In 1954, the enormously popular TV program   Space Patrol   ran a storyline that took place at a medical research lab in the  Cydonia Jungle. The jungle was located on Venus, not Mars, but let us not be picky- it remains an odd coincidence of names, 22 years prior to Viking. Later  that same season, there was an episode titled “The Martian Totem Head”, which launched a story arc set in the underground Martian city of Carnaca  Believe it or not, more on the Totem Head coming up later...
Also in the early 1950’s, on another network (actually two different ones), the show Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Based on a book by Robert A. Heinlein. They occasionally visited the Ancient Ruins on the planet Mars. A View-Master slide promoting that program actually depicted them standing on the Martian surface  in front of a Stone Face.  Here's the cover- to see the frames, go visit www,enterprisemission.com

Thanks, Richard!

Heinlein had planned a whole series of books involving ancient ruins throughout the Solar System. but they were never published.  

 In 1958, an early comic by Jack Kirby had a story called “The Face on Mars”, complete with drawings of a massive architectural Face. He later seems to have reprised that visage for the principal Bad Guy of his New Gods series, a demigod named Darkseid who resembles the classic Viking Cydonia Face even more. Darkseid was the ruler of the planet Apocalypse, which doesn’t matter here. But another featured location in those stories is strangely relevant- a mysterious extra-dimensional place of great power and  of great danger called the Wall of Souls, something completely composed of Faces. It was also known as the home of The Source. The New Gods series was described by Marvel Comics as  Kirby’s “Fourth World”, ostensibly to  point out its separation from the more mainstream storyline matrices in their catalogue (meaning you would not expect to see the characters doing guest appearances in Spiderman or The Fantastic Four- but that was not a completely ironclad rule) . Let’s see…isn’t Mars the fourth planet in our system? Hmm.  OK, you ask, what am I setting up here?  Time and purpose  Come speculate along with me, and we will build a context for understanding the  reasons  behind the Conspiracy.  
darkseid © Marvel Comics comic pages courtesy RHW
Before Viking went to Mars, there was the Mariner series.  The photos from those probes were of low resolution and did not excite that much public interest. The Soviets had their own Mars missions, but those also sent back poor quality images. However, can we possibly look back even further? The first satellites were launched in the 1950’s, so that is normally considered the beginning of the Space Era…but what kind of hardware put Sputnik, Echo, and Telstar into orbit?   Primarily, it was derived from the legacy technology grabbed by the USA and Russia from Nazi Germany after WWII. The German scientists and engineers were parceled out and hustled off to both countries to continue building war toys. I raised the point when discussing the Apollo program that Germany could have sent a man to the Moon in the 1940’s with their level of rocket technology if that had been given a high priority. It would have been a one-way trip, but our Apollo hardware was not that far beyond what they potentially had available. Apparently no one made a case to Hitler promoting any war-related advantage to be gained by squandering a pilot in such an endeavor, so it was not done. I haven’t seen any mention that it might have even been actively considered, but one never knows. Himmler did in fact boast about one day expanding into space, but no one took him very seriously at the time, or so we are told. Every public record of the engineering and technology they did explore shows few limits to the research, if suitable resources were available. Very Bad Men, but clever ones. In any event, this scenario immediately following is pure speculation about what Nazi Germany might have done, and why that might matter.