The Controversy In the Cydonia region of Mars there is a rock one mile square which looks like a human face. We have only a few photographs, snapped by a robot spacecraft in 1976. Only two photos reveal the facial features. Even the best image hides half the landform in afternoon shadow. Most of us would have doubts.
Most scientists think so.
There has been no lack of wishful thinking about Mars. The planet is one of the most prominent in the night sky, and so was worshiped as a god by the ancient Greeks and Romans. In the 1600s, when the telescope revealed Mars as a world like Earth, theologians presumed that a bountiful Creator would naturally populate a world like ours with beings like ourselves. And the relentless evolutionary procession of mutation and natural selection would inevitably lead to Intelligence. Though Mars seldom approaches Earth closer than thirty-five million miles, astronomers of the 1800s marked intricate surface features which seemed to manifest life.