NEW STUDIES BY Veli Martin, 1998

THE "FACIAL" FEATURES Richard Hoagland noticed that if you mirror the left side of the face and copy it to the right, you get a humanoid face. If you mirror the right side and copy it to the left, you get a feline face (a lion, perhaps). He used this as as a reference to the Egypt Sphinx, since it is also a mixture of a humanoid and a feline (human face on a cat). Like this: Well, you certainly can't do this with the new picture... Or? We'll see that a bit later... Now let's remember that the new pictures is viewed clearly more from the left. To get a more accurate view from the top, some retouching must be made. The following images demonstrate how the shaded and lit regions can be used to estimate heights. Using the center curve as reference I "turned" the face a little to the left; and the result is this: In the animation (where the shades have been inverted to negative), you can see that the match is pretty good, but still the "face" seem to turn a little to the right. This can be seen from the "nose" (the peak of the mountain) as well as the "pimple" on the left. Now if the mirroring is done according to the absolut center axis, the result is this: But when the axis is moved to the right (which is not too far fetched, supposing even the corrected image is still viewed a bit from the left), we get a closer match to the Viking "faces". The lion is very similar, but the region above the "ape's" mouth is strangely different. I guess this can be explained with the different lighting:

Now what does this prove? Mostly it proves we are certainly seeing that same old mountain. But IF this is supposed to be a face, then either: The work was done very badly, it was meant to cause confusion and arguments, it was supposed to seem like a face only with the correct angle and lighting or the sculpture has been damaged after it was made or most likely the erosion is responsible for the deterioration of the original shape Since all of these options are only speculation, I can only say there is not enough reason to claim this is a sculpture of a face. Based on this we should regard the resemblance as a coincidence. continue to last page