Back to the Face we go. The “classic” Face, taken from Viking orbiter image 035a72, is usually shown in a crudely enhanced version, the one which first appeared in public in a German magazine. Just download the “raw” version of the image from the JPL archives and apply the simple “equalize brightness” function available in any graphics program, and you will have almost the same result. You will also see that the “nostril” is apparently a pixel of noise. Noise on the nose. But the “classic” picture has been selectively enhanced, because the area on the left side between the eye and mouth is much lighter than it should be. It exaggerates the roundness far beyond what you see on the one you just (hypothetically) did for yourself. And although some of the noise has been removed, the dark spots, including the nose-noise, were left. Speaking as an accomplished pixel wrangler, I must tell you that whatever was done there is not acceptable enhancement protocol unless you were aiming to make something look like something it was not. 

Why would NASA, or in this case specifically JPL, the American Varsity Team of pixel wranglers, claim work like that as their own? For that matter, why was that atypically enhanced image in the pile reviewed by the analyst anyway?  Beyond offering the possibility that it was partly to make a statement about the “folly” of reading too much into a photo that of course could not actually show a real Martian structure, since there are, according to NASA, none, I will leave the question hanging for now.

	Now if they had released image 070a13a  in a nice clean version like this, people might have not been able to make so many misjudgments about Cydonia. Hey, it still looks like a Face. Nope, the Agenda called for more smoke and mirrors than that. So this one was released with low contrast and all covered with noise lest people study it and notice all that interesting artistic detail. After you read the rest of the site, you'll come back to this one and understand that last comment. Incidentally, it is virtually unprocessed here, literally just "cleaned up". They hadn't implemented the later tricks of their trade yet.

When you examine one of the other Viking images of Cydonia, 070a13, you will find it looks far more like every image taken of Cydonia by all the subsequent probes. Be advised that unless I specify otherwise, I’ll always reference the “raw” versions of images, the ones that have not been perspective-corrected or “map projected”. Those are all, by definition, warped. Just imagine a photo of someone lying down. Now imagine that you digitally distort the photo so that the person appears to be upright. How clear is that picture going to be compared to the original? Clever software can do clever things, but it seems ill advised in this situation.

Here is the point to all of this: the Face was a set up, a red herring. From the beginning, every bit of the Face Mystery was orchestrated by NASA to distract people from any real investigation of the true story of Mars. Many sincere researchers expended their energy on attempts to glean insights from a contrived situation. This was augmented by posed pseudo-anomalists who engaged in various enhancement  “techniques” to claim new bogus findings and keep the waters nice and muddy. Rumors were circulated saying things like, “that image was never supposed to be released, it slipped out”, and were eagerly accepted as gospel. There were lots of helpful suggestions from the Sincere Public Servants at NASA encouraging people to do ridiculous things like combining completely different images into amalgams, all to hide the fact that the images being released were tweaked in ways to make them, well, useless. You were meant to simply view them as presented, and ask no embarrassing questions.

	Oh, they knew what was there all right. In many respects, the Viking images are at least the equal of any of the later Mars pictures. When enhanced, they yield the widest range of color and never seem to have the excessive contrast and noise streaking  problems that plague so many images from the later probes. You don't suppose that some of those problems are fraudulent, do you?

Just in case there might be anyone who still pondered the possibility of fraud, more rumors were spread. There was a Secret Archive, where the real pictures were kept, and the ones placed in the public archives were retouched to airbrush out the anomalies- that was a popular one.  It is a fair assumption that there would be some images held back, for any number of reasons, so that story did contain some truth, as the best Lies always do. It thereby coddled and misdirected many of the civilians who might have otherwise delved deeper into the nature of the whole shell game. They would embark on largely fruitless searches for “better” images, when the truth was right there in front of them. They were trapped by their passion for the Truth. This was good, for the cover-up. Someone examining the whole situation with a cool detachment might have figured out that it was absurdly impractical to maintain full separate archives. Even if the storage and security issues were manageable, the manpower that would be required to produce so many bogus images would be completely ridiculous. Just hiring, not to mention training, half the people needed for such a task would be tantamount to full disclosure. Far better to encrypt the pictures. Only the chosen insiders would be able to access the real content, but the pictures would be easily available through the normal channels. After all, just screening the incoming images for Anomalous Things was a massive and time consuming task, since it had to be done simultaneously with the actual cataloguing and analysis. There was a limit to how much the images could be pre-distorted if they were to look at all consistent, so each still had to be checked before release.  When there was some political or PR advantage to be gained from quick release, it seemed that an image could be processed for release in just a few days, but the majority were held back for “analysis”, often for months. That must be some really in-depth analysis. We might give them the benefit of the doubt on that, oddly enough, as you will see.