About this episode

The episode discusses the mystery surrounding a photograph taken by NASA's Viking 1 orbiter that appears to show a humanoid face on Mars.

On July 20th in the year 1976, something happened up on Mars that would spark decades of wonder, argument, and wild speculation here on Earth. NASA's Viking 1 orbiter, having just settled into orbit around the red planet, began snapping photographs of the Martian surface in a region called Cydonia. Most of these images showed exactly what you'd expect from Mars: rust colored plains, craters, wind carved ridges, and endless dusty nothing. But one photograph, cataloged rather dryly as frame 035A72, showed something that made mission scientists sit up straight in their chairs. There, staring back up at the camera from roughly a mile wide stretch of Martian terrain, was what appeared to be an enormous humanoid face. Two symmetrical eye sockets, a ridge that looked uncannily like a nose, and a mouth line, all carved into the landscape as if some ancient sculptor had decided to leave a monument the size of a small mountain range. NASA scientists at the time, perhaps sensing the storm they were about to unleash, released the image publicly with a somewhat playful caption noting the strange formation and its resemblance to a face, while also noting it was almost certainly just a trick of…

Topics covered

• Mars exploration
• NASA missions
• mysteries of space
• alien civilizations
• photographic evidence

Keywords

• Mars
• Viking 1
• Cydonia
• humanoid face
• NASA
• space exploration
• mystery
• photograph
• civilization

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: NASA

Places: Mars, Cydonia

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