Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

When discussing UFOs and related phenomena, I’m frequently asked, “What about the face on Mars?” The face first turned up in 1976 in a couple of photos of the surface of Mars taken by Viking 1 . These rather low-resolution images seemed to show a gigantic face and attracted the attention of the UFO community. Proponents, chief among them a Richard C. Hoagland who touted the face in his book The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever ( 2001), argue that the face is evidence of an advanced Martian civilization. Much like George Leonard, who sees complicated structures in pictures of the Moon’s surface, Hoagland also sees manufactured structures in photos of the Martian surface. He also sees all sorts of obscure pseudomathematical meanings in the arrangement of features on the surface of Mars. This is all really little more than a high-tech version of Lowell’s canals—with a bit more nonsense thrown in the pot.

Even if the initial images of the Mars face had turned out to be what the formation really looked like (and they didn’t, as will be seen below), so what? There are lots of geological formations around the solar system that look meaningful in some way to the human brain. One of my favorites is the Old Man of the Mountains from my home state of New Hampshire (Fig. 17). If the Mars face is a creation of one extraterrestrial civilization, then why is not the Old Man evidence of ancient civilizations visiting New Hampshire (perhaps to get a good view of the autumn foliage before all those annoying New Yorkers arrived)? And if the Old Man isn’t enough, there’s also a Kermit the Frog and a smiley face on Mars (MacRobert 1986). Posner (2000) has published a review of the face on Mars claims. He notes that more detailed images from a 1998 survey of the Red Planet by the Mars Global Surveyor showed a much less dramatic picture. Of course, Hoagland (2001) can explain the lack or support for the reality of the face in the latest images. It’s all a conspiracy, a cover-up. You see, the government really knows all about the Martian civilization and they (the big they) are doing everything they can to hide the truth.

There is one final odd aspect to the face on Mars: It has been turned into a philatelic hoax as well. As shown in figure 18, Sierra Leone issued a stamp showing the face. This was but one stamp in a series of thirty-seven (actually, to be philatelically correct, they are termed “souvenir sheets”) commemorating Mars exploration. This set was hyped by a philatelic huckster named Alan Shawn Feinstein, who claimed that the set of stamps could be worth a fortune. And it was none other than Robert Hoagland who supported these claims, stating that the stamp could be worth $10,000 (Posner 2000). In fact, according to Michael Laurence (2001), editor of Linn’s Stamp News , a widely read and highly authoritative philatelic weekly, the Sierra Leone Face on Mars stamp was worth $2.50 as of September 24, 2001, and is “one of the most overhyped labels ever foisted on a gullible public.” As is so often the case with collectibles promoted to noncollectors, the promoted items are essentially worthless, but then these items are obviously never promoted to people who would know enough not to waste their money on them.

The fact that the released CIA documents relating to UFOs clearly showed that the claim of a government cover-up was nonsense didn’t stop Ground Saucer Watch from issuing a press release stating just the opposite. A profound lack of respect for the facts is nothing new among UFO groups—especially when the facts don’t fit the belief that UFOs are extraterrestrial—so GSW’s “big lie” technique is not all that surprising. What is both surprising and disturbing is that several major newspapers around the country carried GSW’s press release essentially verbatim and made no attempt to check whether the astonishing statements made therein were true. The New York Times ran the release on January 14, 1979, under the headline “C.LA. Papers Detail U.FO. Surveillance.” According to the story, the released CIA papers showed that “the Government has been lying to us all these years.” GSW director William Spaulding also made the absurd claim that “he has sworn statements from retired air force colonels that at least two U.F.O.s have crashed and been recovered by the air force. One crash, he said, was in Mexico in 1948 and the other was near Kingman, Arizona, in 1953. He said the retired officers claimed they got a glimpse of dead aliens who were in both cases about four feet tall with silverish complexions and wearing silver outfits that seemed fused to the body from the heat.” This, then, was reported by the New York Times as serious news. It’s obvious that the Times never believed a word of it; otherwise, it would have launched the biggest journalistic investigation in the history of the paper to come up with the story of the century. Where UFOs are concerned, it is almost impossible to distinguish the editorial policies and ethics of the New York Times or the Washington Post from those of the National Enquirer or the Globe . The most absurd UFO reports are accepted at face value and published as news stories. Attempts are seldom made to verify the truth of the report or to seek comment from skeptical investigators.

The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) sent out its own press release refuting the claims of GSW Neither the Times nor any other paper saw fit to print it. Sheaffer (1981) correctly sums up the situation as follows: “Wild and unfounded claims of massive UFO cover-ups are news, it seems. Reasoned refutations of such claims are not” (p. 141).

An excellent example of such shoddy journalism comes from the Washington Post, the paper that broke the Watergate story and is worldrenowned for its excellent staff of investigative journalists. In its April 30, 1977, issue it ran on the front page a story about a UFO sighting by President Jimmy Carter that had occurred in Georgia in 1973. Sheaffer (1981) pointed out to a Washington Post reporter who contacted him about the story that it “was not news” as reports of the sighting had appeared in several other papers, including the National Enquirer (p. 140). Nonetheless, the story appeared on the front page and contained nothing but rehashed old news. A few days later Sheaffer, who had been working on the Carter sighting for months, positively identified the UFO that Carter had seen as the planet Venus. Sheaffer reported this to the Washington Post , which reported his identification in a tiny item in the gossip column in the May 9, 1977, issue. The front-page story reporting the sighting received ten times more space, while the report of the solution to the mystery was given minimal treatment.

Whatever the reasons for the perverse editorial policy of not checking UFO stories (a check would certainly be made on any major story on nonpseudoscientific or nonparanormal topics), the result is to badly mislead readers. One reason why so many people think that there is “something to” the extraterrestrial explanation for UFOs is that they “hear so much about it.” By reporting as factual news stories wild, unsubstantiated, and false claims, many newspapers shirk their responsibility to correctly inform their readers.

The print media are certainly not alone in their irresponsibility where UFO stories are concerned. The electronic media are, if anything, even more irresponsible in presenting unverified and clearly false material as fact to their listeners and viewers. William Spaulding, the Ground Saucer Watch director whose incorrect claims about the released CIA documents made the New York Times , appeared on Tom Snyder’s television show Tomorrow on February 2, 1979. He continued to spread his fantasies about a government cover-up and to distort the facts. NBC-TV made no attempt to have a responsible critic dispute these unfounded claims.