The Monuments of Mars [antikvár]

PUBLISHER'S FOREWORDby Richard GrossingerFor a reader first discovering the matters in this book, the topic may seem bizarre and obscure. Monuments on Mars? A sphinxlike human face among the craters and sand? Is this a science-fiction story?Is this a new attribution to the already-ubiquitous "ancient astronauts?"In truth, at first glance the Face on Mars seems more like the invocation of a theosophical cult, or a bit of astral sightseeing, than what it is: a concrete object apparently carved from a Martian mesa in precise alignment to the sun and to surrounding structures. The Face and its adjacent "Monuments" are not the imaginings of flying saucer abductees or paintings from the cover of a science-fiction magazine; they are physiographic protuberances photographed by NASA, our American space agency, in 1976, and yet not discerned . . . because they were not supposed to be there, because they would have been too outrageous to believe.Outrageous even to the New York publisher who first purchased the rights to this book and then tried to reclassify it as science fiction. Finally it was deemed too far out to publish as fiction!Now it would be foolish for me to tell you that for sure and certain there is an artificially constructed statue of a human face on the surface of Mars, surrounded by the outcroppings of a buried city. I don't know that as a fact, nor does Richard Hoagland. This is, however, a bona fide puzzle for us as a culture and as a species to resolve over the next two or three decades.However, I can say safely that the objects photographed by Viking on the surface of Mars, particularly in the Cydonia region, have many intrinsic characteristics of artifacts that go beyond (and beneath) the mere subjective appearance of a face and a city, and that these characteristics arePublisher's Foreword