 4x spatial resolution.