Nefertiti's Family

I definately agree that scepticism is more than legitimate; in fact it is essential to the process. What I object to is not scepticism, but deception. This is a legitimate concern because without an open and honest debate about the actual issues (the facts in question) it will be very difficult to make progress toward the truth.

When the issue of deception is raised, the opposition often throws out the "conspiracy card." But the way the debate is conducted (honestly or through more devious means), is as important as the actual scientific issues being discussed.

As the great Poirot used to say, "Do not forget the psychology."

Neil

Does anyone else think this debate is taking on the characteristics of the UFO believer/skeptic dynamic? Rather than acknowledge that the evidence really is not very convincing, believers start thinking there must be a conspiracy when the skeptics don't see the evidence the same way they do, and then the skeptics start thinking that the believers are irrational nutjobs for rejecting perfectly reasonable and plausible explanations.

JR

jrich writes: "believers start thinking there must be a conspiracy when the skeptics don't see the evidence the same way they do, and then the skeptics start thinking that the believers are irrational nutjobs for rejecting perfectly reasonable and plausible explanations."

Bingo!

We knew events would take this turn, and lo and behold! They have. Both with regard to the disingenuosness of the disrupters, and the actual issues.

BTW, I do not define "deception" the same way as I define "lying." The former is a a tactic of generals, politicians, intellectuals, and sometimes even scientists and businessmen when they deem it necessary for whatever overarching reason they may have. The latter is a personal vice, and I never said that.

Neil

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by neilderosa</i>
<br />What I object to is not scepticism, but deception. This is a legitimate concern because without an open and honest debate about the actual issues (the facts in question) it will be very difficult to make progress toward the truth.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">It would appear that it is not only the artistic imagery on Mars that is difficult to see. I, for one, am having trouble seeing any credible (to me) evidence for deception, as opposed to an open mind being swayed in different directions by different evidence -- an emotion we all experience over issues where we have no vested interest. Emanuel shows great interest in learning new things, and in checking out the imagery sources and processing for himself rather than take what others have done on faith. Would you rather debate JR, who probably thinks Emanuel is far too weak with his skepticism?

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">When the issue of deception is raised, the opposition often throws out the "conspiracy card."<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Only one side has raised the conspiracy card so far in this debate, and Emanuel isn't on it.

I find it difficult to see why Emanuel taxes either of you so much. I find his posts to be of some value, and my guess is that a lot of uncommitted readers do as well. Why can't you just ignore them if you don't? -|Tom|-

Neil and RD,

I really can understand that it seems odd to you that I changed my position/inclination on artificiality, but I still think my explanation is perfectly sound. In the hopes of clearing up some misunderstandings, I will try to re-cap here the whole history of the past few weeks from my perspective.

First, I have to admit it took me a while to see the new images you posted. Before I saw them, I thought this was just another "Who's on Mars" type of thread. Then you posted the "key" and I honestly was blown away. "Seeing is believing," I guess, or so I felt at that time. I mean it really impressed me. Why? Because I had always considered Nefertiti the highest quality "artistic" image so far found on Mars. Besides the Viking face (and specifically its Mesa symmetry), I always felt Nefertiti was the next best candidate for artificiality. (I have criticisms of most of the other animals, faces, etc.) So when I finally *saw* the man facing Nefertiti, and saw that it was of such a high quality, it really blew me away. I mean, it was now the second highest quality artistic image on Mars! What are the chances, I thought, that it just happened to be right there next to Nefertiti?!? This couldn't be just a coincidence, I felt. So I was now absolutely convinced that the scene was artificial.

Call this the "blown away factor."

So then I started examining the scene more, fascinated by what the artist might be trying to depict (remember I was fully convinced now it was artificial). So it dawned on me that the woman's head was sort of where Nefertiti's "hand" was supposed to be in the original "key" in Tom's press conference slideshow. I went back and looked at that key again and sure enough, the "hand" was on the head of the woman. And the fact that the woman wasn't quite as high-quality as the man made it look kind of "mangled." So I gave my opinion that the scene looked to me like it was depicting some kind of horrorible decapitation, with Nefertiti carrying a mangled, severed head. I remember, in fact, that this really upset me, because for the longest time I had felt a kind of hope in that if there *was* a highly advanced civilization on Planet V, they must have been peaceful and culturally advanced too (rather than warlike) because they put *artistic* sculptures of faces and animals on their moon (rather than monuments to power, say). As a life-long activist in these very dark times, the notion of Mars artificats and it's implications for a potential better future captured my imagination from the time when I first read Tom's book. So I remember being a bit freaked out when the scene appeared to me to show Nefertiti carrying a severed head. That was kind of scary-looking, and it made me wonder whether this "advanced" civilization had managed to destroy it's own planet in it's war-like culture... something I think we are doing here on the earth. You might find these musings silly perhaps, but that's how I felt, for what it is worth.

Ok are you with me so far? Then one of you pointed out that the "hand" was really in front of the forehead of the woman, and not gripping the woman's head. And so you were right, and I was a bit embarrassed that I had hastily gave that interpretation of the scene. So then I tried to calm down my "blown away factor" and I looked closely again, and realized that if the hand was over the forehead, then possibly it either wasn't a hand or it wasn't a forehead... that either Tom's original Nefertiti key was wrong, or else the woman below was a wrong. If you go back you can see where we discuss this, and I think you two felt that Tom's original key was wrong, that the "hand" was actually the woman's forehead.

Now here is where my first real doubts started to appear. If Tom's original key was wrong, and that wasn't Nefertiti's hand, but rather a forehead of another woman, then perhaps Nefertiti didn't have an elbow or arm either??? And if that was true, then perhaps Nefertiti wasn't quite as "high quality" as I had originally thought.

Are you still following me? I mean, part of why I felt Nefertiti was such a good candidate for artificiality was because it wasn't just a head, but actually had part of a torso, breasts, an arm, etc. Now suddenly here you guys were saying that you felt the hand was actually the forehead of another woman below. So here I am starting to feel sceptical. Make sense?

Then I start looking at more of the strip, and I find the Warrior Twins, and while I am not completely sure of them at this point, they are compelling enough that I post them. And then *after that* I notice the big profile facing the twins and once again I have this kind of "blown away" feeling, because here we have *facing profiles*, just like the Nefertiti/man below! (I've explained all this before. It makes perfect sense, and I have nothing to apologize about.)

So I post my scene and what happens? You two start making fun of them as if they are "Darth Vader" like, meaning not really proportional, but rather like characters in a cartoon, and thus not likely artificial. And you know what? You were right. I had to admit that. Still, felt I had found something significant, if for no other reason than the location and stylistic similarity to the Nefertiti/man scene (i.e., facing profiles). So I started defending my find--at least a little bit, because also during this time remember I was entertaining new doubts as a result of the hand/forehead issue.

So I decided the only way for me to clear any of this up (for myself) was to obtain more data. So I started searching strips, and yes, I was a bit confused as to how to find specific strips. The layout of the msss website allows you to visually click around these blue-colored dots, but it doesn't give you a way to search for a specific strip number. Thus I asked how to do it, and your response clarified for me that there wasn't any way to do it other than the way I already was (just by clicking around the general coordinates and making a guess of which blue dot corresponded to it). Do you understand this now?

So it took me a while to find the Nefertiti strips this way. And when I did you will notice that I immediately posted links to them, as well as the strips all around the general Nefertiti area. I did this because I wanted to make it easy for people to find them since the msss website wasn't easy to navigate. All this is in the history of this post, and is easily verifiable. I hope you can now see that I have always been participating here in good faith.

And now jumping forward a bit... eventually I discover these new profiles, which I still think have exceptionally high quality, for what that is worth. And here is where you might have gotten confused and started becoming suspicious... because to me, these new profiles really do *subtract* from the overall artificiality hypotheses. I just have a hard time believing that I could find such good profile images within only a few hours. It makes a lot of send to me that that profiles are simply more likely to appear naturally. (Now I could be wrong about this but it's plausible.)

So this muted what I felt was my initial niave enthusiasm after being "blown away." And I was personally embarrassed, because I felt I felt I had been led astray by my emotions. I also felt it was important to share my new skepticism with you all. Perhaps you would respond with something I hadn't thought of. Either way, I never imagined that you would start accusing me of being some kind of government agent!

As for the R07 and R12 images, what happened there is that for a while I never knew that thee were any shades of grey underneath the dark areas. I misunderstood your original post, and even a number of your follow-up posts. I take the blame for this. But to my credit, if you go back and read your posts carefully, you have to admit it isn't perfectly clear what your right-hand adjusted images are. I never understood where you got them from, or what you were really talking about. I will accept full responsibility for my mistake in thinking that the dark areas had no more grey underneath them. I just hope you now see that I was being genuine, that someone could have misunderstood what you guys were saying.

And then Tom finally was the one able to explain clearly to me that there were shades of grey underneath the dark areas. And finally I got it. It was Tom also who first said those images were not "messed up." So once again I had to correct my mistake, which I did, in good faith, by thanking Tom for clarifying. (All this is documented in this thread, and you can go back and verify it).

So now I did not understand why you were complaining at all that the slides were messed up, when Tom had just revealed that they weren't. Ok, ok, later on Tom once again clarified that while they weren't "messed up," they nonetheless had lesser contrast. Ok sure, I though, that is true, but it didn't seem to warrant the suspicions of tampering that you were suggesting. This is a key point here. When I thought the dark areas had no shades of grey underneath, I was "on your side" about possible tampering. That was really suspicious, I thought. But once Tom explained to me that there were shades of grey and I actually went and saw them myself, I changed my mind. Tom provided a perfectly natural explanation for the "balance" of brightness/darkness that made the upper areas of those strips really dark. So then the only question became, "why is there less contrast *after* you adjust the brightness?" This is when I remembered the dust storm issue, and so I posted that as a possible explanation. This is all perfectly reasonable and understandable.

At this point emotions started escalating, most likely due to all these misunderstandings, which I take my share of the responsibility for, since I clearly did not "get" some things you two got much earlier, and probably also due to the fact that I started really playing devil's advocate. But to be clear, I was doing this for my own sake mostly, not to antagonize the two of you, or "disrupt" anyone. I was trying to come up with good counter-arguments to deflate what I felt was my over-enthusiasm upon initially seeing the new images you two posted. I was and remain embarrassed that I was so "convinced" unquestioningly, and I wanted to balance this with some good old self-criticism. (And I do think my arguments remain plausible, and will eventually need to be addressed one way or the other.)

So I hope this clears up some misunderstandings, and in defending my honesty and integrity here, I hope the personal stuff can be put to a rest. In due respect, I am still impressed with the man image in the Nefertiti area, and still think this scene is the most likely "artistic" scene to be artificial. I just feel that a good dose of skepticism is warranted, given the reasons I hope I have adequately explained.

Sincerely,
Emanuel

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Larry Burford</i>
<br />Consider the possibility that even with human eyeballs in orbit of Mars and on the surface we might still not be able to resolve the issue. Alien technology (emphasis on alien) might be more difficult to recognize than we imagine. Especially if the only manifestations we can find seem like art that has been eroding for millions of years.
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Larry, you hit on something that I am already giving a great deal of consideration. I posted this concern a couple of times, in this topic and the "Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter question" topic.

rd