The face on Mars really is just a landform. I've seen the landform before on our very own home planet. My family and I were going to Grand Canyon for a vacation. Life had been rough so we decided we deserved to see the country a little bit. Upon arriving in Arizona, I saw hundreds of mesas, which are landforms that look like faces. I was petrified at first, until I learned they were merely landforms. The first time I saw the alledged "Face on Mars," I knew it was merely a landform. I believe the Face is a landform and not an alien figure because it was exaggerated by Hollywood and the media, it would be better for NASA if it were an alien life form, and there are already lots of similar landforms on Earth.

Hollywood, its the home of the media. Of course the media will do anything for views. As soon as they found out about the Face, they jumped all over it. For instance, in paragraph 5, the author quotes, "The 'Face on Mars' has since become a pop icon." This implies that it really wasn't a big deal before it started to become popularized. Paragraph 5 also shows us that it starred in a Hollywood film, appeared in magazines, books, radio talk shows, and even was told in checkout lines for 25 years. The Face was an icon of its time, and thus was twisted to seem like an alien figure.

Moving on, why would NASA want to keep an alien a secret? If NASA actually did find an alien, they would want to let the world know so that they'd have more funding. In paragraph 5, we are told that the NASA budget wishes that there was an ancient civivlization of Mars. This proves that it would help NASA pay off debts and would make them more popular in the face of the public. It is also stated in paragraph 7 that Jim Garvin, chief scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program, had a few words to say.

"We photographed the Face as soon as we could get a good shot at it." Jim said. This exemplifies that NASA knew it was only a landform, but they wanted to take pictures so that the public would pay them more.

A third reason for my believing is that there are already many landforms like this. The landform is called a mesa. As I said earlier, I've seen many of these landforms in Arizona. We are shown in paragraph 7 that when the picture of The face first appeared on a JPL web site, it showed that there was no alien monument, only a landform. This proves to us that sure, if you take a picture from a certain angle, it looks like a face; when you take it from a different angle, it looks like the landform that it is. This is similar to the Man on the Moon. We know that it is just a bunch of craters, making it look like a human figure. In the final section, 12, Garvin states a perfect example.

"'It reminds me most of Middle Butte in the Snake River Plain of Idaho,' says Garvin. 'That's a lava dome that take the form of an isolated mesa about the same height as the Face on Mars." This is an excerpt from the passage that demonstrates how the Face is no different from our landforms on Earth.

Some might say that the face is actually an alien monument, and that NASA just doesn't want the public to know. But, what they don't realize is that NASA would benefit from seeing an alien life form. The public would love it, and the money would start rolling in. The author tells us that defenders of the NASA budget actually wish that there was an ancient alien civilization on Mars.

It seems that life gets so boring for people that they make any little thing seem amazing. This is shown through the fact that people made a landform appear as an alien monument. Through all the incomplete theories, I still believe that the Face is purely a landmark. I believe this because hollywood and the media exaggerated it greatly, the discovery of alien life would actually benefit NASA, and there are many landmarks on Earth and Mars that represent the supposed "Face of Mars."