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zling" features has appeared in New Scientist. The penultimate frame taken by Phobos 2 has been released and fits the description given above. It exhibits a convex catseye shadow which, because the overhead solar inclination prevented shadow-casting by Martian surface features, implies a shadow thrown on the surface by something in orbit— beyond the orbit of Phobos 2 itself. The shad- ow—spindle- or cigar-shaped—is inconsistent with any possible shadow cast by the moon Phobos, which is an irregular potato shape. One needs little imagination to postulate a | giant, hovering cigar-shaped mother craft sim- ilar to those documented down the years by UFO investigators. Another Phobos picture, released on Canadian TV, presents an infrared scan radiometer image of the Martian surface that showed clearly defined rectangular areas. These were interconnected with a latticework TASA. of perfectly straight channels, much resem- bling a city block. > fe . This suggests the heat signature of what may be a set of underground caverns and channels that are just too geometrically regular to be formed nat- urally. According to Dr John Becklake of the London Science Museum, “The city-like pattern is 60 kilometres wide and could easily be mistaken for an aerial view of Los Angeles." An underground base? If not, why the heat signals? The final picture taken by Phobos 2 before it was struck by what has been officially described as “a small piece of rock which happened to be in the same orbit” has never been publicly released, to the knowledge of this writer. One report indicated that it contained "potentially sensitive information” and would be presented at a closed meeting with US and British officials. Life on our own planet is diverse in the extreme. Why should we therefore place limits on extraterrestrial possibilities? Being open-minded doesn’t necessarily mean allowing all sorts of notions to come flooding into the mind, But people once | claimed the world to be flat, that men could not fly, that metal would not float, and that outer space was beyond humankind's reach. For myself, I cannot look at the night sky without won- dering about the myriad possibilities for life out there...and why not also within our own solar system? Mars ‘Pyramids’ in the Elysium quadrangle. Photo by NASA. prove this)—much like our poor old Sphinx back on Earth, which had its nose shot off by a trigger-happy French soldier | when Napoleon invaded the Land of the Nile. diana Sceptics among the scientific community remain unconvinced —_yrally that either of the two mentioned Faces on Mars could be genuine —fysey artefacts. Any reasonable, thinking person might be happy to easily concede that a single Face may be an aberration of nature, but res two Faces with similar features... The Hopefully, the current NASA mission to Mars will give us hard evidence either way. The DiPietro/Molenaar et al. ongoing effect, incidentally, indi- cates the possibility of even a third Face on Mars, although the photographic evidence for this is not anywhere near as convinc- ing as that for Face One and Face Two. PHOBOS AND ANOTHER MYSTERY Phobos, one of two moons of Mars, has itself always been considered a rather mysterious object, as has its smaller twin, Deimos. Iosef Shklovskii, noted member of the Soviet Academy of Science and co-writer with Dr Carl Sagan of Intelligent Life in the Universe, once calculated from the estimated density of the Martian atmosphere and the peculiar ‘acceleration’ of Phobos, that the satellite must be hollow. A space station of huge pro- portions? In July 1988, the Russians launched two probes in the direc- tion of Mars, Phobos 1 and Phobos 2, with the primary intention of investigating the planet's mysterious moon. Phobos 1 was unfortunately lost en route; Phobos 2 was also ultimately lost in most intriguing circumstances, but not before it had beamed back certain images and information from the planet Mars itself. According to Boris Bolitsky, science correspondent for Radio Moscow, just before contact was lost with Phobos 2, several unusual images were radioed back to Earth, described by the Russian as "quite remarkable features". A report taken from New Scientist of 8 April 1989, describes the following: "The features are either on the Martian surface or in the lower atmos- phere, The features are between 20 and 25 kilometres wide and do not resemble any known geological formation. They are spindle-shaped and are proving to be intriguing and puzzling." For the record, no further report on these "intriguing and puz- NEXUS¢15 The author, Brian Crowley (left), and James J. Hurtak. AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1993