The Mars Mystery: The Secret Connection between Earth and the Red Planet.

Octavo, black & red boards (hardcover), gilt lettering, 344 pp. Fine in a Fine dust jacket. From dust jacket: Mars, Earth's closest proximity neighbor, has been a source of wonder and speculation for mankind from the time of the ancient Egyptian astronomers to the dawn of space exploration in our own era. The Red Planet, ravaged by comets and asteroids, is barren, bleak, and bitterly cold. But has this always been the case? In The Mars Mystery, investigative archaeologist Graham Hancock treats our growing knowledge of Martian topography as a Rosetta Stone we can use to decode mysteries as old as the human imagination. He examines the current landscape of Mars and discovers evidence that the planet was once home to a lush environment of dense atmosphere and flowing rivers, lakes and oceans. He asks questions, based on growing evidence, that cannot be dismissed: Has Mars ever sustained higher forms of life? How might the secret history of Mars be intertwined with Earth's own past and future? In his most riveting and revealing book yet, Hancock points to the intriguing possibility that ancient Martian civilization is communicating with us through the remarkable structures it left behind. 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 Eyptian-style headdress. Might there be a connection between the structures of Egypt and those of Mars? Yet, as intriguing as scientists all over the world find the Cydonian anomalies, NASA continues to dismiss them as a "trick of light." The April 1998 Mars Global Surveyor mission, which Hancock examines in this book, has only further stoked the controversy. In The Mars Mystery, Hancock makes a strong case that NASA is motivated by a lingering Cold War mentality and a fear that evidence of alien life will have destabilizing political, economic, and social consequences. In exploring the traces lfeft 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 -- which we still hae time to heed -- about our ultimate fate. xsli.…