The Mars Mystery: The Secret Connection Between Earth and the Red Planet
by Graham Hancock

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Book Reviews of The Mars Mystery: The Secret Connection Between Earth and the Red Planet

Book Review: A strange amalgam of verities and balderdash
Summary: 1 Stars

Hancock's rather considerable defects as a putative writer of "nonfiction" are more obvious here than in any of his other works; in fact, reading this book can be instructive in revealing the more skillful deceptions he has practiced elsewhere, such as in "Fingerprints of the Gods." In order to arrive at his thesis--that Mars (and, less violently, Earth) was subject to a horrendous bombardment by cometary debris, perhaps as recently as 10,000 years ago, which resulted in its odd Janus-faced appearance and distinctive plantary geology, and incidentally may have destroyed a teeming ecosystem and even an advanced civilization on the planet in the bargain--Hancock piles speculation upon speculation to the point of absurdity. I honestly can't see how anyone could fail to perceive the fundamental flaws in the narrative he constructs; certainly, the man is guilty of inconsistency--if the same long odds apply to the coincidence of so many odd features at Cydonia in order to rule out a natural explanation, how can they not also rule out Hancock's reconstruction of Mars' history?

Beyond shaky logic, however, "The Mars Mystery" is an aptly Janus-faced book as well. The juxtaposition of the sections on Martian geology and cometary impacts with the pseudoscience surrounding the spectacular over-analysis of the few existing photographs of the Cydonia region never seems appropriate. [I should note here, as Hancock does in a preface to the American edition of this book, that the former sections were written by Hancock, while the latter sections were written by an assistant of his named John Grigsby. Why Mr. Grigsby is not a co-author on the jacket is beyond me.] The two or three chapters concerning a "link" between Cydonia and monuments on Earth (such as Stonehenge, Giza, Teotihuacan, etc.) are ridiculous, consisting as they do entirely of worthless number games (finding pi, phi and other mathematical constants in certain measurements of these sites) that are more likely a reflection of the expectations of the "researchers" than of the characteristics of the sites themselves.

The threat to Earth, and more importantly to modern civilization, presented by the possibility of cometary impact is a real one, with a basis in real observations. One cannot help but agree with those portions of Hancock's thesis in which he laments the lack of a coherent international approach to the problem of Earth-crossing asteroids and comets. One simply wishes that in this case such an argument was not also lumped together with Martian "monuments" and advanced civilizations in antiquity that weaken it by association.

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