Monday, June 30, 2008

Jack Kirby, Mindbomb: Face the Facts

This post has been kicking around the queue for quite a while now. But after trying to wrap my brain around the whole topic, I thought I'd revisit the issue after reading that the whole Council of Nine group were involved with the whole Mars controversy, and that some had claimed that the Face had been seen by remote viewing several years before the Viking missions. 

 Of course, Jack Kirby seems to have remote-viewed the Face in 1958, as seen above.

In honor of Kirby, the Face also has a place of honor in this blog's masthead. I spoke to the group at Esalen about this remarkable synchronicity, which again ties back to the Nine. 

In Jeffrey Kripal's book on Esalen, we learn that in one of the stranger episodes in its history, a medium claiming to channel the Nine essentially took control of the institute for several years in the early 80s. Much to Michael Murphy's chagrin, I might add. There's been such a flurry of activity in the news subliminally linking Mars and Egypt, I thought it would be an opportune time to revisit the controversy.

Here is the object commonly known as "The Face on Mars," as photographed in 1976. Of course, it caused a whole big hullabaloo and became the subject of a number of books. Picknett and Prince allege in The Stargate Conspiracy that somehow someone may have actually looking for this structure at Cydonia, based on the sequence programmed into the Viking satellite. 

 However, in the late 90s, NASA send up a new satellite to photograph Mars and made a big to-do about photographing Cydonia.
  This is the picture of the Face that was released to the press in 1997. Richard Hoagland screamed bloody murder over the doctoring (and indeed it didn't match the rest of the images for quality), but the mainstream media just laughed it all off and that was the end of it for most people. Then the Mars Global Surveyor went up and took a whole new set of photos.
 
Now I had to go looking for this Surveyor image, which- of course- wasn't widely released to the press. And this is a cropped version of a huge landscape of the Cydonia region, where the Face is one of many features.

  And more recently, the ESA created a bunch of computer generated cartoons of the Face based on new satellite images. How they get those interpretations - and why this feature continually needs to photographed (and rendered via CGI) at odd angles is beyond me. 

But I'm not interested in the facial features per se, I'm interested in the symmetry. I did that graph in a few minutes by tracing the contours of features on the left side and finding they matched up with features on the right. 

What's more, the whole thing strikes me as strangely geometric, particularly for a "natural" formation. The fact that this structure has been sitting on an extremely violent planet without a protective atmosphere might account for the facial features- if ever there were any- becoming badly eroded. 

Whatever the case may be, what should really draw our attention are the weird games being played with this issue- the manipulations, the weird CGI images, the odd angles, the clandestine releases. But also the fact that the space agencies are suddenly awfully horny to put people on the surface of Mars - a planet very far away and presently extremely inhospitable to human life- during an worldwide economic downturn. 

 What's more, the Face is not the only strange object on Mars by a long shot. And the other conundrum here is if the Council of Nine's psychics saw this thing before it was photographed in 1976, did NASA go looking for it solely based on their advice? What does that say about the influence of a group that most people could be excused for dismissing as a bunch of gullible New Agers? 

A remote viewer wouldn't necessarily know if this this thing was artificial or not and given my other investigations into Jack Kirby's predictions, it's a good bet he could have remote viewed it as well. One thing I am absolutely sure of- there are some very strange goings-on when it comes to Mars, and I have a feeling our experience with Martian weirdness is just beginning. 

Especially when you consider that last Friday the Economic Times- the world's most prestigious financial newspaper- barked out "Will Religion End on Mars?," concluding that "religions would, therefore, have no choice but to modify their dogma to bring extra-terrestrial life into their creation beliefs." Easier said than done. 

So why all of the interest in Mars now? I can't remember a time when the issue has been more front and center. No matter what is being told to the public, it's been obvious for a very long time that some very powerful people see Mars and ancient Egypt as being intimately linked

 As with the Council of Nine situation- which all began a quarter-century before anyone in the public knew anything about it- you're talking about a large group of influential people who in fact believe in these things. And indeed, have often gone to great lengths to hide that belief from the rest of us. 

 I can't pretend to understand what the Cydonia situation or the Council of Nine situation is all about. I only know that it's definitely not what some conspiracy theorists - all of whom are phenomenally unqualified in every applicable field - would like to dismiss it as. 

The idea that you could fake an alien landing in a media-savvy time such as ours is simply not credible to me. The first thing everyone- from Boston to Bangalore- would think is that it was all a publicity stunt for some new Michael Bay movie. 

 The fact that Mars is suddenly at the top of the agenda reminds me of how Iraq was such a fixation for so long. There's the oil of course, but there's also the archeological remains of Sumer and Babylon. Let's not forget one of the first orders of business following Saddam's defeat was looting and ransacking the Baghdad museum. Now that that was accomplished, Mars has become suddenly incredibly interesting to all of the major powers. Don't think for a minute that's by accident.