I originally came across this anomaly in 2003. It was 2003 and the opposition of Mars was at hand. So naturally I was at the library fossicking for books on Mars when I came across a book grandly titled "The Monuments of Mars - A City on the Edge of Forever." by Richard Hoagland. Adding it to the pile, I checked out and when I got home started to browse through it.

The Viking 1 Orbiter snapped an unusual photo. A  mesa resembling a shadowed human face.  NASA's line was that it was a chance arrangement of shadows and light.

Richard Hoagland, the author, disagrees and makes the following assertions:

1. The Face is an artificially created monument - as a message to Us.

2. There exists a ruined city nearby the face. The buildings take the form of massive arcologies.

3. The Face and the City are aligned to allow the observation of the Summer Solstice and the heliacal rising of Earth at the epoch of construction of the City/Face complex, asserted to be 500,000 years ago.

4. There are mathematical relationships encoded in the construction, alignment, layout of the City, Face and other structures in the area.

5. That the beings that lived on Mars in the City and who created the Face, in the balance of probabilities were not indigenous to Mars. That given that the technological remains of an advanced culture may not endure millennia of erosion and planetary change, these beings used the Neolithic permanence of stone to leave a message to us. 

6. There is evidence of a nuclear holocaust that wiped out these colonists.

7. There is a connection between the Face on Mars and Egypt (The sphinx? Pyramids?) and the Sumerian culture. 

8. That the location of the City on Mars and other "anomalies" in the solar system relates to "Hyper dimensional Physics" 

So where do we begin!

This topic being what it is, there is a staggering volume of material for anyone who is trying to look objectively at it all, so I have chosen to look at a couple of the key features - the Face and the D&M Pyramid. In some aspects I may have simplified matters, however I have tried to present the gist of the arguements - there is simply too much material and only so much time!

Where is Cydonia - A description of the Region.

This montage is composed of Viking orbiter images and is bordered by Latitude 41.7N, latitude 39.7N, Longitude 10.6W and longitude 8.6W. Various NASA sources catagorise the form of the region as being mostly due to erosion. The mesas and other landforms that protrude are the remains of the bedrock, the rest of the region is covered in a rubble of erosion materials.  The Cydonia region is halfway between the more heavily cratered highlands of Arabia Terra and the smoother lowland regions of Acidalia Planitia. In the late 1980s scientists proposed that this region was on the edge of an ancient sea-shore. The difficulty in proving (or disproving) this theory related to the poor resolution of the imagery, and that testing the soils directly was the easiest way to establish the facts of the matter. However the 2004 NASA rovers have established the presence of minerals that our current understanding suggest as being most easily formed by the presence of  liquid water that existed for an extended time.

The Cydonia Region and it's "anomalous" features. Scale = 0.2314 kilometers per pixel (true at the equator).

  revised 2007