A tantalizing Mystery remains in all of this- why Cydonia?  Sorry, I do not have a  simple answer as of yet as to why that locale on Mars has so many apparent links with Earth. It might turn out to be just another contrivance, a utilization of  a place-name which happened to occur  often in suitable Earth references to help manufacture the new, improved cover story. There seems to be something more, however. In some way, Cydonia is special. No one has turned up any ancient references linking the name Cydonia with any extraterrestrial anything. The Biblical reference to Sidon does not have any space-related component, unless you tie it in somehow with Baalbek, home of the huge stone platform Zechariah Sitchin says was used as a spaceport. As it happens, there is a clear link between Sidon and Cydonia. 

	If your favorite location for Cydonia isn't on this map, don't fret- the on-line map shows a "Kydonia" at the position of Kirtomados (a little bit east of Loutraki on the above). I think that's a mistake, but many towns have multiple names on Crete- or, someone might be looking for tourist business.

 Said to have been founded by Sidon, grandson of Noah, the city-state of  Cydonia  was the parent city of  Sidon, which was the parent to Tyre, which became the most famous of the three, home to the Phoenicians, who were a mixture (genetic and cultural) of Greek and Minoan. One of the wives of Solomon was a Sidonian named Jezebel (yes, that's her) who "tempted him" with the "idolatrous ways" of the Minoan culture.

	One of Sitchin's Annunaki - or the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, one of the two.

With or without the Annunaki,  that seems to be the oldest mention of the name in any form. Of course, a Biblical reference is pretty old.  It is possible that other  references were expunged from the historical record as part of some long-ago political or religious revisionism, but it is rather difficult to prove such a claim. When you factor in the various spellings, Kydonia, Cydonia, Sidon, Saïdon, even Zidon, the number of  possible arguments for links expands. Hania comes from Canea, which comes from Canaan: 

 In spite of that reference, the proto-Semitic root word sayd ("fishing"), is cited by some linguists as the likely origin of the city name.

Hmm. That would be very old indeed, and the Phoenicians were sometimes referred to by contemporaries as "the Fishermen" ...but you see how that goes. You can easily generate a derivational chain which will be quite valid, but not automatically true. So I am not sure about the name source. 

	Two coins from Kydonia. The lower one is a hemidrachma.  I presume the one at top is a different denomination..  That is a sea turtle,  not a hand grenade or pineapple I don't know the exchange rate, nor what the detail on the reverse means. c. 455-450 BCE

 

 

 

	There are some clues, however, indicating reasons for a possible specific Insider interest in the place, which you've already seen , in the previous Baalbek images.  You just didn't realize it- all that subtle face-related decoration of the stones is a dead giveaway. That trait is the tangible Fingerprints of the Old Culture, (with a nod to Graham Hancock), but it is part of what we are conditioned to ignore. "Don't look there...  look Here, where we're pointing!" In any event, Cydonia became the new star of the Conspiracy. That discovery of a “Face” on the Viking image was more than a GIF, it was a gift. Sorry. I could not get through an entire website without at least one pun. Anyway, whether orchestrated or accidental, that strangely compelling visage, as I said at the beginning, drew more public interest than anything NASA had ever experienced before. One might think that the executives at NASA would have seized upon this as an opportunity to secure funding for new missions, but instead, they disparaged any who saw a Face there. They called it merely a result of “tricks of light and shadow”. See a pattern here? Present a picture of something blatantly artificial in appearance, and then call it an illusion. Something you knew could be shown to have been misinterpreted- because you  made it up. This was to insure that any other obviously artificial things which might be noticed by the public could be discounted as nothing but more illusions, misperceptions by the unsophisticated who did not understand how to interpret the “special” imagery from the Mars cameras. There was a good reason the Face was chosen for this role. It is not a typical Martian Face. The true shape of the structure was distorted by perspective , and in combination with the "standard" contrast reversal, the result was uniquely flat. This unintended circumstance permitted a description  as a “mesa”, when it actually is built out of the side of a terraced hillside. Naturally, for genuine analysis, you would want to observe from the low side so as to see as much interior detail as possible. Yet so effective was the subtle sales job of the deception that Face aficionados complained whenever  a new image was released unless it was displayed with a vertical orientation. Rotated left from the proper aspect, in other words.
	MGS R0700989

You may have noticed by now that the Face is neither the largest nor the most unusual structure in the Cydonia area. The one singular distinction it has is this: it’s really wrecked. Other  local structures are of course  collapsed, eroded, and   more what a developer would call “scrapers” than “fixer-uppers” due to age and circumstances, but the Face looks like it might have intentionally  been bashed, smashed, and trashed. If  that impression is correct, it might mean something.  

It might seem odd that once the idea had been planted and the case established for discrediting any claimed discoveries of artificiality anywhere else, that NASA would continue to photograph the “meaningless” location. But that was necessary. The real goal was to make any serious amateurs obsess on the Face. The notion had to be nurtured that Cydonia was the hottest hot spot on all of Mars, the biggest and best chance to prove NASA was Hiding Something. Big bad NASA would do anything to hide this “smoking gun”, and it was worth any effort to try and trip them up.  Gotcha, Suckers. The Conspiracy knew that if enough people started looking at the rest of the planet, inevitably someone would find some other blatant, inexplicable feature, and then it would happen again, and then again. It was easy to disparage one “anomaly”, but if they did not limit the focus of attention to a small number of areas, eventually there would be so many anomalies to explain away that the whole cover-up would collapse under tons of absurdity.

	Just to ensure that everyone had confusion to spare, the raw versions of images sometimes vary from the posted ones in the archives. This was the last Face image taken by the MGS. As you can see, the  same data yielded quite a different perspective view.  How is one to know which is the more accurate? You can enhance a picture taken at an angle without problems, but if the picture has been incorrectly distorted to simulate a different perspective, that will affect the results of further processing.  The "low angle" one on the right seems to be the original. After all, why would they distort it like that if the other was the uncorrected source?
	click HERE for a bigger version
	Enhancement of that low-angle image, however, yields this. At higher resolution, it gets even more interesting. The problem is, it doesn't look like any of the other Cydonia images. Is this actually a glimpse of a parallel-world  Cydonia? Maybe they finally found the filter combination which could manage to reveal what they had been seeking. Before you dismiss it, study it for a while without thinking of the "familiar" details. Maybe this is the accurate one? It does indeed look  like many other Mars images, just not like other Cydonia ones. See how confusing it is, when things won't hold still ?

 

	As long as they could continue to trot out the Face as the prime example of how silly the anomaly seekers were, there would be few who would take other claims of “discoveries” seriously. There would be no pandemic of understanding. So they continued to put on a dour expression of resignation and take more images of the notorious Face.
	A little corner of the Inca City area   We will take a better look later...
	There were even a few backup targets. An area half a world away from Cydonia was labeled Inca City by those cataloguing the Mariner 9 images because it resembles the ragged grid layout of Macchu Pichu. Of course, any Medieval village would look about the same from the air, but the NASA insiders knew it really did have Incan detail. And since anyone could plainly see the curved grid, it was pointless to try and ignore it. So it was another opportunity to hide the truth in plain sight, and draw more attention safely away from any dangerous free range analysis.. We’ll take a look there, too. Next up, however, is the explanation which eluded the oh-so-smart Conspirators for 50 years.