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On July 25, 1976, the Cydonian Plains in Mars' northern hemisphere were being mapped by the Viking 1 Orbiter, when among the images sent back to Earth there was one with a face on the surface of the Red Planet. Staring blankly into the sky, the unmistakably human face carved into a hilltop was first thought to be a chance combination of light and shadow. But thirty-five orbits later, another image showed it again. Over a kilometer across in size, its mouth agape, the deep-set eyes searching the heavens -- an extraordinary find, to say the least. And soon, while scanning the images of adjacent areas of Mars, people claimed they saw ruined pyramids and the remains of cities.
This led to an even more elaborate theory of a world-wide nuclear war on Mars, which destroyed all life on the planet, leaving nothing of the civilization on the planet except devastated ruins, half-covered in the blowing sands. It wasn't so far-fetched, they said, how else could you explain the high concentrations of the isotope Xenon 129 In the Martian atmosphere, the outcroppings of uranium and thorium spotted on the surface by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, the red dust itself? The scientific community dismissed it all as nonsense -- there are outcroppings of uranium and thorium on Earth, not to mention red dust; Xenon 129 isn't produced by nuclear explosions; and the face ... well, isn't there a face on the Moon? The response was predictable cries of a coverup, of a government concealing the truth from its citizens. There were protests, people yelling, "Why don't you tell us the truth?"
Well, the truth came twenty years later. New images were returned via the Mars Surveyor, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the European Space Agency's Mars Express. The higher-resolution images showed no face, just a hill eroded by the wind, and the sand, and the eons of time. The face had never been there, it was gone like a mirage in the desert.
Yet the belief continues, as belief will do. Without evidence to corroborate it, it continues as faith. A faith to guide people, to get them through the monotony and disappointments of life.
There is a story among Highway Patrol troopers in Texas, about drug runners coming up from the border in the middle of the night, driving at breakneck speeds with their lights out the whole way. If the patrol cars pick them up on the radar, they look up and see nothing, and assume it is just a glitch. The drivers know every mile of the road, every town, every curve. Flying past sleeping mesas, past rivers in moonlight; not seeing that the road is there, but knowing that the road is there. And such is faith. As others, in the same world of darkness, know there are faces in the sky.
Why don't you tell us the truth?