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170 by Whitley Strieber S 1995 May not be Reprinted Without Permission http://www.strieber.com The first time that I came across a possible hidden government policy devoted to concealing evidence of extraterrestrials was in 1984. Early that summer, Dr. John Gliedman, whom I had then known for about a year, showed me a photograph that appeared to be of a gigantic sculpture staring up from a desert. My first thought was that aerial archaeology had uncovered an incredible find in the Sahara or the Gobi or somewhere. But the image had been discovered some years before by two NASA scientists, Vince DiPietro and Greg Molnaar, in the data that the Viking orbiter had returned from Mars. Staring up from Mars' Cydonia Plain was the haunting image of what appeared to be a human face. I was well aware of NASA's early expectations regarding the possibility of finding extraterrestrial artifacts ¢ as we expanded into the solar system, and of the policies it planned to We a abet follow when this happened. In 1960 NASA had co-operated with the Brookings Institution to publish a report that said, "many cosmologists and astronomers think it very likely that there is intelligent life in many other solar systems...artifacts left at some point in time by these life forms might possibly be discovered through our space activities." Carl Sagan had theorized in a 1963 paper that probability theory suggests that our solar system is likely to have been visited an average of once every ten thousand years by space-traveling civilizations. So I thought that NASA would be ecstatic that these images had been uncovered in the mountain of data sent back by the Viking Orbiter. NASA, as it turned out, would not deal with the pictures. They had rejected them as a trick of light. This perplexed me, since the importance attached to finding the remains of a non-human culture obviously mandated taking every chance that presented itself, no matter how long the ~aae odds. In the years between 1960 and 1984, however, a great deal had changed at NASA. The most important evolution was that the space shuttle program had brought the agency into direct and extensive co-operation with the military. In the 1960s, the notion that alien visits had probably taken place in the past was a commonplace of science. If artifacts had turned up, nobody would have been surprised. On the contrary, they would have felt the same elation that I experienced when I gazed at the ag Mars face. By 1984, however, virtually the entire planetary science community was marching to the military band: we are alone here, we have always been alone, and there are no artifacts of intelligent visitation remaining from the past. Sagan, once a reasoned supporter of the simple mathematical probabilities involved, was now a fierce public exponent of the idea that--while artifacts might be found somewhere some time--nothing under present study, no matter how compelling the evidence, qualified. He went to some quite startling lengths to 'debunk' the Mars face--lengths to which, in fact, a scientist would not generally go, and seemed to me more related to propaganda than scientific discourse. As that face stared up at me from the Cydonia plain, my imagination embraced the NASA of the past--that grand and so gloriously American organization, full of vigor and excitement-- that had taken us to the moon and laid plans to go to Mars. Any further work would have to be done privately, and Dr. Gliedman was hoping that I might Blood On Mars.