By the time the Viking mission came along, the opinion of the scientists working in secret to unravel the Mystery of Mars was well established. They had decided that the things that would not Hold Still were in some fashion multi-dimensional, and struggled to design methods by which those things could be decoded. When you look long enough at Crazy Things, you begin to get Crazy Ideas. So the cameras were designed to incorporate as many filters as possible, in the hope that different wavelengths would yield clues to the nature of the physics responsible for such weirdness. This was sold to the Outside science community as a way to search for minerals and heat signatures. Everyone bought that story, but it wasn’t the real reason, at least not the important one.

When the pictures were reviewed, all that they found were more questions. At different wavelengths, even more anomalous designs and faces appeared. Apparently those smiling Martians were even scarier than first thought- their stuff was trans-dimensional. Yet the Viking landers, and the Soviet probes, did not fall into other dimensions or behave oddly at all. The clocks kept proper time and the instruments worked properly (mostly). Getting a close look at the constructions from the ground cameras only helped a little. Some of the materials looked more like coral, in a wide range of impossible colors, than anything else. Many places seemed to have  been grown rather than built, merging seamlessly from one substance to another, or with no discernable functional use. There was a lot of glass, or something very similar, casting prismatic reflective patterns that drove the cameras nuts. Here and there, what seemed to be entrances, even occasionally recognizable doorways, were found. This gave hope that at least there might be troves of useful hardware or archives of ancient knowledge underground.  This was all new information, so on balance the missions were deemed successful. The big questions, however, had not been answered.

So what were they doing wrong- besides hiding the most important information in all of human history from most people, I mean? They did not understand what a tolas was. In fact, there wasn’t even a word for it until I coined that one a few years ago.

The movie about late Victorian-era  stage magicians, The Prestige , opens with an explanation of the three parts to a magic trick. First,  a show-and-tell, the Pledge, which is pretty self- explanatory. Next, the Turn, the trick itself, an illusion of something happening which convincingly appears to be something it is not. Finally, the Prestige, a surprise revealed to the audience based upon the preceding misdirection. The resulting reaction would be equivalent to the modern Hollywood term, the money shot. That sequence is akin to what Mars did to NASA.  The tricksters got the pledge wrong..

They were aware from the first of the irritating way Mars changed before their very eyes, but for a long time they looked in all the wrong places for the mechanism. Eventually, after re-imaging various areas many times, someone realized that the sun angle had a lot to do with what showed up on the photos. Rather than getting glimpses of other realities, it was noticed that the figures seemed to come alive. The faces turned, or changed expression. There was interaction between the figures. Stories were being told, and no one had been watching. It was not a multidimensional crossover phenomenon, but shadow play. Those were not ruins, they were storyboards. We’ll refer to the groupings as dioramas here, since there is no antonym for “still life”.

So, what is a tolas? The word stems from the acronym for the slightly cynical phrase used by  NASA spokespeople to explain the “things” silly civilians sometimes think they see in the Mars images, things which are naught but “Tricks Of Light And Shadow”. Of course, that is exactly correct and true, but then the very best Lie is to tell the truth in such a way that it is perceived as false. A tolas is therefore a meaningful and intentional

 visual illusion, a constructed merger of the pledge, turn, and prestige mentioned above. Since it is from an acronym, the plural is also just “tolas”, not “toli” or ”tolasses”. OK? The word most often seen in recent years is pareidolia , but that is completely inappropriate because it is just a fancy word for mistaken impression. Mars is no mistake.     

At some point, the Conspirators gave up trying to understand it all. Such analysis was left to the lower level few on each camera team who were privy to the truth about what was being photographed, to be occasionally reviewed by some of the military sector technicians when they were not otherwise occupied. The Heads of the Conspiracy (sorry, another little pun slipped out) seldom asked for an update. The only thing left for them was the accumulated baggage of decades of deception. There was the bad  advice from untrustworthy aliens which had led to poor choices that resulted in political problems with other aliens. There were enough unholy alliances interacting to keep a dozen Tolstoy clones  writing for a thousand years.  And, there was  a bunch of technology so far advanced beyond what existed in the public sector that it seemed impossible to integrate into the mainstream, even if they wished to, and they did not. Most of it had not come from investigating the Old Culture anyway. All they had was Power, and they definitely did not want to relinquish that. The Secret Must Be Kept. Why? Well…because. I probably do not have to point out  the inevitable outcome of such circumstances. Dissenting voices began to be raised in the secret councils. The public should be told, it was proposed. OK, tell them just about Mars, but not the machinations of the Conspiracy. Hmm. That would not be possible. They had come full circle, back to the General’s Conundrum. What to do, what to do?

Meanwhile, the various probes continued to catalog the Martian Art Show, while interested civilians, people who were pretty sure there were secrets and that the images were not honest, wondered who it was that got to see the “real stuff”, and what they might be doing with the information. Sadly, the answers were, hardly anybody but the project heads of the camera teams, and, not much.  The wrong people were looking at the pictures, and not seeing the real value hidden within.