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

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 atmo-sphere 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 Egyptian-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 discovery, NASA continues to balk at taking a more detailed look at the site and has veiled previous photographs and studies

in a web of equivocation. 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 left 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 have time to heed about our ultimate fate.

GRAHAM HANCOCK is a former East African correspondent for The Economist and has traveled around the world writing books and filming movies on archaeological discoveries and their connection to our distant past. He is the author of the best-selling Fingerprints of the Gods and The Sign and the Seal, and the coauthor of The Message of the Sphinx. He lives in Devon, England.