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171 give a donation. I was soon involved with the group, which was known as the Mars Anomalies Research Society, Inc. nea - -- RTA QA Lote On the committee were former NASA scientist and member of Reagan's National Commission on Space, Dr. David C. Webb, John Brandenburg, Vince DiPietro, who was one of the original imagers, writer Dan Drasin, astronaut and planetologist Dr. Brian O'Leary, imaging specialist Dr. Mark Carlotto, Randy Pozos and Dr. Gliedman. Dr. O'Leary is the original Mars astronaut, and, if our Mars exploration program had not been abandoned in favor of military objectives, he would have been to the red planet and back by now. Dr. Carlotto, who was a contractor for an intelligence agency involved in reconnaissance, was in possession of imaging equipment so advanced and so secret that many of its controls had to be shielded from the eyes of committee members without proper clearances. The primary purpose of the equipment was to transform satellite pictures into clear and accurate images with high detail content. The fact that the Mars face was re-imaged on the best equipment known to man in 1985 and came out looking even more like a sculpture has been efficiently suppressed. However, the results of studies made with the TASC Corporation's equipment were routinely used in the most sensitive of reconnaissance projects. Except for what he did on the face, Carlotto's work was routinely assumed to be completely accurate. My specific role was to finance the new analysis of the data and subsequent study that Drs. O'Leary and Carlotto undertook. On December 13, 1986, the group met at Carlotto's lab in Boston. At that meeting they re-imaged the face from the original Viking data. The picture that resulted has become known world-wide, but the power of the equipment that was used to obtain it has been studiously ignored in the press. Even though the public has in general only been allowed to see false-color images compared to normal-contrast ones in the mass media, interest in the face has stayed high. I did not attend the Boston meeting, because by that time I was struggling with the Communion experience and had withdrawn from direct participation in the committee out of concern that my connection with the UFO subculture would embarrass the other members and compromise the already tenuous standing of the project in the scientific community. The fact that "UFO zealots," in Dr. Sagan's words, are excited by the face was and is a major bar to science taking a serious interest. It should be remembered that my encounters started after I became interested in the face, not before. I received in the mail a copy of the image that O'Leary and Carlotto had derived from the Viking telemetry. Staring up at me from the distant past and the depth of mystery was the strangest single thing I had ever seen, stranger far than the original Viking image, even stranger than the face of the alien I had peered into the year before. This was truly an enigma from another place and time: the face was no longer shadowy and tentative, it was quite clear. It glared up, teeth barred, as if raging at the very heavens. Drs. O'Leary and Carlotto eventually published a paper in the Journal of the British Planetary Society that makes an impeccable case for the face being a truly anomalous object. This duly peer-reviewed monograph drew the interest of additional open-minded scientists to the face, and they were hopeful that the Mars Observer that was scheduled to go Mars orbital in late 1993 would provide much more detailed imagery. Their hopes were dealt a blow by the apparent destruction of the spacecraft just as it was making its orbital insertion maneuver, but NASA had already gone to such extraordinary lengths to keep the data it sent back secret that it probably wouldn't have mattered anyway. To make certain that public access to all images from Mars would be strictly controlled, NASA secretly altered its long-standing policy of complete public access. By so doing, it defied its most fundamental public mandate, which is to operate as openly as possible. This is why we went live to the moon, and why America used to brag that space exploration in a free society should be open, in contrast to the Soviet Union's secretive approach.