UPDATE:

The more I look at this image the more I think something’s wrong here. I have a suspicion but I’ll withhold it for now. I just want to note that another possibility has come to mind (and I’m not a “face” believer as my original post below makes clear). I wonder if the same notion that occurred to me just now will occur to Richard or Dave. At any rate, here is the page for the photo on the HiRise website via the University of Arizona. Do you see what I see? (I see what appears to be an incongruity in the photo data — but I’ll wait to see if Richard or Dave comment).

ORIGINAL POST:

The new extreme close-up image of the “face” on Mars should finally put this to rest. There is absolutely nothing in the famous Cydonia region resembling a face or even anything “structural.” Even the other “structures” in the region with the “face” don’t show up in the new photo. It’s like they missed the right location! (But no one has demonstrated that, so we’ll assume they got it).

I never bought into there being a face at Cydonia, as readers who follow my work know. The reason wasn’t because I don’t consider the idea of intelligent life on Mars or elsewhere in our solar system (or beyond) impossible. The reason was the weakness of the data, and the relentless spinning of that data by “face” researchers. I never found it persuasive.

I personally know two of the researchers heavily engaged in “face” research. I speak of Richard Hoagland and David Flynn. I went to their respective websites today and saw nothing posted about the new photo. It was obviously not good news for them. I have some thoughts about how I hope the death of the “face” prompts them in terms of their research.

With respect to Richard, it will be painful if Richard goes the denial route — the notion that the new image isn’t real, or is doctored, or (worse) still shows a face. He will cross into the realm of the comical if he does that, so I hope he doesn’t.  I know, many of you think he’s already there, having gone on that trip some time ago, but I think that response is not only unkind, but unfair. Think what you will about Richard (he is of course very controversial), but the older data was anomalous and got serious peer-reviewed attention (Carlotto, McDaniel). Now we have new, better data, and that should be allowed to take center stage, even though it eliminates the “face.”

As I noted already, I didn’t buy what Richard was saying about the “face,” nor his (to me) incomprehensible mathematical proofs for it. But his real contribution is likely the hyper-dimensional physics model, which doesn’t need the “face” to be real at all. I’m a physics bonehead, but I know enough science to know that if a model has successfully predicted certain things (and his has), then there is something to *that* at least. But the “face” and all he has erected upon it (“earth-Mars” connections, Martian-human heritage, that sort of thing) needs to fade into the past. I also don’t buy into most of what Richard says about moon artifacts and all the elements of his NASA conspiracies. That said, I do believe he has marshaled enough evidence (and we’ll throw in the life story of Jack Parsons here for good measure) to demonstrate that it’s reasonable to think that at least a few people in NASA have intellectually married the agency’s mission to occult religious beliefs. High office does not translate into or away from *any* set of ideas. Parsons might have occult kindred spirits at NASA. My hope is that Richard will do what a scientist would in the wake of the new photo: say he was wrong, junk all the ideas rendered null by the error, and then concentrate on the working hypotheses that remain.

I think the new Cydonia photo might be more serious for David Flynn since he had attached a few theological ideas to the “face” (but it doesn’t need to be). Dave is very gifted and, in my judgment, a valuable resource as a thinker (albeit my reasons for attributing value to his work are probably different than most who are familiar with his work). My hope for Dave is that he will be willing to dispense with the “face” and focus on what I’ve always wished he’d focus on: occult history and — more importantly — doing what is necessary to teach that history to a popular audience. Going forward, Dave will hopefully learn an important lesson: correlation does not mean causation. One can “see” all sorts of connections between things that might mean *something* but may not be at all related to a cause-effect relationship (and of course they may mean nothing at all). In short, I hope this makes him more cautious without paralyzing his work.

I’d love to see Dave do more in regard to teaching the principles of sacred geometry, gematria, numerology, and occult history, especially to a Christian (yes, I said Christian) audience. Why? Because the thoughts Dave thinks were the thoughts of very important “schools” in the ancient world — schools that produced their own “occult hermeneutic” for the Bible and biblical theology. Dave is one of the few people who speak that language today. If he could teach people this lost way of thinking, we could more easily decipher the erroneous theological thinking of aberrant groups in early Christian history, like the Gnostics, for example. Basically, Dave could be an important resource for understanding a variety of “mystical” approaches to the Bible that are just very hard to comprehend nowadays.

The “face” on Mars has nothing to do with this per se, but Dave has factored it in at points (and it in turn has had an impact on his eschatology). My hope is that he can let go and still see clearly how valuable he can be to Christians interested in understanding early occult theology, My own view is that our world is rapidly re-paganizing — that is, we are sort of moving back to the early Christian era, where orthodox Christianity was a minority view, surrounded by all sorts of mystery religions and pagan religions. Whether the Church wants to admit it or not, we are living in a substantially post-Christian world. Dave can help us make sense of that world, thereby equipping the Church to minister to it and intellectually rebut it.