Mars Pathfinder Landing Site ...
A Sphinx Revisited?
By 
Mike Bara
"Still, we cannot deny that the act of placing a 
tetrahedral object on Mars at latitude 19.5 contains all the necessary 
numbers & symbolism to qualify as a "message received" signal in response to 
the geometry of Cydonia. Moreover, such a game of mathematics & symbolism is 
precisely what we would expect if NASA were being influenced by the type of 
occult conspiracy that Hoagland, for one, is always trying to espouse."
-- Graham Hancock, "The Mars Mystery -- The Secret
 Connection Between Earth and the Red Planet" 
 
When  Mars Pathfinder bounced to a halt on its innovative airbags after it's  unprecedented straight in, meteor-like decent to the Martian surface on  July 4th, 1997, most of us were convinced - watching its initial  panoramas -- that we were simply looking at another boring Martian  desert filled with rocks -- just like the scenes relayed from the  previous Viking Lander missions some twenty years earlier. Overshadowed  by Enterprise principal investigator  Richard C. Hoagland's highly advertised political prediction -- that the  Pathfinder Lander would be diverted to Cydonia, instead of arriving at  its announced touchdown point a thousand miles away -- many of us in the  "anomalist community" were initially distracted from viewing those  first Pathfinder images in any great detail.
At  the time of the Pathfinder landing, I did not know Hoagland well; we  had yet to begin a formal collaboration on our now highly successful  "reverse engineered" model of NASA's extraordinary (and now extraordinarily well documented) "Egyptian ritual obsession."  Hoagland's high-profile mistake on Pathfinder, after years of  additional analysis, is understandable in retrospect -- given the  (deliberate?) "mixed messages" carefully promoted at the time around  JPL's actual Pathfinder landing (see below).
One  of the things that threw Hoagland was the sky above that landing site:  looked at before the actual July 4th arrival, it did not correspond at  all to the stellar pattern he'd found throughout NASA's previous manned  and unmanned missions; at the announced time of Pathfinder's projected  landing, the key "ritual star," Sirius, and the critical "Belt stars of  Orion," would not be in their expected "ritual positions" (19.5° or 33°)  above or below the horizon; or, on the horizon or meridian. By sharp  contrast, the sky at Cydonia did fit -  not for July 4th, but for the "perfect" ritual date, July 20th. (It  wasn't until about a year later that continuing analysis revealed  previous "commemoration" patterns - alignments "celebrated" for one  landing site on a particularly auspicious date, but conducted at another  landing site or "temple" -- on many prior missions.)

In  hindsight, paradoxically, it turned out that Hoagland was simply  looking in the wrong direction: instead of looking at the stars above  the site, he should have been looking at the announced landing site  itself -and then have focused on those clues. For its choice could not  ultimately have been more "symbolic," or more embedded in NASA's  amazingly consistent pattern: 19.5° N Lat. by 33° W Long! As the first tetrahedral spacecraft flown to Mars, Pathfinder itself embodied precisely those same circumscribed tetrahedral mathematical  parameters, carefully "telegraphed" by NASA's choice of the "Ares  Vallis" landing site - as "33," besides its other tetrahedral qualities,  is none other than the sin of 19.5 degrees!
Such a remarkable mathematical "coincidence" for Pathfinder had to have been (by "someone") carefully designed.

Thus,  if Hoagland hadn't focused public attention on a possible "clandestine  Pathfinder mission to Cydonia" (through his, it turned out, erroneous  misreading of some stellar indicators), no one would have paid attention  to this stunning -- but completely unexpected -- ultimate confirmation  of his larger "NASA pattern" in the actual Mars landing! Pathfinder's  unique tetrahedral spacecraft design geometry, coupled with the totally  "recursive" tetrahedral geometry of the landing site itself, was  obviously intended by NASA "ritualists" behind the scenes to celebrate -  on their first return to Mars in over twenty years -- the two key Hyperdimensional numbers underlying all the NASA rituals - "19.5" and "33."
And, by his own admission, that crucial confirmation made Hoagland's initial political "mistake" supremely worth it.
Thus  forewarned -- that "something" about Pathfinder's actual July 4th Ares  Vallis target was considered very special, not just by the geologists  who ostensibly picked this landing site but by these ritual "believers"  somehow quietly controlling the entire Mission -- Hoagland alerted other  members of the Enterprise team to  focus heavily upon the next phases of the Mission. Within hours after  it's successful touchdown, Pathfinder -- according to a pre-loaded  on-board computer program -- began to transmit image after image of the  scene around the landing, far more (it inexplicably turned out) than  "originally programmed." And, unlike JPL's pre-announcements, the images  were not just "looking down at the edges of the spacecraft solar panels  and the airbags" - but were of the entire panorama … from the  spacecraft to the distant red horizon. It was in those first, unplanned  and totally uncensored images, that several startling features - clearly  NOT belonging on a "lifeless desert world" - unquestionably could be  seen … and not just by Hoagland, but by the literally millions watching  "live on CNN."
Hoagland,  alerted by the extraordinary numerical "coincidence" of the  spacecraft/pre-planned landing site geometry, had planned his own  careful taping of all the live transmission of those first (even just a  few) uncensored scenes. Enterprise Mission consulting geologist, Ron  Nicks, also began looking … and started seeing major "inconsistencies"  about the landing site as the unexpected panoramas swept across the  screen: blatantly geometric "anomalies" around the Lander, showing up on CNN's television broadcasts.  Worldwide viewers, also watching live on CNN, began calling in about  "the strangely geometric rocks" that they were seeing in the flood of  images. The number of calls was so significant that CNN's science  anchor, the late John Holliman, eventually felt compelled to ask one of the Pathfinder scientists about it on the air.
Meanwhile,  Nicks and Hoagland, taking careful notes and taping everything, quickly  realized that what they were seeing was not the expected "wind or water  eroded rocks" of Ares Vallis -- but a debris field filled with a  variety of apparently corroded metal objects, "canisters" with opposable  handles, shimmering glass-like geometric structures … and even a couple  of deformed but recognizable tracked vehicles. A totally separate  research effort, the Near Pathfinder Anomaly Analysis Group (NPAA), also sprang up - triggered by the same anomalous images appearing live on CNN.
But,  after the initial - and still totally unexplained -- windfall of those  first "hundred or so live images on CNN" (perhaps from a whistleblower  deep in the Mission planning team?), the post landing analysis of these  remarkable anomalies was immediately frustrated by the maddening (and  also inexplicable) lack of clear Pathfinder images, subsequently made  available across the Web from JPL.
Over  twenty years had elapsed, between Viking's literally mechanical  facsimile surface cameras in 1976 and Pathfinder's state-of-the-art CCD  imaging technology of 1997. But, judging by the digital Pathfinder  photographs publicly available from JPL -- you'd never know it! Unusual  (and still unresolved) discrepancies were found repeatedly, between the  original (much clearer) initial television transmissions from CNN's live  Pathfinder feed that July 4th afternoon, and the later electronic  versions of those same images released by JPL.

The  simple truth was that the processed Internet digital files should have  been much sharper than the original "raw" data feed coming from  Pathfinder that first afternoon - especially, after rebroadcast over  live TV. Instead, JPL's Web versions were full of astonishingly  amateurish compression artifacts, assembly errors, and blatant color registration problems.  JPL even "adjusted" the color of the Martian sky to appear the  traditional "Viking pink" -- instead of the forecast (from concurrent  Hubble imagery) natural Earth-like blue.
The  implications of this blatant image tampering and crude manipulation  were as abhorrent as they were sickeningly obvious (to everyone but the  mainstream press, that is): JPL was clearly trying to hide (and not too  well, for some reason … more "whistle blowing?") "something" in these  images. It soon became obvious exactly "what."
Besides all the "near field" Pathfinder anomalies, Nicks and Hoagland began studying "super resolution" images of  the two distant (almost one kilometer) "mountains" imaged on the  horizon of the Landing Site: the celebrated "Twin Peaks." Nicks, in  particular, soon realized that these features showed definite signs of engineering,  as opposed to natural erosional processes. And, although he recognized  that the area (as NASA had previously advertised) obviously had been  subjected to "a brief but catastrophic flood," he could not explain some  of the strikingly geometric features he was seeing on the "Peaks" as  "just geology." There were obvious, repeating block-like structures  (particularly on South Peak - see below), and some very unusual  orthogonal (right angle) three-dimensional layering on the exposed  ("downstream") surfaces.

The "Twin Peaks" seemed have the definite geometric shapes of pyramids --  but highly eroded pyramids (especially the North Peak) -- which  apparently had had some of their casing literally ripped off in that  same massive flood that had devastated the entire area countless  millennia before. The debris field in the foreground, which had  initially captured Hoagland and Nicks' attention, consisted of a myriad  of objects possessing multiple sharp "points" and edges. They could not therefore  be merely "water eroded (or water tumbled) rocks." They obviously had  to be made of much harder materials - potentially artificial objects and  even metallic machinery, ripped from the exposed interiors of the  not-so-distant, exposed-"arcologies" - including, probably, remnants of  the technology that actually built them!
All  of which was quite fascinating ... and ultimately irresolvable. For,  without better resolution images from future rover missions, or cleaned  up versions of the Pathfinder originals (as opposed to the degraded and  obviously "sanitized" versions placed by NASA on the Web), there was  really not much more that we could do to prove the artificial nature of the region.
Until now.
Using a technique called "Super Resolution Surface Modeling,"  in the several years since Pathfinder, NASA scientists have been able  to take multiple images of the Pathfinder landing site and enhance them  well beyond their original resolving capability. Recently, a reader, Giuseppe Pezzella from Naples, Italy, pointed me to the official NASA image archive for  these "super resolution" images. After downloading a few, it quickly  became apparent that something - completely unnoticed at the time, and  even more interesting (if that's possible) than the potential nearby  artifacts analyzed by Nicks and Hoagland -- might have been imaged on  the Martian landscape … between South Peak and Pathfinder itself  (below).
What  had been merely a huge "blocky shape" on the original scenes, suddenly  emerged as "recognizable" on the new, highly processed images. I did a  "double take" on the shape Giuseppe pointed out ...

... A Sphinx!
Given Hoagland's now strikingly confirmed "leonine" dual Face image lying  at Cydonia, my mouth basically dropped open when I saw this other,  "eerily familiar shape" crouching there in front of Pathfinder's "South  Peak Pyramid." It struck me as not only of the right size and form for  nothing less than a Great Martian Sphinx (!) --  but it was in the right position as well (out in front of the  background Pyramid!). It lay some distance from the Pathfinder Lander,  at the edge of the previously mapped debris field … near the base of  South Peak. And -- like its counterpart on Earth -- also faced East …  directly toward the Martian equinoctial sunrise. There were even a  couple of what appeared to be "vertically-faced buildings" to the left  of this potential "Martian Sphinx"; they could easily be viewed as "a  temple," or a distant entrance to the background Pyramid Arcology  itself.
In  ancient Egypt, Sphinxes were used to "guard" temples, tombs and  monuments. The grandest example of these, and probably the earliest on  Earth, is the Great Sphinx at Giza -- forever guarding the three Great  Pyramids on the Plateau. As a Sphinx carries out this task, it is always  in the same repose: lying flat on its stomach … forepaws extended  outward … ready to "pounce" into action at a moment's notice. Sphinxes  invariably have the head of man (or woman?), to go with their lion's  body. The head, in turn, is framed by the characteristic banded "nemes"  headdress (which is meant, of course, to signify the lions mane).

Even  from this compressed narrative perspective, you can see in these  NASA-enhanced close-ups (above) that this Martian Sphinx has all the  classic earmarks of its Egyptian counterpart: there are two attached and  extended "forepaws"; a body (complete with what looks to be a feline  hind leg); and a very clear rounded Face, encompassed by a symmetrical  nemes-like Pharaohic "headdress!" The Headdress even has two opposing  angles just below the "chin" - extending outward at about a 45° angle.  These characteristics alone -- the extended symmetrical paws, and the  rounded Face framed by that familiar headdress - coupled with its  context, lying to the East of a strikingly pyramidal-looking structure,  would normally be enough to call this formation's natural genesis into  serious question. But when you view it side-by-side with its counterpart  on Earth -- the Giza Sphinx itself -- the resemblance is totally  uncanny ...

And remember - this "Martian Sphinx" is guarding an obvious "pyramid" on Mars … at 19.5° N Latitude by 33° W Longitude ... 

When  you consider all these factors -- the current man/lion hybrid symbolism  now amply confirmed elsewhere on Mars (Cydonia); the unusual,  suspiciously "manufactured" and "pyramid-like"  characteristics of the "Twin Peaks"; and the striking similarity of  their "attending figure" to the renowned Giza feline monument itself --  it becomes somewhat obvious that we are looking at a feline Martian pattern.  Although these assessments are still strictly qualitative, all we  really need to know for certain are some better imaging enhancements.  Certainly, in the years that have passed since these initial Pathfinder  panoramas and their analysis, the Super Resolution algorithm must have  been even more significantly improved … enough, perhaps, to confirm what  these features finally are.
Clearly,  in light of the implications of a class of ancient "Martian Sphinxes" …  mysteriously arrayed across the Red Planet, and their documented  cultural importance here on Earth, this particular object - so eerily  familiar and yet so impossible on Mars -- is now worth that "extra"  effort.
http://www.enterprisemission.com/Path-sphinx.html