Posthuman Blues

Newsflash! The mainstream media has been plugging Mars anomalies thought to represent a vanished (?) extraterrestrial society. Only one catch: The "anomalies" are the specious "discoveries" of a single guy -- who will go unnamed; he's raking up enough attention anyway. (One clue: For once, he's not Richard Hoagland.)

The "Mars researcher" eating up page-space in newspapers across the country has unearthed examples of supposed letterforms in heavily processed photos taken by the twin Mars Exploration Rovers. (That's right; the Martians somehow chanced upon English. The odds!)

This is the first time I can recall controversial Mars research (if "research" is the operative term) achieving mainstream escape velocity since 1998, when Malin Space Science Systems released its first radically substandard image on the Face in a vainglorious effort to "scotch this thing for good," in the words of one participating project scientist.

Interestingly, qualified scientists of disparate disciplines -- Stanley McDaniel, Mark Carlotto, Horace Crater, et al -- have been providing objective evidence favoring possible artificiality on Mars for years and have never been mentioned outside of venues such as my own Cydonian Imperative (with the exception of highly specialized peer-reviewed journals). None of these researchers, with the exception of noted astronomer Tom Van Flandern, has ventured an unqualified declaration of artificiality, but their case, seen in proper context, is compelling indeed.

So why does the mainstream zero in on the infinitely suspect claims of one of the countless online "anomalists"? To finally give the "underdog" a fair hearing? Hardly. This is classic debunking. Wave the weakest, most outlandish and incoherent "case" for "Martians" in full view and the masses will accept it as representative of the entire controversy. It's good for a few laughs and quickly forgotten.

But in the meantime, the uppity hicks manning the Kansas City Star and other timid publications can revel in smug superiority, secure in the conviction that they're fighting the Saganesque "good fight" against pseudoscience -- even if this means tweaking journalistic parameters so that a lone fool's ravings are packaged as Actual News.