There is an old canard from the Sci-Fi world that states: If  you are facing Something  truly Alien, completely foreign to the conventions of human perception, that Something might be impossible to see. There would be no context for your brain to use for comparison, and thus the built-in visual mechanisms would fail to register the  excessively Strange Thing at all. Is this true? Well, it is unprovable, if it is true- how could you know that you were not seeing something? Yet it is part of the problem that began the cover-up. They did not understand why the things they saw on Mars and everywhere else they looked would not hold still.  

	Here's something inscrutable for you- the bottom half of  MGS image R1701452.. Yes, it's Mars.

	Strangely enough, if you imitate the effect of moving toward the site from a distance, it changes in front of your eyes. More on this later.

	Just pretend you are an astronomer comparing plates for differences. The less you strain, the more you'll see. If you see nothing at this point, don't fret- you will, after reading further.

Let’s try a little experiment. I tell you, with respect, that

GOD IS A DUCK

When you ask me the meaning of such a statement, I say again

GOD IS A DUCK

If you protest my remarks as blasphemous, or accuse me of  aggravated levity, in fact whatever you say, I tell you

GOD IS A DUCK

Now  click on the phrase below

GOD IS A DUCK

What was the first thing you noticed? You never thought the power of suggestion was so easy to wield, did you?  For a better, or at least a different, view , click on one of the other repetitions of the phrase. I'm not saying which one.

Since there were Scientists doing the secret research, they searched for scientific explanations. Since both the scope and the nature of the phenomenal things were so far beyond their understanding and capabilities, they assumed that high technology was the key. This seemed initially to hold great promise of reward. If a somewhat broader base of minds had been involved, the preliminary judgment might have been a little different.

What they were not prepared to find was Magick, in the most formal and classic sense. They had all the clues- the background information from all the ancient archives made quite clear that the Gods, the Old Ones, the Ancestors, by all the Names, had some mental link with Reality. This was not just some metaphysical conceit coincidentally  woven into all the stories from the past, or the misapprehension of technology by sub-technical observers. it was the key to understanding the information preserved in those accounts. Even in a culture where the  most sophisticated technical tools might be the hammer and chisel, people could tell the difference between actions initiated by a wave of a hand and those started with a lever or button- and the ancient accounts speak of both Belatedly, these latter-day Seekers in Secret found themselves on the same path as the Crazy Nazis. In order to find the technology, they would have to understand the environment in which it hid. That environment scared the Hell out of them.  

	E1101155 detail-  Very hard to visualize the composition here. The face in the center morphs back and forth between a man sticking out his tongue and a lion without even having to move. Try glancing away and back a few times. This also possibly makes this website the only space-related one with two separate images containing someone sticking out their tongue. No message is thereby implied by me...blame the Martians.
		This is a Mariner 4 image, trimmed a little.  The released versions were pretty crude and worthless (this is "number 8", if you want to go find the original), but I suspect they were able to glean a bit more for their own perusal. It's obvious the targeting skills improved on the later missions- though the Mariners couldn't really be precisely aimed anyway. There is a Mariner 9 image that shows Cydonia, but the Face area is too small to yield an acceptable image. Sorry.
	Click on the image for a close-up of the lower corner area. It is actually kind of interesting.

The mathematicians theorized that only in more than the three familiar dimensions could such unstable-yet-persistent phenomena be explained. Did this mean that a man attempting to walk amongst the ruins of Mars would run the risk of falling into some other dimension? Would they merge with the walls like the hapless victims of the Philadelphia Experiment? If so, then a total quarantine was called for. Nothing would be obtainable.  

The Visitors who established contact with our self-appointed intermediates  after Roswell seemed to exhibit some similar weirdness, and made the case that  they should be granted exclusive access to places like Mars, since “Man was not Ready”. As our military could do next to nothing to stop the aliens from pursuing their own agenda anyway, whatever it was, this seemed odd to a few of the insiders. Why even ask? They even tried to present themselves as our Creators, and showed evidence of  their long “association” with Earth. Not everyone believed the pitch, but deals were struck anyway, because they had actual technology to offer, real hardware. Another alien group, much more human in appearance and apparently more advanced, stressed that neither they nor the Visitors were our Creators, but they lost the bidding war, as they offered us  little in the area of hardware. Beware of Grays bearing gifts.  

	detail from MGS  E0901304. See her?   Click HERE for close-up

As soon as the covert program made it to the Moon, a sigh of relief was heard in the halls of the secret facilities. No one fell through a dimensional hole- at least, not accidentally. But the Moon was nowhere near as strange as Mars. Our Moon was artificial. It was a reconstructed planetoid,  parked in orbit by entities unknown at some undetermined point in the past. 

	Inside the lunar crater Tycho, from a Clementine image

There were plenty of confusing ruins to explore, in fact it looked like several different  civilizations had been there already, but the technological artifacts we sought were elusive. Many of the ruins were so ancient as to be dangerously fragile, and most of the place made a definite Look but Don’t Touch impression on the explorers, but it was solid enough. They still could not understand Mars.  

	A detail from a  Soviet Luna 17 image. of  lunar ruins
	whole image (if you're curious- it's very Alice)

All the details from the interactions with the various aliens were used to embroider the Great Myth which had supplanted contemporary history. This provided new ways to plant the seeds of fear and steer people away from any potential discovery of the real situation. The new Myth was following the grand tradition  of the Myth which had been in place already, of course. The hidden research continued. Mathematicians worked on topological models, attempting to quantify the number of layers required to build the Martian Madness. Specialists in optics strove to design filters that might separate  the component details of the morphing vistas and provide glimpses of other dimensions.

The  cameras sent out on the NASA public probes were built under the auspices of the Black projects so that suitable safeguards against unwanted revelations could be incorporated. One cannot have too much Intelligence data, so the safeguard systems were designed to be reversible. That way, NASA could gather the photos in the open, but only the insiders would be able to access the real content. There were too many people involved in the process of running the missions and receiving the data for security to be maintained any other way.

An early technique used a special lens that “blocked” the image, much like the pixelization software later used in  TV news to obscure the faces of  victims and perpetrators, But you can  compensate for  any lens effect with a complementary second lens. The average citizen merely thought the images were low quality and chunky, so the trick worked for a long time. This was eventually superceded by software which twisted the histogram ( the range of values of intensity). To undo the effect, one simply had to know how to extract the information buried in the data as difference values between the components of the signal. That is possibly a little technical for some, so just imagine something like multiplexing the stereo of an FM transmission on a carrier wave. The consumer, you in this case, got the scratchy AM , and the elite few got the FM stereo. I say “elite few” because even most of those in the NASA food chain who knew that data was being withheld  were not given the way to decode the images   .Since no one had any unaltered reference images to compare with those from NASA (and, by grudging agreement, from the Soviet space agency), the system survived in spite of any suspicions about the veracity of the released images. Remember that last point for later.  But suspicions did grow, and the plan had to be modified.