Seven years after new photographs destroyed the bizarre Face on Mars theory, my local community newspaper, the Tabletalk, has announced the possible extra-terrestrial origins of the human race in a front-page article that features the face prominently.
I shall be posting the image as soon as my scanner works again. In the mean time, I wrote the following letter.
Dear Sir or Madam
When arguing against the theories of Melkbosstrand writer Wayne Herschel (Facing Our Past, Table Talk, 19 March 2008), there is something far more effective than mentioning thousands of years of cultural history, a century of evolutionary science, and the fact that Dan Brown, whom he seems to believe is a serious scientific researcher, is actually a self-declared novelist, who makes stuff up for a living.
This would be to point out the preposterousness of his composite image of the so called “Face on Mars” that graces the front page of your newspaper.
The accompanying image shows one of the 1976 photographs on the left, and a 2001 photograph on the right. The bad photo looks face-like. The good one does not. Mr Herschel has reduced the quality of the good photograph by superimposing the bad one. He has done this in order to create a more compelling image, or perhaps an image that seems to show something which does not exist.
Thousands of academics all over the world have advanced human knowledge through the application of scientific methodology, and announced their findings in peer-reviewed journals. Mr Herschel’s work is constrained by no such process of validation and verification. As fascinating as his ideas are, we need to recognise that he is not so different from Dan Brown after-all, and that his works are nothing more than speculative fiction.
Andrew Freeborn
Table View
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