An anonymous posted writes:

Isn't it interesting how the word IS getting about about the bizarre teachings of our favorite deadly cult? Notice this free clue larding an article about yet another piece of pernicious nonsense being peddled to the gullible. Alas, no mention of the Elron-postulated between-lives implant stations based on Mars and providing, one would think, an important part of the belief-system of this tax-exempt criminal conspiracy disguised as a "religion" <spit>, but otherwise informative enough, don't you think?

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From: The Daily Texan, 2 June 1998
By Roahn H. Wynar

Enterprise Mission (www.enterprisemission.com), founded by Richard Hoagland, has been pushing the envelope of stupidity for nearly twenty years. This leading pseudoscience organization has been "investigating" potentially artificial features on the Martian surface since the first shadowy image of a "face" peered back from an early Viking photograph. In late April, new higher resolution images from Pathfinder, taken under different lighting conditions, revealed the face to be nothing more than another eroded hilltop.

We didn't immediately comment for two reasons. First, we did not want to give the impression that we were actually holding our breath waiting to see if the new data would confirm a stipulation as ridiculous as the Scientology notion that we are descendants from clams. Also, we wanted to give the crackpots who have been promoting the notion of an advanced Martian civilization time to rationalize away thedata and regroup with new, even more inane theories.

Our restraint was rewarded.

Enterprise Mission has now concluded that the Martian plain where Pathfinder landed is littered with eroded Nazi-era armored vehicles, a gyroscope, and a howitzer. They also believe that Pathfider brought Nazi symbols to Mars, particularly an SS insignia mounted on the exterior of the spacecraft.

Obviously Hoagland has made a complete and clean break with reality.

Hoagland and others have long claimed that a "Pyramid City" and several other artificial structures lay west of the Face. For two decades theories linking these Martian pyramids to Egyptian Pyramids have been circulating, mutating and gestating, waiting for more data, and a break in the NASA conspiracy that is hiding the whole discovery. The motivation for the cover up, some claim, is that NASA employees worship Isis, an ancient Egyptian goddess, and for some reason Isis does not want a press leak.

The Martian civilization theory has at least three versions:

First version (attributable to various fundamentalist Christians): Angels used to live on Mars, but these guys aligned with Satan and God destroyed their home during the rebellion. What we are seeing are artifacts of their angelic civilization. The Bible seems to support this.

Second version (according to Zecharia Sitchin, author of The Twelfth Planet): A race of beings lived on "Planet X," which has a highly elliptical 3,600-year orbit around the sun. A few orbits ago, they "jumped planet" and moved onto Mars and later Earth. In both places they built pyramids, which are not tombs but rather large hydrogen gas power generators. Ancient Babylonian religion supports this.

Third version (Richard Hogaland): There simply was another advanced civilization in our own solar system, NASA knows it and is keeping it all a secret. A deeply disturbed personality supports this.

Version one and two heavily depend on the notion that the Pyramids are than 10,000 years old, an idea that seems to be gaining popularity with psuedoscientists and crackpots everywhere. Academic experts, however, aren't so easily moved.

"The archaeological record [regarding the Pyramids] is quite clear, and the datings are widely agreed upon among Egyptologists. The three 'great' pyramids at Giza, just outside Cairo, all date to the Old Kingdom period, and especially to the time of the Fourth Dynasty (ca.2650-2500)," explains Dr. L. M. White, Professor of Classics and Director of Religious Studies at the University.

Professor White is both an archaeologist and a specialist in religions of the ancient Mediterranean world.

On the issue of who built the pyramids and if they required any "help" from spacemen, Dr. White adds, "There is no doubt among archaeologists and Egyptologists that these monuments were the work of the ancient Egyptians themselves and can be set in very specific periods of cultural, social and economic history."

Rigorous archeological study and scientific consensus, of course, are extraterrestrial ideas to the pyramidiots, who have simply invented their own truths about the pyramids and the Face on Mars.

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Roahn H. Wynar is a physics Ph.D candidate.
Atomic and Molecular Experimental Physics

Columnist, The Daily Texan, Student Newspaper of the University of Texas at
Austin http://www.ph.utexas.edu/~rwynar