STUDIES BY MARTIN KEITEL

a 3d model of the mountain

So you've all seen it - the famous mountain on Mars photographed by a Viking orbiter in 1976, that looks like a gigantic humanoid face looking up to the Martian sky. So you've all heard the official scientific opinion: It's just a co-incidence caused by a light coming from a proper angle and making a natural geological formation appear like something "we would like to see". So you've all hear the UFO enthusiastics claim that this is an artificial construction built by extra-terrestrials, maybe an ancient Martian civilization.

So you all ask: WHAT MORE IS THERE TO SAY?? On these pages I am not presenting any scientifical proof showing that the formation is artificial - nor the opposite. I am hoping to offer, however, a clear and objective presentation for you to make your own conclusions about this thing. Neither am I going into technical details - if you want that, I strongly suggest you pay a visit to the Face on Mars homepage. My motivation for doing the following studies was the fact that several seemingly competent researchers and other people take for granted that the face is indeed artificial, while I thought the whole matter is ridiculous. We don't have to go far from our home yard to see nature-made formations that look like faces, animal or human figures etc. Cloud formations, the bumps and cracks in tree trunks or rocks, holes in the ground, ponds of water in mud... So what I decided to do, was to reconstruct the face in a 3D modelling software (Imagine), so that it appears somewhat the same lit from the same angle as it was when the Viking orbiter took the pictures. Yet I was determined to make the mountain actually look anything else but an artificially constructed face - so that seen and lit from another angle it would not look like a face at all. THE RECONSTRUCTION I used a photo in a book for the modelling. I rendered images with the light coming low from the up-left and I adjusted the slopes on the mountain until I got the appearance of the face. I made the right side (in the shadow) intensionally unsymmetrical and "malformed", though actually from another photo also taken by the Viking orbiter you can see that the face is rather symmetrical. The resulting formation is not quite an exact match to the original, but it serves the purpose of this experiment that it's less "perfect". I then made an animation with the light and a very slight camera movement just to make the animation look more realistic. The idea was to show how an irregular natural formation turns into a face when the light moves to a certain position. I also present you a set pictures from different angles and also with different lighting directions. Seen from a smaller angle the face shape is not so quite obvious anymore. Click on the miniature images to see enlarged versions. Okay, the formation looks like a face. In my opinion this can quite well be a coincidence, especially if you watch the formation individually, separated from its surroundings. In my opinion, it's not the resemblance to a face that makes it look artificial, but the regularity of the shape. Let's go and examing the original photos... continue to next page