As the planet turned, a vast dark spot appeared, beneath a brilliant Martian airglow. This made Mars look to me like a gigantic eyeball and Solis Lacus looked like its pupil. Furthermore, another strange effect: the pupil bled a long black tapering tear to the south formed in the southern region called Thaumasia Fossa, a dry river bed or, more likely, another meandering fracture or fault line in the planet caused by the asteroid impact, which created Solis Lacus.

I felt like Ulysses looking into the eye of the wounded Cyclops, Polyphemus with terror and fear, Deimos and Phobos, in the pit of my stomach at the realization of the magnitude of the catastrophe that had formed "The Cyclopean Eye of Mars."

The effect it had on my mind will always remain with me, unforgettable. The impression it made on this viewer is best expressed by simply stating:

"When I looked at Mars, viewed at its closest point to Earth in 60,000 years, Mars looked back."

EYEBALL TO EYEBALL WITH MARS

This first-person familiarity, literally "eyeball-to-eyeball," with Mars' geography and topography proved invaluable one year later. The memory of the black pupil and bleeding tear, aided me in slowly recognizing "The Martian Artifact" over a 5-month period for what it now appears to be: a topographical sculpture of the Red Planet's most significant feature. Except that "TMA-1" shows the same outline, contours but with the internal land forms and features as they would appear in full daylight under the light regimen of a Martian midday sun.

The realization was stark and shocking: The artifact is a bas-relief sculpture, accurately depicting every detail of "The Eye of Mars", showing in minute detail its terrain contours and, perhaps, memorializing the disaster that altered the planet's ecosystem and nearly destroyed the planet.

Since NASA was ignoring my new "pet rock" and, in fact, treating it facetiously with the name "The Berry Bowl" in my belief to disguise its significance. I took it much more seriously and the artifact was nicknamed "TMA-1" to honor Arthur C. Clarke, who predicted a discovery such as this in his novel, "2001: A Space Odyssey".

Arthur C. Clarke, in "2001: A Space Odyssey," described a fantastic lunar anomaly also known as "The Monolith" or the "Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 1," which had been intended by its extraterrestrial designers to communicate its message geometrically (for those advanced enough to decipher it). The Tycho Magnetic Anomaly encoded and contained a message revealing intelligent design through its unique edges and their dimensions in proportions of 1: 4: 9, the squares of the first 3 numbers.

In Clarke's story, TMA-1, Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 1, "The Monolith", discovered in the lunar crater, Tycho, was a coded message, a radio marker beacon and a pointer directing mankind to explore the outer planets, specifically, Jupiter and its moon, Europa.

Its modern namesake, "TMA-1", discovered in The Eagle Crater, is nothing less than that: a marker beacon and a "lighthouse" beckoning Mankind not just to explore Mars but also to explore a very specific region of Mars. TMA-1 is an invitation to visit a specific location on Mars, the most important one being a region called "Noctis Labyrinthus, marked by a lustrous bead, presumably made of hematite (but which looks much like steel in the bright Martian sunlight).

In September 2004, after 5 months of research and detailed geometric analysis of TMA-1, I wrote: "…comparisons of the Rover image with HST photos and Mariner 9 photos of the region's terrain features have revealed TMA-1 to be a well proportioned and topographically accurate depiction of the whole region called Solis Lacus, 'The Eye of Mars', as it appeared aeons ago, at a time BEFORE IT WAS COVERED by Martian dust and sand."

That became the last sentence in the abstract that I submitted to AIAA for the 2nd Regional Mini-Technical Conference held on October 30th, 2004 in Laurel, MD. The abstract was selected for presentation. But as I was to discover, I was wrong, misdirected by images in NASA's computerized Hubble Space Telescope photos, which prior to 2005-2006 and the appointment of Dr. Michael Griffin as the new director obfuscated the true nature of Solis Lacus and its features. It is not covered with sand and neither is it a "desert."

On October 18th, 2004, I uncovered yet another important detail. I vividly recalled particular details of the Martian atmosphere, which I had noted previously on August 29th, 2003, indicating that Mars possesses a dynamic weather system in the Olympus Mons-Tharsis-Solis Lacus region. I had observed extensive cloud formations to the west and north of Solis Lacus, some of them, described below, were over a thousand miles long.

I have also discerned from the study of recent Mars Global Observer photos (compared with Mariner 9 photo mapping) that the area of Solis Lacus is not a desert but a dynamic area of Martian meteorological activity, involving high winds, thermal tides, immense amounts of carbon dioxide and water vapor, at times equal to or greater than the activity that I saw in the Hellas Basin on the 29th of August.

At the John Hopkins University AIAA technical conference presentation, my descriptions of cloud formations, accompanied by vast planetary wide streams of ionized plasma similar to our own Aurora Borealis in the high atmosphere with dynamic meteorological activity was received with great surprise, excitement and scientific curiosity by most people in attendance. But, in the case of one of two NASA employees present (a self-styled "weather modeling specialist" from GWU-Langley) my report, views and interpretation met with an overly vocal skepticism verging on derision. But, try as he might to disparage and debunk my observations, the "skeptibunkers" objections fell flat before the more respectful and serious members of the AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics) audience who were intrigued and receptive to my report. There is something unique about "The Ring of Truth" that can easily withstand the bluster, snorts and "harrumphs" of the disappointed skeptic, disinformationist or debunker.

Recently, under the leadership of a new director, Dr. Michael Griffin, the former President of AIAA, appointed by President Bush (which pleased me to no end!), NASA took a new direction, a bold new tack in openness and forthrightness in sharing Mars data with the public and independent scientists.

In December 2005, NASA released a MOC (Mars Orbital Camera) photo, which proved true every detail of Martian meteorology, which I had described at the AIAA conference at Johns Hopkins University on October 30th, 2004. With the exception of the planetary wide ionized plasma streams (which were acknowledged and described by NASA earlier this year 2006), the MOC photo (mars moc1_143msss _1large) confirms the observations of active and dynamic weather systems on Mars., which I presented at Johns Hopkins University on October 30th, 2004.

From the vapors fuming and rising from the Hellas Basin to the cloud forms around Olympus Mons and Tharsis Montes, my description of a dynamic weather systems around Solis Lacus and Hellas Basin are confirmed in the following photo:

Note: Brilliant white "clouds" (on the lower right) are actually vapors of CO2 rising from the Hellas Basin. The large cloud formation on far left are the heights of Olympus Mons with the similar clouds around the summits of the 3 Tharsis Montes to the Southeast.

Other photos demonstrated that Solis Lacus is a vast asteroid impact crater that holds a dynamic, self-contained weather system, perhaps sealed by high planetary winds like the Sea of CO2 in Hellas Basin. Contour studies of the details shown in the Mariner 9 photographs compared with TMA-1, The Martian Artifact, reveal that Solis Lacus is a far deeper impact crater than presumed or revealed by NASA scientists and their current interpretation of radar altimeter estimates of the regions depths, which NASA purports to be 4 km. at most.

Slopes of "Syria" Descend Steeply From Tithonius

Some regions of Solis Lacus, like the slopes of "Syria" descending precipitously from Tithonius Lacus (See MOC photo above) may be hundreds of miles long and deep, revealing the cataclysmic effects of a huge asteroid or small planetoid impact, which cracked the planet, creating the Valles Marinaris, a 2500-mile long canyon system, depressing the area to the north along the fault line called "The Tharsis Bulge" and, thereby, creating the confluence of the Tractus Albus Australis and Tractus Albus Borealis. The formation and structure of these "White Tracts" imprinted the appearance of a "trigonometric stamp" upon the planet's surface north of Valles Marinaris with Candor Chasma appearing to form the pupil of an "eye" and "brow" within it.

Story continues on Page 4.

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