The Enterprise Mission is founded on the belief that certain Martian landforms, specifically, the "face on Mars" are artifacts of an ancient Martian civilization. There is much further speculation on the Enterprise Mission website about other possible alien artifacts on the Moon and Venus, but the evidence for them is less than compelling. From an unbiased perspective, one should clearly remain skeptical that extra terrestrial landforms are truly "intelligently designed," but the rhetoric used in the site is very interesting because it lends insight into the minds of those who really believe in the Enterprise Mission, namely Richard Hoaglund.
The argument is based on a few crucial assumptions and facts. First, Hoaglund openly assumes the "face on Mars" is humanoid (Hoaglund, 1989, "The Message of Cydonia). This assumption warrants further investigation into the landforms of the Cydonian desert. Some of the landforms there that do not resemble any part of the human body are supposedly Martian "pyramids." After extensive research and analysis of the landforms in the Cydonian desert, Hoaglund and his colleagues conclude that not only are the anomalous and evidence for ancient civilization, but also that they hold within them a secret code to deciphering an advanced "hyperdimensional physics." This is done using extensive measurements of the landforms and their relationships to one another and the star locations at the time they were supposedly created.
These images are food for thought, but the Enterprise Mission is more interesting to me as a conspiracy theory. The rhetoric of the mission relies heavily on a circa 1960 report by NASA known as the "Brookings Report." This is a report on the implications for humankind of contacting alien civilization. The report clearly states that making contact with extraterrestrial intelligence could be detrimental to the human race, and Enterprise Mission proponents use it as evidence for a NASA coverup of the truth about Cydonia. Reading the report makes it clear that NASA has worries about the results of "contact" but supporters of the Enterprise Mission find within it more than doubt. They use it to argue a conspiracy theory aimed at hiding any evidence of ETI, and the contents of the report are supposed to be more disturbing than the landforms themselves. Within the report, however, I found no clear evidence of coverup nor even a lack of objectivity. The Brookings report, like most reasonable minded approaches to SETI, expressed skepticism and a fair amount of moral support.
I thought, if the Brookings report were actually a coverup document aimed at an "extra-ordinary" conspiracy to hinder SETI, would I really be able to link straight to it from the Enterprise Mission site?
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