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- In April, 1998, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory produced
a flat, grainy "enhancement" of the image taken by the Mars Global
Surveyor (MGS) of the "Face on Mars" in Cydonia. The enhancement
was released immediately to the world news media only one day after the
original image had been taken. What the enhancement showed was virtually
unrecognizable as having any relationship to the face-like object seen
in the earlier, lower-resolution, Viking Images. This enhancement of the
MGS image has come to be known as the "Footprint" or "Catbox"
enhancement, because some people thought it resembled those things more
closely than it did a face. Because the "face" seemed to go away
under the much higher resolution of the MGS camera, it has become generally
believed that the question of the artificiality of the Face was answered
conclusively in the negative. But the JPL enhancement can be shown to be
a hoax.
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- A Fox News article posted on their web site September
8 article stated:
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- "...according to the disparate band of believers
who since the big letdown have kept the torch of artificiality burning
on Web sites and in newsletters and books. They branded NASA's image "the
Catbox" or "the Footprint" and said a poor-quality picture
was deliberately released as a public relations move to kill the topic."
(URL: http://foxnews.com/science/090800/mars_face.sml)
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- While there is no way, of course, to prove what the motives
were behind JPL's release of the shoddy Catbox "enhancement"
of the MGS Face image two years ago, it can be proven beyond reasonable
doubt that a deliberate fraud was perpetrated once it is understood what
extreme and bizarre image "processing" had to be done to produce
the Catbox from the raw image. What I think is very likely close to the
image-processing procedure that JPL used is described at:
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- http://vgl.org/webfiles/mars/face/catbox2.htm
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- The resulting "enhancement" is not an exact
replica of the JPL Catbox, but it's close.
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- The "enhancement" process involves the use
of a high-pass filter, which has long been suspected to be the primary
culprit in the creation of the Catbox. But to get something as truly bad
as the Catbox, it was also necessary to apply the Photoshop noise filter
and embossing filter. Both of these latter two filters are used for fancy
special effects in computer graphics, but are bogus in the extreme for
any image purporting to depict a real scene. In summary, it appears likely
that JPL used a high-pass filter to remove visual cues to the true height
and shape of the object, a noise filter to obscure unwanted features that
couldn't be removed, and an embossing filter to add features that don't
exist, but that make the terrain look rougher and more "natural"
than it would in an honest enhancement.
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- I see very little chance that this is anything other
than deliberate fraud. It seems unlikely that even gross incompetence could
explain the Catbox.
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- While a proper enhancement certainly shows no "smoking
gun" evidence of artificiality, it does show additional features that
resemble what would be expected of a face but that were not seen in the
lower-resolution VIking images. Their presence thus fulfills a priori predictions
based on the artificiality hypothesis of what the MGS would see at high
resolution.
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- Careful analysis of the MGS image by image-processing
specialist Dr. Mark Carlotto has shown that the object has a degree of
symmetry that is uncommon for most natural landforms. By any scientific
standards, the MGS image demonstrated that further methodical imaging of
this landform and its surroundings are warranted. Evidently, JPL released
the Catbox as a political obstruction to the progress of scientific investigations
into the possibility of artifacts on Mars and it has done so successfully
for two years. But this situation may not last forever. It can be hoped
that NASA will take corrective actions that will lead to the necessary
re-imaging in the remaining months of the MGS mission.
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