Since the "Face On Mars" can't be seen from the surface of Mars, the only people that it could have been built for were above Mars. There was no obvious purpose for it, without somebody above Mars to see it. If it was meant to be seen from space, above Mars, you would have put it in a culturally significant location, naturally visible from space, such as the equator, and it would have been built right side up.

"But none of those things were true," said Astronomer TomVan Flandern. "The Face is at a random location on the planet at 41 degrees north latitude. It's not built right side up, but tilted 31 degrees off north, and there's nobody there to see it. But a year ago we discovered a connection to the Exploded Planet hypothesis; evidence that Mars was once a moon of a former planet that blew up about 3.2 million years ago. Someone raised the question that we know where the 'Face' is located today, but where was it located before the explosion? Mars is known to have had a very large and very sudden pole shift in the geological past. I looked up the coordinates of the old pole, and the coordinates of Cydonia, the Face in particular, and put them in the computer. I calculated the difference, and it turned out to be 90.1 degrees angle, meaning that the face was right on the equator of Mars before the pole shift, when the exploded planet was still there. It gives you a purpose, it gives you a special, culturally significant location, and the orientation was also right; it was right side up, before the pole shift."

Was it a Martian civilization that built the complex at Cydonia? Dr. Van Flandern doesn't think so. He doesn't think it was a very good candidate for life, especially intelligent life, to evolve there. But there is a lot of evidence, including the pole shift, the fact that most of the original Martian atmosphere was blown away by some catastrophic event, huge flood evidence, evidence of immense cratering on one side and sparse cratering on the other half, and that the crust is built up twenty kilometers on one side; all of this and evidence of radioactive isotopes indicate Mars was subject to a very close explosion - apparently one of these exploded planets - and that may be where life evolved, on the planet that exploded.

People often ask Dr. Van Flandern why the "Face on Mars" is humanoid and not alien?

"The speculative line of reasoning is that if the civilization on the exploded planet was able to build structures on their moon (Mars), to be seen from their planet, they obviously had space faring capability," Van Flandern continued. "Faced with an immanent explosion on their home planet, they probably tried to save as many as they could - put them on spaceships and sent them to the nearest suitable planet, which would have been Earth. The speculative scenario is that they did that, but weren't able to breath our air when they got here. But with an advanced knowledge of DNA, they might have been able to weave their DNA with primates and produce a hybrid species, namely us, that could survive. So speculatively, we are their descendants. The fact that the "Face" is human, and that the explosion dates back 3.2 million years ago, coincides with the fact that the hominid species originated on Earth, following a missing link, dates from, as nearly as we can date it, 3 million years ago. The evidence, although not compelling , leads to the very interesting proposition that perhaps We are Them."

END