Product Description

An asteroid transformed Mars from a lush planet with rivers and oceans into a bleak and icy hell. Is Earth condemned to the same fate, or can we protect ourselves and our planet from extinction?

In his most riveting and revealing book yet, Graham Hancock examines the evidence that the barren Red Planet was once home to a lush environment of flowing rivers, lakes, and oceans. Could Mars have sustained life and civilization?

Megaliths found on the parched shores of Cydonia, a former Martian ocean, mirror the geometrical conventions of the pyramids at Egypt's Giza necropolis. Especially startling is a Sphinx-like structure depicting a face with distinguishable diadem, teeth, mouth and an Egyptian-style headdress. Might there be a connection between the structures of Egypt and those of Mars? Why does NASA continue to dismiss these remarkable anomalies as "a trick of light"? Hancock points to the intriguing possibility that ancient Martian civilization is communicating with us through the remarkable structures it left behind.

In exploring the possible traces left by the Martian civilization and the cosmic cataclysm that may have ended it, The Mars Mystery is both an illumination of our ancient past and a warning--that we still have time to heed--about our ultimate fate.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #294267 in Books
• Published on: 1999-06-07
• Released on: 1999-06-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Amazon.com Review
Mars holds a special fascination for us, because it is the most Earth-like planet we've yet encountered. As we continue to explore the red planet, geological evidence mounts that long ago water flowed freely across its surface, begging the question: If there was water, was there life? Graham Hancock thinks so. In fact, Hancock, a former journalist and the author of several books, including Fingerprints of the Gods, believes that certain formations on the Martian surface are the remnants of an ancient civilization--one strikingly similar to ancient Egypt--that was destroyed by a cataclysmic deep impact. Further, Hancock claims that NASA's reluctance to give credence to "The Face," "The Pyramids," and other things people see in images of the Martian surface is evidence that the U.S. space agency is motivated by cold war paranoia and mistrust. Hancock seems to be more fair-minded than many NASA critics, stating that, "what we see is a mindset, here, not a conspiracy." And indeed, one is hard-pressed to imagine why NASA isn't agreeing wholeheartedly with Hancock, since his ultimate point is that we should be paying more attention to our planetary neighbors and the skies above, lest we suffer the same fate as the Martians. Hancock raises many intriguing questions in this synthesis of unorthodox Mars theory, but those looking for applications of Ockham's razor had best search elsewhere--Hancock's theories require a leap of faith as surely as NASA's do. --Therese Littleton

Review
"Hancock revels in presenting his readers with a vast wealth of information. He builds his case fact by fact,
find by find, until one is overwhelmed by the evidence that draws to an inevitable conclusion."
--Journal Star -- Review

Review
"Hancock revels in presenting his readers with a vast wealth of information. He builds his case fact by fact,
find by find, until one is overwhelmed by the evidence that draws to an inevitable conclusion."
--Journal Star

Customer Reviews

WELL-REASONED ACCOUNT OF "THE FLAYED PLANET"

This may be the most speculative of all Hancock's books, but he gives you plenty to think about. I wondered if this book would just be another rehashing of Richard Hoagland's ideas about the artificiality of the "monuments" of the Cydonia region of Mars, but instead it's pure Graham Hancock. He connects some dots from his previous books, looking again at the significance of the layout of the Giza plateau in Egypt as well as Teotihaucan in Mexico and speculating about whether the ancients have left us a message. It's a dire warning that our planet may be in for a pounding by explosive projectiles from space - the same dangerous objects that may have destroyed the planet Mars.

Hancock provides plenty of background on the swarm of comets and asteroids that are on Earth-crossing orbits and how they got there. It seems as our galaxy makes its great circle over millions of years it periodically encounters the galactic arm which is full of debris. Some of this debris remains with our solar system, but on unstable orbits. Comets, it turns out, can begin as huge objects many miles across. They generally break up at some point into smaller more numerous objects and work their way from the far end of our solar system to closer to the sun - and, of course, passing by Earth. And yes, comets CAN hit planets as we learned with the explosive impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on the planet Jupiter in 1994. One of the impact craters it left is larger than Earth!

Hancock explores the photos we have of Mars that show it must have had liquid water in its past. He gives us a complete summary of the structures found at Cydonia, including the famous face. Despite NASA's release of a picture that made the face look like a bunch of random scratches, the speculation of artificiality is very much alive. NASA was deceptive in releasing a "raw" photo, something they normally do not do. It is obvious they wanted to put an end to the public's fascination with the face. Even cleaned up, the photo shows an irregular structure that only looks a bit like a face. But the whole concept of Cydonia as a place with constructed monuments never rested solely on the face. There is the matter of the geometry of the area, which seems to have encoded a lot of the same numbers as the pyramids of Giza and other ancient Earth monuments.

In true Hancock fashion, the author provides us with penty of food for thought. He carefully labels his ideas as speculation, not fact, but he conjectures that the damage to Mars could have been recent, not millions of years ago, and it could have coincided with the great flood stories of Earth and an apparent disaster or series of disasters in the time frame of 9000 to 12,000 years ago. These may have involved a scattering of comets and other space objects that are still a danger to Earth; that previous cycles of these swarms from space wiped out the dinosaurs and caused other mass extinctions on Earth.

Hancock goes on to speculate that disasters on earth may not be purely geological events, but may have to do with man's treatment of his fellow man and his respect (or lack of it) for his world. He laments that the nations of Earth are doing almost nothing to search the solar system for the danger that may be awaiting our home. Is it just hubris that makes up think we are the culmination of all previous generations of humankind? Or are we dead wrong, and is human civilization destined to experience cycles of destruction? Will our Mother Earth become a dead place like Mars? As always, Graham Hancock provides entertaining reading whether you buy into it or not.

Important, but not up to previous standards.
Graham Hancock's foray into "The Mars Mystery" suggests a disjointedness that is not in character with his usual form. It is definitely not of the same high quality of "Fingerprints of the Gods"; however it does contain the elements of a good story if told with less speculation and more supporting evidence. There is little question that The Face and the Pyramids of the Cydonian plain on Mars make for an intriguing mystery which will likely only be resolved with extensive exploration of Mars. Is this arrangement a natural fluke or an engineered set of structures put there by an ancient race of intelligent beings, beings which may have had a link to Earth? Hancock only serves to heighten the frustration previously generated by Richard Hoagland in "The Monuments of Mars". This frustration is not helped in any significant way by a disappointing resolution and lack of clarity in the Mars Global Surveyor and the Malin Space Science Systems Mars Orbital Camera, aided and abetted by the potentially subjective method of computer "contrast enhancement" and the suggestion of a NASA cover-up complicity. But this Cydonian part of the book does not seem to fit with the rest of it; I tend to agree with T. Peters in his review that the lack of a "walloping confirmation" from the Mars Global Surveyor forced publication of a book in heavily revised form. But what is the true story told here, what was Hancock really trying to say? That Mars was once rich in atmosphere and water and now stands in stark testimony to the vastly destructive effect of asteroid and comet impact is a reasonable thesis. That the same thing could happen to Earth is also a credible argument and the fact that the Yucatan peninsula Chicxulub crater evidences the Cretaceous -Tertiary extinction of the dinosaurs and 50% of the genera and 90% of the species of the existing life should give us pause for a realistic contemplation. Walter Alvarez in his "T. Rex and the Crater of Doom" actually tells this story better. But here Hancock launches a speculative work which requires great conjectural talent; the proposition that a single giant asteroid breakup is responsible for nearly all of the entire present topological state of Mars is indeed harrowing. True, this would have had the necessary energy to explain a host of questions. A single impactor which produced the Martian Huygens Crater at 305 degrees West and 17 degrees South would have had the necessary energy to denude the entire Martian surface of its once robust 3 bar atmosphere while thrusting up the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons, within about 4 degrees of its exact geometric antipode. Surely multiple hits which created the three largest basins on Mars would boast orders of magnitude larger energy availability for ocean destruction, crustal distortion, and shield volcano excitation, although Hancock does not attempt any actual quantitative exposition, making instead an intriguing qualitative case. It follows that we earthlings should be very attentive to our potential affinity for earth crossing objects. If Hancock has achieved something of merit, it is a call for the continued exploration of Mars and a growing public emphasis upon asteroid and comet research, both compelling topics with a potentially profound impact on our past...and our future.

Cosmic deaths and cosmic corpses: signs of demise...
I've read literally 100s of books in my life but this was with ease one of the most fascinating ones I've laid my eyes on.

I could start right off by praising Hancock's research and the integrity of his sources, but actually, before any of that, I think special credit should be given to this man's authorship.

Indeed that's in my mind the biggest asset of this book: that it's a definitive "cantputdowner". The only way i could see someone not being thoroughly engulfed in this marvelous work of a book is if he's either brainwashed beyond repair and refuses to hear anything entertaining notions that go against the "programm" in his mind, or, worse still, if someone is basically cerebrally pulseless.

Hancock spreads out a super convincing, mm, not so much theory, but argument. At no point in his book, again to his credit, does he dogmatically claim "look, there WAS intelligent life on Mars at some point" but he does claim that the evidence is overwhelming towards such a direction and that the rather bizzare attitude of Nasa about this might be actually confirming this or at the very least fuels suspicion to the max.

The premise here is the stunning "monuments" in the area of Cydonia and the implications arising from this. It's not only the well known (???) face on Mars but also the hexagonal eerily symmetrical pyramids and other such phenomena that have tell-tale signs of artificiality about them.

Even though i've read quite some, especially on the net, about the "Face" i found that there was actually an ocean of data i was totally unaware of. Hancock goes on a lenghty but very pleasant to read diatribe about those constructions but where it gets immensely interesting is when he tackles the more-than-strange behavior of Nasa about the whole issue. NASA to put it in a nutshell has been basically fronting the theory that not only the winds are particularly talented out on Mars but that they are also selectively talented as they seem to be creating things in Cydonia and only.

That might be laughable enough one would think, but their overall attitude to public demand for further and detailed investigation on these anomalies so the matter could (?) be put to rest has been borderline conspiratorial. The world has either had to deal with outright refusals or with grainy photos that Nasa releases in an apparent effort to conceal what really? Questiosn that scream for immediate answers. NASA general politics are also discussed in the process and, well, they dont seem exactly "crystal-clean" stuff to put it extremely mildly.

But by then you'd only be half way through the book: the latter half is the one that -incredibly-manages to capture the imagination even more albeit in a macabre and cosmically scary way.

If the death of Mars as all evidence overwhelmingly suggests came from a cosmic bombardment of comets or fragments thereof what are the implications to us here? Especially since the spectacular "atatck" of comet Levy-Shoemaker on Jupiter there has been more discussion about such a danger even if the budget we actually have on comet-orbit watching is downright ridiculous.

Hancock reveals to the uninitiated, like myself, that comets are not a distant low-probability threat but an ever-present and increasingly threatening reality. Alone in our solar system there are 100s of 1000s of them flying about in anarchic orbits and in mindbending speeds (most between 45.000-60.000klm/hour). Many are so called "earth-crossers" as they regularly (in universal terms) cross our orbit.

When one thinks that our current theory holds that the dinos became history indeed because of a comet or that there have been not just that one but several seriously damaging impacts in Earth's past, but also, that contrary to mainstream belief a comet does not have to be "giant size" (i.e planet-size) but a mere few kilometers in diameter to make the "blue planet" another cosmic corpse with a past. But with no present.

Hancock does also question the possible connection between a past civilisation on Mars and ourselves and again, the evidence more than confirms his notion that such a connection is not some far-out sci-fi type thought but it is actually supported by our ancient heritage. What i like a lot about Hancock compared to other researchers of the genre is that he's actual very casual and undogmatic even when he suggests (but never insists) such dazzling theories.

An absolutely tremendous book on all levels. If you do have a "sucpicion department" in your brain the "Mars Mystery" will confirm your worst fears. All this has nothing to do with "conspiracy theories" by the way. As a journalist once said at the beginning of the 20th century:

"...it's not the conspiracy theories that interest me, it's the theories about conspiracies."