There are many reasons why new scientific hypotheses and discoveries have a very difficult time breaking into the mainstream of science. One of the most important (as noted by Tom previously) is bias. This is a state of mind caused by many other factors: economic interests, psychological insecurity, indoctrination, fear of being considered an “odd ball,” the herd instinct; to name just a few. No amount of evidence will change a biased mind (unless it experiences an epiphany). The biased person often claims to know things he can not possibly know, (such as that it is impossible for there to be evidence of intelligent life on Mars). Many biases are learned during the normal process of education and they amount in effect to taking existing paradigms on faith. Bias is not always the same as simple raw prejudice, but there are many similarities.
One similarity is the classical closed mind, along with the belief that new evidence (unless it is very extraordinary) will make no difference. The open, active mind, on the other hand may also have strong opinions. But these opinions can be changed if the evidence is good enough, though not necessarily extraordinary. Rich changed his mind on the bases of finding the family of faces in E0501429. All were realistic enough to convince me individually, but Rich, knowing that we were dealing with an extraordinary hypothesis, was unwilling to be convinced on what he considered the weak evidence of the single Profile Image.
We now both think we are at the level of confidence, but we are not absolutely convinced of artificiality. The reason is that we are only looking at images and there is no iron clad, unbroken “chain of evidence” leading from the artifact to our eyes. In other words, the images for whatever reason could be faulty or faked. We believe that many of them are fairly accurate, but we are looking forward to further confirmation by the MRO and eventually by on the ground confirmation, which by the way, will require the participation of scientists from many fields.
As for the individual images: M0305549 gives us, in spite of only fair resolution, the best rendition of the original Profile Image discovered by JP Levasseur. E0501429 has the best resolution, and it is offset to the left somewhat, which are probably the reasons Rich discovered the Family in this image, after my suggestion that he search there. Although they are visible, albeit partially, in M03, no one previously noticed them. R0701791 is darkened for some unknown reason, but with drastic adjustments the profile of the girl, especially around the face, can be made out. R1201454 has better resolution than R07, if we can believe the data sheet, but nothing of the Profile Image can be made out in this strip no matter how the original data is enhanced. We think that M03 and E05 offer compelling evidence of artificiality, and that R07 offers evidence of confirmation of the existence of the PI. R12 offers nothing but disappointment.
And there you have it. Make of it what you will. I believe there has been some tampering with the Public Request images, (probably unofficially but with officials looking the other way), because I don’t believe in coincidences. In these and other public images, I have often seen suspicious signs of darkening, blurring, excessive filtering, and the like. But Rich is not ready to draw that inference, preferring to be more cautious, and simply saying that there seems to be something wrong with R07 and R12, and that whatever went wrong, most likely happened during image acquisition.
Returning to the problem of bias, our impression is that the epidemic of bias is so severe in the academic and scientific worlds that it will be a long uphill battle. But eventually the proponents of artificiality on Mars will be vindicated—hopefully in their lifetimes.
Neil DeRosa and Richard DeRosa
