Day 699 (Tidbits)

There are some interesting videos on the Day 669 entry over on Blake Hall's The 800 Days blog, starting with "Hey Boy Hey" by the Chemical Brothers. After that bit of video and music artistry, the video content abruptly changes...

The topic: "MARS."

For the first vid, just a little background in case some readers are unfamiliar with the topic being discussed ('face on Mars') in the video:

A certain area of the planet, Mars, is called, "Cydonia," which is made up of a bunch of sub-parts. The sub-areas are Cydonia Mensae (flat, Mesa areas), Cydonia Colles (area of small hills), Cydonia Labyrithus (a rather complex bunch of valleys which intersect). Cydonia is named after an area - (a historical city-state) - on the North West coast of the island of Crete that was called Kydonia. Presently, Kydonia is now the city of Chania, and this is as far as the little history lesson goes...

Back on topic... There was a photo taken of the surface of Mars in 1976. The image was collected from a tool in the NASA VIKING PROGRAM and the tool was the Viking I Orbiter. Viking I took a photo of an area of Cydonia somewhere between the Arandas Crater on Mars and another crater known as "Bamberg," and when this image was viewed, people thought it looked like a face or, in the least, a "made" structure that could not have naturally occurred in nature. Another orbiter, Viking II, also picked up images of the "face," from different angles.

By 1977 speculations were printed and spoken, saying the face might be the work of extraterrestrial intelligence and activity, so on and so forth...

NASA refused to comment much about the images but about 20 years later, superior equipment was launched to subsequent missions to Mars and new images were gathered of the same location of Mars. Comparisons to the old images have been offered, the respective collections of images from more recent expeditions out in space, along with Viking I and II images... and still we have no clear answers about what the images are showing...

Many experts say the images simply show some naturally occurring items that our minds and eyes then, by the effects of PARAEDOLIA, turn into "the face on the surface of Mars," and nothing more...

Please Note: * These images in the Cydonia area that seem to show a "face" are NOT the only images or places on Mars that show areas that appear to be faces or known shapes... the Cydonia images, for some reason, just seem to be the most high-profile and oft-analyzed images.

Head on over to Blake's 800Days blog and watch the video, along with two more vids about Mars. BTW, the second vid on Mars (third vid down on the blog) requires that you read. It has a fair bit of scrolling text, so if you need to pause from time to time to get the reading down, feel free to do so.

The Day 699 post is associated with Mars, The Chemical Brothers and the date, Friday January 21 2011.