<HTML>Claire,
Obviously, the first place you should probably go for an opinion on this is straight to the source, asking Robert or Graham for their opinion.
Having said that much, I'll offer my own. One key issue in the post you brought up is its dating, (August 17-19, 1996 from the Daily Mail - London)
Approaching the matter from a slightly different angle, a good question to ask here is:
Did this posting precede the NASA expedition which essentially refuted the long-held possibility that the Face on Mars may have been a non-random, 'man-made' [or e.t.-made] anomoly?
Let us all face the following fact: whether or not the image of the Face on Mars was natural or man-made was, until the time of this expedition, really a matter of opinion, and one in which people on either side of the fence had a fair and reasonable position.
I, for one, was inclined to believe the Face was not natural, but not so much so that I was emphatic about this issue. At the very least, I thought that the Face itself, especially when considered in relation to the other anomolous structures that were nearby, warranted a good second look - and nothing at all like the inexplicably dismissive attitude that NASA had been taking ever since the Face was first captured in the mid-70s.
As such, I believe that the article by Graham and Robert to which you refer is fair and reasonable comment, but that relies solely on the timeline of the relevant discoveries.
However, the subsequent Mars expedition in the late 90s pretty much proved that the skeptics were right, that upon closer inspection the so-called Face proved to be nothing more than a natural phenomenon. This basically moved the discussion outside the realm of opinion-making, for those who persisted in opining that the Face was sitll man-made in light of the new evidence would surely not be deemed 'reasonable' in their assertions to this effect, so far as the vast majority of reasonable-thinking people would be concerned.
[To see why this is true, one need only put the later NASA photos alongside, say, four other photos taken of deserts or natural landscapes under similar lighting conditions. One then puts forth the question: which one of these photos looks to you like a face? Being all more or less the same, it follows that the so-called Face would score no better than any of the other photos, and far less than one of the possible answers, if the reasonable-thinking test-takers were allowed to fill in a box entitled, "none of the above". Alternatively, we can be certain that the Face, when juxtaposed alongside some photos of random natural landscapes would have scored much, much higher in the vast majority of surveys.]
Note: there is one caveat to the point made two paragraphs above: that NASA, acting on behalf of The Big Brother Association, [local 634] may have produced false evidence to produce this effect. While our conventional reflexes will cause most of us to dismiss this notion offhand, at a deeper level we will also be reminded that if this were true, it would not be the first time that Big Brother - or, Big Person - had done such a thing. In fact, they probably do it on a daily basis.
Nevertheless, by the time of the second expedition, and again, in applying the standard of the reasonable person, the Face on Mars was more or less put to rest. And this returns me to my question: when did that second expedition produce said photographs? Was it before, or after, Hancock and Bauval wrote the article in 1996 - I believe this was well before NASA came back with those Face-slapping photos. As such, their findings with made for interesting and fair comment, in my opinion.
My view of this issue changed however, about 3 years later. At the time I was living in Japan, and eagerly awaiting their follow-up work to Keepers of Genesis, at the end of which G and H promised to explore the matter of whether or not the pyramids had been encoded with certain information that had been intended to create a "messianic fervor" coinciding with circa nowadays. I think that I waited 2 years for this book to come out, and when the Mars Mystery finally hit the shelves in its hardcover form in Tokyo in (I think) early 1999, I eagerly coughed up the $60 US dollars for the hardcover version.
The disappointment I experienced upon reading that book over the next few hours was profound, for a couple of reasons. Number one, by that time the Face on Mars theory had been effectively quashed by the NASA photos, again, as far as any reasonable person would think [or so I assert]. The Mars Mystery made no mention of this whatsoever. I felt like I had been taken, and the generally provocative style of the writing, which seemed to rely nearly exclusively on inneundo, made me question whether or not Graham had actually used similar methods in writing Fingerprints of the Gods.
However, I was not about to conclude this off the bat, nor have I yet - and I'll tell you why: the reason has to do with the nature of the publishing cycle. My understanding is that the larger companies, with whom GH is obviously associated, require the final submission of a manuscript to arrive something like 6 months to actual publication. As I recall thinking, there was no way that Graham would have had a chance to retract or qualify some of the statements in the book itself, for the simple reason that according to this time cycle he would have had to have submitted the manuscript PRIOR TO THE LATEST NASA PHOTOS. Again, and in my opinion, those photos rendered the whole Face theory passe, but if they were made prior to the later NASA photos, much of what Graham wrote in the Mars Mystery would have been fair comment, I think - even though the overall tone was far more tabloid than scholarly, and still very disappointing to me for that reason.
Could somebody verify the timeline I'm getting at here? If I am right, it does seem that Graham might have wanted to have retracted, or to have qualified, some of what he wrote in Mars Mystery in light of the new [NASA] evidence. At the very least, he should have given due mention to the the NASA photos if he could have - but now in thinking about it, I seem to recall that he did make some sort of comment to that effect, albeit a token one, which would have been very sensationalistic and unscholarly if this recollection is correct.
In any case, Claire, if he hasn't done so yet, again I suggest that you solicit Graham's opinion (and Robert's) directly.
Cheers,
Mark Grant</HTML>
