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What was heralded as "arguably the biggest discovery in the history of science" last week - a fossilized organism embedded in a meteorite which arrived on Earth from Mars - is the first evidence of life beyond our own world. Could advanced life forms have existed on the Red Planet millions of years ago? Robert Bauval and best-selling author Graham Hancock, whose book, Fingerprints of the Gods, was the publishing phenomenon of last year, believe there is evidence to support this. Monumental structures on the planet's surface have mystified scientists for 20 years. Are they the result of natural processes...or the remains of a great civilization? Decide for yourself.
The sensational
announcement that a fist-sized meteorite from Mars contains signs of life has
so far been accepted by scientists as evidence that only 'incredibly primitive'
organisms may once have existed on the planet. Yet it could mean far more.
The meteorite, billions of years old, is thought to have landed in Antarctica
about 13,000 years ago, after being "splashed off" the surface of
Mars by a cosmic collision - probably with a comet - at least 15 million years
ago. We know from our experience on Earth that life is always evolving to higher
species.
During the thousands of millions of years after that rock and its fossils formed
on Mars there was ample time for incredibly primitive organisms to have become
much more complex - perhaps even forms capable of developing a civilization.
After all, the Earth and Mars are not thought to be much older than 4.5 billion
years and the first incontrovertible evidence of life here - bacteria and algae
- does not appear in the fossil record until 3.1 billion years ago. From those
primitive organisms, we evolved. So why should precisely the same sort of processes
not have taken place on Mars?
What raises the stakes in such speculation is the existence of remarkable evidence
that complex artificial structures - monuments, gigantic edifices - may have
been built on Mars at some remote date. These structures, detected in NASA video
images sent back by the Viking Orbiter in 1976, have never been photographed
since but have become the focus of a widening controversy over the past 20 years.
Because they include several enormous pyramids and a massive Sphinx-like face,
an apparently lunatic fringe argues that they must be the work of intelligent
and technologically advanced beings. A civilization, in other words.
Scientists have officially opposed this view, asserting that the structures
are not structures at all but tandem geological patterns.
Increasingly, however, even the most orthodox academics have begun to sound
less sure. Earlier this year, for example, several months before the discovery
of signs of life in a Martian meteorite, Professor Car Sagan, of Cornell University
in the U.S., made a significant admission. The Face on Mars, he said, was 'probably
sculpted by slow geological processes over millions of years'. Nevertheless,
he also said: "I could be wrong. It's hard to b sure about a world we've
seen so little of in extreme close-up."
Sagan urged that forthcoming American and Russian missions to Mars should make
a special effort "to look much more closely at the pyramids and at what
some people call the Face and the City.
"These features merit closer attention. More detailed photographs of the
Face would surely settle issues of symmetry and help resolve the debate between
geology and monumental structure."
COHERENT SHAPES
The Face on Mars was identified on Viking frame 35A72 by Dr. Tobias Owen, who
is now professor of astronomy at the University of Hawaii. The same frame, covering
approximately 34 by 31 miles - also shows many other features that could be
artificial.
These cluster around latitude 40 degrees north in the region of Mars known to
astronomers as Cydonia, and were photographed from an altitude of more than
1,000 miles with relatively poor resolution.
A casual glance reveals only a jumble of hills, craters and escarpments. Gradually,
however, as though a veil is being lifted, the blurred scene begins to feel
organized and structured - too intelligent to be the result of random natural
processes.
Although the scale is grander, it looks the way some archaeological sites on
Earth might look if photographed from 1,000 miles up.
The more closely you examine it, the more it is apparent that it really could
be an ensemble of enormous ruined monuments on the surface of Mars.
For a long while after the 1976 Viking photographs, NASA and other scientific
authorities continued to disseminate what one researcher calls "the bogus
claim that the Face is a trick of light and shadow".
This notion began to be challenged seriously only when Vincent Di Pietro, a
computer scientist and former NASA consultant, discovered another image of the
Face on frame 70A13.
This second image, which had been acquired 35 Martian days later than the first
one and under different lighting conditions, made possible comparative views
and detailed measurements of the Face.
Complete with its distinctive Sphinx-like headdress, it is now known to be almost
1.6 miles long from crown to chin, 1.2 miles wide and just under 2,000 ft..
high. Image analysts say the bilateral symmetry of the Face, which has a natural,
almost human appearance, is most unlikely to have come about by chance.
This impression is confirmed by other characteristics that have subsequently
been identified under computer enhancement. These include 'teeth' in the mouth,
bilaterally crossed lines above the eyes, and regular lateral stripes on the
headpiece - suggestive, to some researchers at least, of the headdress of ancient
Egyptian pharaohs.
According to Dr. Mark Carlotto, an expert in image processing, all 'these features
appear in both the Viking images, and are coherent shapes structurally integral
to the object. Thus they could not have been caused by random interference or
artifacts of the image restoration and enhancement process.'
PYRAMIDS AND TOWERS
The same is also true for the 'D&M Pyramid' (named after Di Pietro and his
associate Gregory Molenaar, also a former NASA contractor, who discovered it).
This five-sided structure stands about ten miles from the Face and, like the
Great Pyramid of Egypt, is aligned virtually north-south towards the spin axis
of the planet.
Its shortest side is a mile, its long axis extends to almost two miles and it
is half a mile high.
Commenting on the proximity of the Face and the D&M Pyramid, American researcher
Richard Hoagland asks a pointed question: 'What are the odds against two terrestrial-like
monuments on such an alien planet and in essentially the same location?'
Hoagland has made his own detailed study of Frame 35A72 and has identified additional,
possibly artificial, features.
These include the so called Fort, with its two distinctive straight edges, and
the City, which he describes as 'a remarkably rectilinear arrangement of massive
structures interspersed with several smaller pyramids'.
Hoagland also points out another striking fact about the City: it seems to have
been sited in such a way that the inhabitants would have enjoyed a perfect,
almost ceremonial, view of the Face.
The impression of a great ritual center, shrouded under the dust of ages, is
enhanced by other features of Cydonia, such as the Tholus, a massive mound similar
to Britain's Silbury Hill, and the City Square, a grouping of four mounds centered
on a fifth, smaller mound.
This configuration, so suggestive of cross hairs, turns out to be located at
the exact lateral center of the City.
In addition, a group of British researchers based in Glasgow has recently identified
what looks like a massive four-sided pyramid, the so called NK Pyramid, 25 miles
west of the Face and on the same latitude (40.8 degrees north) as the D&M
Pyramid.
In the same general area is a feature called the Bowl, approached by a tapered
ram that has been likened to the stairway of a Mexican pyramid.
'Looking at the whole of Cydonia," says Chris O'Kane of the Mars Project
UK, 'my gut feeling is that these structures have to be artificial.'
O'Kane's hunch is strengthened by the fact that 'many of the structures are
non-fractal'. In plain English this means that their contours have been scanned
and assessed as artificial by highly sophisticated computers.
'What we have, therefore,' sums up O'Kane, 'is an improbable assortment of anomalies.
They have alignments, they're grouped, and they're non-fractal.' Nor is Cydonia
the only site on Mars to have yielded photographic evidence of unusual and apparently
artificial structures.
Pyramids have been identified elsewhere, notably in the region known as Elysium,
on the opposite side of the planet where , as early as 1971, NASA's Mariner
9 spacecraft photographed a group of mile-high three-sided structures.
Other Martian features that are decidedly non-fractal include a straight line
more than three miles long defined by a row of small pyramids, extensive rhomboidal
enclosures in the south polar region, and a weird, castle-like edifice rising
to a steeple more than 2,000 ft. high.
WHAT HAPPENED?
If there was a civilization on Mars capable of creating such monuments, then
what might have happened to it?
A WAR OR A FLOOD MAY HAVE WIPED OUT LIFE ON MARS
Since extensive damage typical of explosive penetration is apparent on some
of the structures, notably the D&M Pyramid, more than one researcher has
suggested that the Martians might have destroyed themselves in a suicidal war.
A geological cataclysm is another possibility.
Analysis of the Martian meteorite suggests the Red Planet was warm and wet -
an environment that is likely to have been hospitable to life. Today, it is
permanently frozen.
The change may have been caused by a very large and rapid slippage of Mars's
outer crust, a phenomenon which has also been cited as a possible cause of the
cataclysmic end of Earth's last Ice Age 13,000 years ago.
Evidence reported in Scientific American magazine in 1985 confirms that Mars
did at some unknown stage in its history, suffer a catastrophic crustal displacement.
If this had happened during the planet's warm and wet phase, any civilization
present at that time would almost certainly have been wiped out in the ensuing
global floods and earthquakes, leaving behind only whatever scattered ruins
and monuments were massive and stable enough to survive.
The pyramids and the sphinx on Mars seem to fit the bill. And if they are artificial,
then the implications for our idea of ourselves and our place in the universe
are shattering.
One top priority in President Bill Clinton's recently announced program of intensified
Mars exploration should be a mission to find out for sure, particularly so since
NASA has hitherto refused to include Cydonia in the list of more than 150 sites
of scientific interest that it recognizes officially on Mars.
Similarly, investigators would be unwise to ignore the fact that there is a
region very like Cydonia on Earth - Egypt's famous Giza plateau - which has
its own distinctive pyramids and Sphinx.
Associated with these ancient monuments is a tradition that they were built
by an antediluvian race as repositories for scrolls and books of past ages,
and intended 'to prevent the ancient wisdom from being lost in the Flood'.
Could that flood have been the cataclysmic 400 ft. rise in sea levels that we
know took place 13,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age? And could there
be some sort of bizarre interplanetary connection, not yet understood, between
the story of civilization on Earth and on Mars?
THE MYSTERIES OF MARS:
COSMIC SEED AND THE ORIGIN OF LIFE
WERE MEN BROUGHT TO EARTH BY A METEORITE?
Is there an extraordinary connection between the Martian meteorite containing
what scientists believe to be a fossilized organism and mysterious structures
on the surface of the Red Planet? Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock, authors
of the number one bestseller Keeper Of Genesis ( Message of the Sphinx ), which
was serialized in the Mail earlier this year, believe there could be. On Saturday,
in the first part of their controversial series, they described the strange
monumental objects in Cydonia, a region of Mars, and how they could be the remains
of a long-dead civilization. They also pointed at the bizarre similarity between
a structure called The Face and the Egyptian Sphinx. Today, in the second part,
Bauval and Hancock focus on the other inexplicable links between Mars and ancient
Egypt .
At some points in its orbit Mars passes less than 30 million miles from Earth
- in cosmic terms just outside our front porch compared to the nearest star,
Alpha Centauri, which is 26 thousand billion miles away.
Therefore it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that there could be a connection
between life and civilization on Mars and life and civilization on Earth.
Since time began, Earth has played host to literally millions of strange visitors
from outer space - meteorites. IT has been estimated that a million meteorites
hurtle through the Earth's atmosphere every year.
Fortunately most of them are tiny and quickly burn out after entry, appearing
to us as 'shooting stars'. A few survive the atmosphere and reach the ground.
These can be as small as a ping - pong ball or as large as a London bus.
The most spectacular meteorites found on the Earth are the large 'oriented'
meteorites, so called because they cut through the air retaining their direction
of flight like a cannon shell, with their front part taking the brunt of the
frictional heat. When they hit the ground they are found to be shaped like cones
or pyramids.
Wonderful examples of 'oriented' meteorites can be seen in museums around the
world. a 15-ton 'oriented' iron meteorite called Willamette is displayed in
the Smithsonian Institute in New York and another, called Morito, can be seen
at the Institute of Metallurgy in Mexico city.
Such an 'oriented' meteorite, probably pyramidal in shape, could have been at
the root of the mystery of the Giza pyramids.
It is known that long before the so-called pyramid age of Egypt (circa 2,500
BC) a strange pyramidal or conical 'stone' was kept within a sanctuary called
the Temple of the Phoenix, 12 miles to the east of Giza in the sacred city of
Heliopolis.
This mysterious stone was called the Benben, derived from the root Ben - a word
which Egyptologists say means 'seed'' or procreation'.
Other details that ancient Egyptian texts give us about the Benben strengthen
the possibility that it may have been a meteorite. We are told that it came
'down from heaven' like the fire-bird or Phoenix. It was also said to have been
'sent by the gods' at the moment of ' Creation' -0 an epoch the pharaohs called
Zep Tepi, literally meaning 'The First Time'.
In our book , Keeper Of Genesis, we used the science of astronomical alignments
to calculate the date of the 'First Time' to 12,500 BC. The implication, if
the Benben was indeed an oriented meteorite, is that it landed in Egypt in precisely
the same period during which the meteorite containing a fossilized organism
from Mars arrived in Antarctica.
The original Benben of Heliopolis - an object that was already old in the time
of the ancient Egyptians - is lost. Whatever its origins , it must have been
of paramount importance to the pyramid builders, because stylized replicas of
it served as the capstones of all pyramids.
A surviving example, carved in one piece out of a hard stone known as diorite,
is in the main hall of the Cairo Museum. On it are two rows of enigmatic hieroglyphs
evoking the 'Lord of the Horizon' (the rising sun, according to Egyptologists)
and making reference to a deity called Sahu, identified with the constellation
of Orion and the deity Osiris - the archetypal god of the 'First Time', whose
'Divine seed' created humanity.
Beneath the complex layers of symbolism, the ancient Egyptian texts can be taken
to link the origins of life - and civilization - to the arrival of a meteorite.
Within the past ten years, scientists have independently reached a similar conclusion,
arguing that life on Earth may indeed have been imported - or 'seeded' - by
a meteorite or a comet, billions of years ago.
A striking characteristic of the pyramids and Sphinx of Giza is the way in which
they are integrated into a grand architectural plan, based on mathematical and
astronomical data.
There is no evidence that the pyramids were used as tombs. What is certain is
that two narrow shafts emanating from inside the Great Pyramid were directed
to two specific stars: Zeta Orionis, one of the three stars in Orion's belt,
and Sirius, in the constellation of Canis Major.
It is certain, too, that the principal Giza monuments form an accurate terrestrial
'map' of the three stars of Orion's belt as these constellations appeared in
10,500 BC.
Who could have been observing the skies over Giza in 10,500 BC and who, at that
date, could have had the technical capacity to realize such monumental works
as the Sphinx and the pyramids?
Egyptologists assert there was no civilization on Earth at that time, let alone
one capable of planning and building such immense, well engineered structures.
If they are right, why do the alignments of Giza so plainly and repetitively
mirror the skies of the 11th millennium BC?
Former NASA consultant Richard Hoagland is convinced there may be a 'terrestrial
connection' between Giza and Cydonia - the region of Mars where the mysterious
structures are located - perhaps a common source that imparted the same legacy
of knowledge and symbolism on both worlds.
Hoagland's interest in Giza began when he met Dr. Lambert Dolphin, a scientist
from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) who had conducted radar and seismographic
research to locate hidden chambers near and under the Great Sphinx.
Dr. Dolphin was captivated by Hoagland's idea of a 'Martian Sphinx' - the Face
- and , in 1983, was instrumental in helping Hoagland set up the Independent
Mars Investigation Project under the aegis of SRI.
Hoagland argues that the Face on Mars is 'not merely the image of an terrestrial
hominid...lying where it has no business being. One half (the right) is also
the perfect image of a cat; specifically a lion - the king of beasts. So the
Martian sphinx is in truth the combination of two "families": hominid...and
...feline.'