By PHIL PATTON By coincidence, happy or sinister, the landing of the Pathfinder probe on Mars coincided with the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the alleged Roswell saucer landing in New Mexico. But many in the crowd gathered at Roswell thought they already knew what was on Mars. They are the believers in "the Mars face," a pattern of hills and rocks from a Viking probe photograph number 35A72 taken on July 25, 1976 that suggests a human face, possibly the work of some ancient Martian civilization. At Roswell, Erich von Daniken, author of the Chariots of the Gods? which held that the giatn Nazca drawings in South America marked "landing strips" for ancient space ships, expressed his hope that Pathfinder would "get a good shot of the face on Mars." But reexamining the Mars face was not the task of Pathfinder, whose lander has now become silent. That job is being left to the latest Mars probe, the less publicized Mars Global Explorer, which went into orbit around the planet a few weeks ago and last month transmitted its first photos back to earth. NASA controllers are now carefully lowering the Mars Global Explorer into its mapping orbit by "aerobraking," using the Martian atmosphere to slow the craft down. MGE will not land, but early next year will begin systematically photographing the planet. While most NASA scientists have dismissed the Mars face as a trick of light and shadow, the agency has promised the MGE will pass over the plains of Cydonia, site of the face, and photograph it again. Seeing faces in space is as old as the man in the moon. What changes is what the faces say about life on earth. The lore of the Mars Face or "Sphinx" became the seed around which all sorts of theories crystallized. Some theorists saw pyramids and whole cities around the face; others saw Elvis. Still others postulated a conspiratorial government "secret space program" that has already established bases on the moon and Mars. In 1947, the year of the Roswell "crash," sculptor Isamu Noguchi suggested we build our own planetary face, a huge "Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars," constructed somewhere in the desert. Noguchi's geometrical countenance was designed to serve not just as a signal to space but as a memorial to our species, in case we obliterated ourselves. Noguchi's project never got beyond a model, shaped in sand, but it might be worthy of consideration again. Pathfinder strengthened suggestions that Mars's climate has grown more hostile over the millenia, suggesting dangers of the same thing happening on earth. Noguchi's face and the Mars face are mirror images. Both are environmental memento morie, and signs that as surely as we launch probes and orbiters to Mars we dispatch our terrestrial fears and hopes with them. When we look at Mars, the face we see is our own, looking back at us.
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