Customer Reviews

THE MARS MYSTERY: A TALE OF THE END OF TWO WORLDS

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

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.

Like so many other Hancock readers, I have read all of his previously written books, but note in other reviews, the absence of any mention about what I consider to be his most profound and factual writing, "Lords of Poverty."

Mr. Hancock continues to intrigue me with all of the "possibilities" of this present work. I am now even more inclined to give credence to his research because of "Lords of Poverty" which, although written ten years ago, has proven to be right on target!

I must say that as I read "Mars Mystery..." I found myself surfing the Web trying to access his bibleographies in an attempt to better understand exactly what he was talking about. In every respect, however, the book is an adventure in learning and an expansion of one's intellectual peripheries.

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."

Graham Hancock, if you hadn't already noticed, is a tad off his rocker. He has a bad tendency to leap to conclusions from minimal evidence, and, so, I wouldn't always agree with everything he says.

However, he is two things: Entertaining, and sometimes right. This book is no exception. It has a rather broad focus, leaping from Mars to Earth and outer space and back again. His main thesis is that Mars was terrestrial and habitable as recently as 20,000 years ago, with a similar civilization to his version of Atlantis, and that related catastrophes destroyed the Martian civilization, while severely crippling the Terran one.

On the whole, his theories are a tad shaky. Yes, Cydonia looks like it's artificial, and that might be the most likely solution, but there's still nothing proving it. Even the mathematical ratios the researchers found are still not beyond the vale of coincidence. Similarly, his evidence for Atlantis isn't decisive, at least to my mind. I'm inclined to believe him, but mostly because the idea's just really cool.

The one thing that I don't have any trouble believing is his theory about the Taurid meteor swarm. Noting that the Tunguska and Canterbury events, as well as several other large meteor strikes, happened in the same time, convinces me that we *do* need something to watch for NEOs. (The incredible thing is that he never even comes close to the idea that the Tunguska blast was an alien ship...he's not that kind of lunatic)

This is a good book to pick up and read, if you get the chance. He might not be entirely all there, but he's entertaining, and he asks some very interesting questions, which often he has the best answer for.

This is among the earlier of Graham Hancock's remarkable series of books on unknown Human History. It concerns a possible connection in the ancient human past between Earth and Mars, which the writer postulates hosted a Human civilisation before it got destroyed in a cataclysm caused by a cometary or asteriod impact. Either there was a sister civilisation on Earth, or the remnants from the Martian one escaped and came here to start afresh, and thus Ancient Egypt was where they "unloaded" their legacy. He dated Ancient Egypt's legacy as belonging far back in the hidden mists of millenia untold, linking it to this Martian civilisation, instead of its "official" starting date of circa 3100 BCE. The "story" therefore is remarkable and astounding. But Hancock, in this book, also deliberately deconstructs his previous, equally remarkable and plausible ice-age theory for the destruction of such an ancient technological global, antediluvian civilisation for which he cites the theories of Charles Hapgood and others, and for which overwhelming evidence otherwise exists, transcending interdisciplinary boundaries. This theory was based on the Earth's cyclical axial precession as well as the related possibility of its crust shifting catastrophically, and was at the core of his "debut" book, "Fingerprints of the Gods". His new asteroid-impact theory is as equally as forceful as the axis-shift one he replaces, and such abrupt changes of view could cause doubt in the minds of his readers, even those with superior intellects and education who could reconcile both these aspects of view. He does touch upon this disparity of his on P.254 of the book, but cursorily and briefly.

He treats the example of the present day scarred and desolate planet Mars as a warning for what could happen to our present "high" civilisation now populating Earth. Elsewhere, he also speculates on a conspiracy by the powers-that-be to conceal what happened to Mars - and therefore Mankind's actual history - so as to be able to control their societies, which might otherwise become restive and panick stricken in the face of such knowledge and eventualities. After all, the elites are mature and powerful enough to be able to contemplate awful disasters coolly and in the face - which an ordinary Tom, Dick and Harry can't otherwise even think of, let alone bear! In the last chapter of this book titled "Dark Star", he writes mournfully to the effect that just as humanity seems to be lifting itself to superior levels of cultural, technological and spiritual expression, along comes a global cataclysm forcing them back to square one: to begin as mountain shepherds and hunters all over again, carrying with them the tales of lost Golden Ages of science and culture. This forces him to contemplate mournfully, along Gnostic lines, as to whether God is indeed all-good and love as the "classic" scriptures would have one believe - or whether "He" is a Duality: Evil as well as Good. He then supplies the answers, and so do his other excellent books which I recommend to Amazon readers, "The Lords of Poverty" and "Journey Through Pakistan". The influence of devilish forces aside, it seems we ourselves become The Devil when our lofty achievements get overtaken and harnessed to base desires and consumeristic greed, leading inevitably to some kind of disaster... That is evident right now, in this most critical time recorded Human history has ever known.

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.

Is it just me or have most of the conclussions this book drags it's way to been holed below the waterline by the recent Mars mapping mission? perhaps I'm inhabiting a parallel universe in which major pieces of Astronomical news are given more coverage. The most recent NASA mars mission took numerous highly detailed mapping photos of the Cydonia region which have revealed the so called "Face" as an artifact of the poor resolution of the few, oblique images that previously existed.(I know,I know, some people will scream "CONSPIRACY! CONSPIRACY!" but there are some people who think the earth is flat too) The recent pictures also show the "Pyramids" to have moved downwind, changed shape and passed over the top of more solid geographical features. Remarkable! The Martians must have been advanced indeed if they could make pyramids that behaved just like sand-dunes. Perhaps now Graham can go back to bothering reputable archeologists with theories about ancient ruins all around the world being based on the remnants of Atlantis, instead of wild speculations about little green men (did you spot the irony there, normally I wouldn't mention it but some people don't seem to be able to recognise it) This book was pedestrian and ridiculous when it was written, now it is outdated, pedestrian and ridiculous.

I have finished reading the book a few weeks ago and now that all the emotions have settled down, the impression that is left is of a highly entertaining and informative book.

I might not agree with 100 per cent of all what Mr. Hancock writes, but most of the evidence that he presents can not be ignored.

As a person with an open mind I recommend this work of art and science to everyone who is willing to give a chance to the ideas presented in it.

All of Hancock's previous books I devoured with fascination and glee--they were stimulating and provocative. This one was a giant dud! It was as if he waited for the latest Mars mission photos to substantiate his connection between Egypt and Mars, then discovered to his horror there was no connection evident from the photos, and had to "wing-it" to complete the remainder of the book. For the best summary of the whole controversy over intelligently constructed edifices on Mars I suggest you read COSMIC TEST TUBE, by an investigative reporter named Fitzgerald who explored this subject and many others in depth!!

I am a hugh fan of Graham Hancock and have read 3 of his previous books, "The Sign and the Seal", "Fingerprints of the Gods" and "Message of the Sphinx"......this was by far the weakest of them. It seems that Mr. Hancock is treading on ground that he is not as familiar with. Indeed, after reading Hoagland's "Monuments of Mars", this books seems weak. But none the less, he adds valuable material to the subject of an ancient connection between ancient ruins on Earth and anomilies on Mars. What I found most interesting was the section on asteroids and comets. This was tangential to the basic theme of the book, but it made me think. This needs more scholarly study. Graham Hancock knows that current Archaeology, Anthropology, and Ancient History has "missed the boat" in many areas. He proposes a key to unlock many of these mysteries. This book adds to that key. I hope his next book is better written.