UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

There has long been an intriguing theory on our reality, that of the concept that we do not exist in a vacuum, and that far from the only universe there are countless others coexisting side by side. It is a notion known as the “multiverse,” and it really opens a lot of mind-bending possibilities and spins on what we think we know. The idea is that there are literally infinite versions of realities and different timelines all simultaneously existing in tandem, perhaps only separated by a thin curtain through which others may on occasion bleed through to each other. What this might entail is left open for debate, but one often talked about consequence of such a merging or opening between alternate dimensions is that people or other creatures from those realities might cross over into our own, strangers in a strange land that temporarily visit only to once again vanish without a trace.

A very strange encounter was included in the book Mysterious Disappearances: And Other Strange Tales, by Robert Quinn, and allegedly took place in the state of Utah in 1977. The two witnesses, called Ben and Steve, were out hiking and photographing sandstone formations in the wilds and set up camp for the night near some sandstone outcroppings, before continuing their adventure the next morning. It was on this day as they hiked along that a strange wind kicked up out of nowhere, growing in intensity and sending swirls of sand and dust spinning through the air. The winds were reaching gale force, and were so ferocious that the two men decided to take shelter in a sandstone cave, and this was when they would have their strange experience.

Utah sandstone formations

As they looked out into the fierce winds, they allegedly spied a figure running at full speed across the open desert landscape right through the gusts of wind, and looking through their binoculars they could see that this was no ordinary person. The man they saw was very tall and well-built, with long hair whipping about and dressed in a bright red loincloth, some sort of multicolored beaded headdress, and with curious metal rings wrapped around his arms. Who was this strangely dressed individual and why was he running about in the storm? The book gos on to explain what happened next:

As the runner moved along something resembling a small dust devil was seen moving along with him as if it had intelligence. If the man slowed, so did the dust devil. If he changed direction, so did the whirling dust cloud. It resembled a race between two cross-country runners. At one time, the man paused and looked around, as if he didn’t know where he was. The dust devil circled him until he once again moved on. It was the craziest thing both had ever witnessed. The two friends noticed the strong wind had diminished when the stranger first appeared. By now the “two” had covered some four hundred yards as they moved north. Reaching a high rise both disappeared over its edge and disappeared.

After this the wind stopped altogether to leave silence in its wake, just as suddenly as it had appeared. Was this some lost wayward wanderer from some other reality? This book has a few other equally strange encounters of what can only be described as some creature falling through the cracks between dimensions, and another happened to a woman called Grace, who is from New Mexico but at the time was visiting family in Connecticut. One day she was apparently out doing some chores in the biting cold of a December day, and she looked up at a hill on the rural property and saw what she at first took to be an animal rummaging about near a gazebo her son had built near the top of the hill. She looked into her binoculars and soon realized that it was no animal, but something far stranger.

She could see that it was in fact a diminutive little man just over a foot in height, who appeared to look rather bewildered and confused “like he didn’t know where he was,” and was shivering with the cold. The little man then stepped into some snow and disappeared. When Grace’s son and his wife returned she told them of what she had seen, and they went to investigate, finding a hole in the snow but no tracks leading away and no sign of the little man. The book goes on to offer an idea of what might have happened, which could be a very similar explanation for all of these sorts of cases:

In theory, this might have occurred: he fell through a slip in time and space from another world or dimension by accident. One morning he was standing in his world, then BINGO. He drops into ours on a snow-covered hill. The poor guy can’t realize how he arrived there. Seconds later, BINGO, he’s back to his world, telling a fantastic yarn nobody believes. They might have thought differently if he had arrived covered in snow.

Perhaps even odder is a case from July of 1975, which also revolves around some sort of “little person.” The report comes from an area of the Adirondack Mountain Range, in upstate New York, where a couple by the names of Mike and Janice lived. The couple one day returned from weekend trip to visit relatives in Long Island, when Janice realized that their rock garden looked off somehow, as if someone had gone around and rearranged some of the stones, flowers, and decorations. Since no one lived around them and this was a rural area, they could not figure out why this should be, but sort of just put it out of their minds as no damage had been done.

A few weeks later, they went out to find that overnight the whole garden had been rearranged and altered yet again. As they looked around, thinking this must surely be someone playing a rank on them, they found what appeared to be tiny human footsteps in the earth, which had been muddied by a rain the previous evening. A few nights after this they looked outside to see a soft white light emanating from the garden, and when they looked they could both see that the light was perfectly circular, yet even stranger than the light itself was what was moving about within it. There within the mysterious light was allegedly a tiny woman standing around a foot tall, with long hair and dressed in a long white dress. She didn’t seem to realize she was being watched, and went about rearranging rocks and flowers, looking almost annoyed, and then one day the little woman just vanished and never returned. One wonders if this was a gardener in some dimension that had become intertwined with ours temporarily, and if perhaps she was the one wondering who was messing with her garden.

One of the oddest and well-circulated stories of some sort of person appearing from what seems to be another dimension allegedly took place in 1954 at Haneda Airport in Tokyo, Japan. In July of that year, a Caucasian looking man dressed in a suit stepped off a plane that had originated in Europe and causally made his way to customs. When customs asked him the purpose of his visit, he told them that he was there on business, and had indeed been to Japan several times before for the same reason. In fact, the man was conversant in Japanese, as well as French and Spanish. Indeed, his wallet contained currencies from a few European countries. At this point, he seemed to be just an intelligent, well-traveled business man, and there was no reason to be suspicious. Yet then they asked him where he was from and things got strange.

When asked his country of origin, the man matter-of-factly stated he was from Taured, as if it was the most natural answer in the world. The problem is, there is no such country, and when the suspicious customs officer informed him of this the man looked baffled, presenting his passport and insisting that this was indeed where he was from and that it was a country lying between France and Spain. The official-looking passport was indeed issued from a country called Taured, and held customs stamps from several European countries, as well as three previous stamps from Japan, just as the man had said. The man even had a valid-looking driver’s license from Taured. At this point the enigmatic stranger was starting to arouse suspicion, and he was ushered away for further questioning.

He was shown a map of Europe and asked to point out where Taured was, yet he seemed genuinely bewildered when he could not locate it there where he claimed it should have been. The only country that was in the location he indicated was the tiny nation of Andorra, and the frustrated man claimed that it was Andorra that was the made-up country and that in its place should be Taured; a country he claimed had existed for over 1,000 years. The skeptical customs officials asked him where he was headed for work, and when they tried the number that the man provided the company on the other end of the line stated that they had never heard of him. A call to the hotel where he claimed to be staying likewise turned up no evidence that he had ever booked a room there, and furthermore the bank information he gave turned out to be from a bank that no one had ever heard of and which could not be contacted. Baffled authorities decided to book him into a hotel under observation as they tried to figure out what to make of his story, yet the following day the man was nowhere to be found in his room, despite the fact that authorities had been outside the whole night. He had simply vanished. Later, when police went to the airport to retrieve the man’s passport and driver’s license for an investigation, they were found to be mysteriously gone without a trace as well.

It is hard to know what to make of this account. Although it has appeared in many Internet articles, as well as mentioned as a factual account in several books, such as The Directory of Possibilities and Strange But True: Mysterious and Bizarre People, there seems to be a lack of any solid original source to verify it all, giving it more the distinct air of an urban legend. Nevertheless, there have been numerous theories posed for who the mysterious stranger could have been, ranging from a time traveler to a visitor from some parallel dimension who had somehow pushed through the veil that separates our realities. Unfortunately, there is little we can do to prove or disprove this amazing story, and it remains a curious mystery.

Similarly there was a case from the mid 1950s in the State of New Jersey at an unspecified town. Here there was one day found an elderly lady who was just sort of wandering about in the street dressed in period clothing from the 1800s. The lady drew quite a crowd, but she seemed to be too disoriented and confused to pay much attention to the onlookers. She called out in what was described as a strange accent, and when someone finally approached her the lady supposedly ran down an alleyway. When she was followed it was found that the woman had just vanished, even though there was no known exit from this particular alleyway. Who was this lady? Had she just sort of wandered in from another dimension and then wandered back out?

There is also a phantom dimensional traveler tale from 1851, when a man calling himself Joseph Vorin was found wandering about a village in the rural German district of Lebas, near the town of Frankfort-on-the-Oder. Thinking he was a vagrant drifter, authorities approached the stranger and asked him where he had come from. The stranger, who appeared to be Caucasian, answered in broken German that he was from a faraway country called “Laxaria,” which he claimed could be found out over the seas in a region he identified as Sakria, neither of which were real places that anyone had ever heard of. When he was detained and brought to Frankfurt for further questioning, things got more bizarre still.

Vorin was found to be unfamiliar with any other European language except German, of which he had only a rudimentary grasp, but he claimed to be a native speaker of two unintelligible languages which he said were called Laxarian and Abramian, with one being the written language of the “Clerical Order of Laxaria” and the other the common language of his people. The stranger was apparently very persuasive, explaining the geography of his country and even his religion, which he called Ispatian, in great detail. Vorin further claimed that he had been searching for his missing brother, but that he had become shipwrecked on his journey and had ended up in Germany. It seems that in the end, the baffled authorities came to the conclusion that he was telling the truth and released him, after which he seems to have just disappeared from history and perhaps from our reality as well.

Along these lines is a case that was related to me directly by a reader who says he believes he had an encounter with someone from another dimension during his days as a security guard at an unspecified airport. He claims that they had to respond to a call for a man who was wandering about babbling nonsensically and scaring other passengers in the airport. When they approached him he seemed to be very panicked and confused, wild-eyed and seemingly on drugs, and he was unable to respond to questions directed at him. He was brought in to be questioned and calmed down somewhat, but his speech was unintelligible. On his person was found a passport for the United States, but the design of it was all wrong, and it looked almost like a really bad, cheap forgery. He also had a driver’s license on him that was written in some sort of gibberish that resembled English, but which made no sense. When the man was supplied a pen and a paper he wrote down a number, and it was assumed that this was his flight number, but no such flight number was registered by any airline in the airport for that day. Things got pretty bizarre when the stranger gestured that he needed to go to the bathroom, but when he didn’t come out for some time the doors were open to find he was just gone, even though there was no other exit. It is hard to know how much veracity this account holds, but if it is true at all one cannot shake the feeling that this was possibly a confused temporary visitor from an alternate reality who was scared and had no idea where he was.

In every one of these cases we have people or other strange figures that seem to have stepped into our reality from some other place, seemingly quite by accident considering their reactions to being here in many instances. It brings up a very strange theory that our reality as we known it perhaps brushes up against and even bumps into others, all separated by some veil that normally keeps us separated, but at certain times is porous enough to allow something or someone to slip through for some time, only to have them fall back out to wherever they came from. Is this what is going on in these cases? Are we living in some sort of multiverse with cracks in the borders that we can fall through from time to time? Or is this something else? There is currently no way to know, and such tales of these strange visitors serve to merely stir the imagination, a fascinating glimpse at a perhaps groundbreaking revelation on reality as we know it.

1976 was a historic year for Americans. A contentious U.S. election was underway between incumbent Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, his Democratic challenger. It was also the year of the bicentennial, as the United States celebrated two centuries since its founding. And like NASA had done less than a decade before by putting men on the moon, in September of that year the space agency would seek to make history again, as the Viking 2 mission went speeding toward the Red Planet in an attempt to place an unmanned lander on Martian soil.

In the humid summer months preceding the successful Viking 2 mission, its predecessor, Viking 1, had already been in orbit around Mars, sending back a constant stream of photographs which NASA scientists planned to use to help them locate a suitable landing site for Viking 2. On July 25th, the usual batch of images were being received and processed, when a peculiar geological feature of the planet began to reveal itself.

One of the photos depicted a sloping prominence, befitted with a number of depressions and rock formations that, casting hard shadows and observed under the sharp contrast of Viking 1’s photography, bore an obvious likeness to a human face.

Some thought little of it, chalking the ghostly visage staring back at the orbiting Viking 1’s cameras as being merely an instance of pareidolia—the natural tendency of the human eye to assemble familiar shapes and images from random features in nature.

Most who observed the area depicted in the photograph probably thought this, in fact. Although it is hard to imagine that there weren’t some, at least—or perhaps even several—who hadn’t cautiously entertained the other possibility: what if there had been a civilization on Mars at one time? And if so, what if this gloomy face befitted upon an odd, polygonal mountain in the Cydonia region, might actually be some remnant of that civilization?

It wasn’t long before NASA determined that the “face” on Mars was, in fact, a natural formation. In their own words, upon releasing the image publicly just days later, the space agency described a “huge rock formation in the center… which resembled a human head.”

The famous photograph from Viking 2 in 1976, which spurred debate over a “Face on Mars”

(Credit: NASA).

The image was, of course, enough to get people talking, whether or not they believed NASA’s determination about the photograph. Many found it impossible to believe that the likeness of the curious features in the photograph to a human face could be pure coincidence. The hope for discovery of life on Mars had already been a source of great anticipation: now an eager public was nearly sold on the idea, but instead of microbes, hoped that within the coming months there would be irrefutable evidence of life on the planet in the form of archaeological traces of a civilization that once lived there.

Interestingly, some scientists were concerned about the emphasis being placed on the search for life on Mars. “There is also a fear that if too much emphasis is placed on the possibility of life and none is then found, as still seems likely, the public will consider the mission a futile failure,” a New York Times article reported on July 22, 1976, just three days before the photos of Cydonia returned to Earth depicting what many believed to be a face.

However, if the famous “face on Mars” had indeed been such, it would raise a number of hard questions. Chief among them is: how could a feature like this—if artificial, as many claimed—have lasted for the untold amounts of time that passed before Viking 1 arrived… especially considering how much it appears to have weathered in the few decades since that time?

While the 1976 photographs remain the most famous ones of the region depicting an alleged face, NASA has released numerous additional photos of the location over the years, captured during ensuing missions (which is interesting in itself, since it shows that there was at least a modicum of interest in the unusual collection of features). However, as we can see in the photos below, NASA’s infamous face didn’t appear to age very well:

By 1996, the “face” looked a lot more like a pile of rocks

(Credit: NASA).

Arguably, the more perplexing element to the region where the Martian “face” appears is not the rocky places that form what many liken to eyes, a nose, and a mouth, but the odd, almost geometric shape of the outcrop itself. According to Space.com, “The rocky outcropping that creates the illusion is approximately a mile across and bears a resemblance to buttes or mesas from the American West. It likely formed from a combination of landslides and collected debris.”

Additionally, the differences between the 1976 and 1998 photos are actually greater than those between the first photos, and some of the most recent, in which the face-like details appear to have returned, although only slightly:

Perhaps what is most fascinating about all of this is people’s desire to look for unusual things on barren, alien worlds. Rather than aliens, or simply a desire to believe in them, people’s interpretations of Martian “anomalies” seems to say an awful lot about us.

I’m reminded of a story my grandmother told me once as a child. Often at night, she and her siblings would become very frightened by the sound of loud crashes that came from the back of their family home. Occurring only at night, they would emanate from the back of the home, the portion facing the forest at the edge of their property. Naturally, they began to believe that an animal—or perhaps something else—had been appearing and pounding on the house at night. Several years later, she laughed about how she finally learned that the thick slabs of pine in the walls would creak and pop as they cooled at night, no monsters necessary.

In much the same way that some people interpret random, natural events as evidence of “supernatural” happenings, people seem to both enjoy, and at times even display a need to look for structured things in environments where none should exist. In years since, similar “anomalies” have continued to appear on Mars, which range from odd structures and other alleged “manmade” features, to sightings of Bigfoot.

So let’s face it: that famous “face on Mars” was never really a face at all. Of course, that’s not to say that there aren’t other “faces” that have been spotted on the Red Planet…