[narrator]
Five hundred and fifty-four solar days
after the Mars Curiosity rover touched down, it beams
its latest high-resolution panoramic photographs
of the Mars landscape to Earth.
Upon inspection, amateur archaeologists
announce a startling discovery,
what appears to be an effigy
located at the Dingo Gap
resembling a human statue.
The find is just one
of the dozens of strange Earth-like objects
sighted in the rover images,
including a sarcophagus...
a Buddha statue...
and even a cross.
There are a lot of different objects on Mars
that people see or think they see
in various rover images.
And it's really hard to dismiss them
because they do look exactly like sculptures
that human beings make,
and even after a massive cataclysm,
like what apparently took place on Mars,
you're gonna find remnants from a lost civilization
that's just leaving behind those last hints
that, "We were here."
[narrator]
that there may be artifacts and unnatural structures on Mars
since the first images were beamed back
from the Mars Viking mission in 1979.
NASA officials claim
the perceived likeness of formations on Mars
to man-made objects is due to pareidolia,
where the mind perceives a familiar pattern,
like seeing shapes in clouds.
But some imaging experts are not convinced
that it's just a trick of the eye.
Joe White has been working in image restoration
for 25 years
and claims to have found artifacts
on the Martian surface that defy explanation.
The rover images are generally fairly close up,
and it is possible to spot things like statue heads
and stone blocks,
sometimes with writing on and carvings in them.
It's such a shame they just do so much to destroy these images.
Basically what they do is they resize them down
so that the details were lost,
but because I've worked
in photographic restoration, I know how to do it.
All I've done with this is actually enhanced the contrast
and sharpened it a little bit.
The details I noticed first were
particularly the eye and nose details
on the front of the statue on the left here,
with a very quite clear mouth structure
and what looks like an ear just here,
and you have a long, narrow, elongated conehead shape
to the statue.
Now, this may well be an elaborate headdress
on this statue here, which seems to be broken off,
but it's hard to say for sure.
I mean, this is a damaged statue
buried up to its chin,
and there's probably a lot more of it buried
just below in the sand,
but you can actually see quite clearly,
it's the sort of thing you would expect to find
somewhere like Central or South America.
[narrator]
of a lost civilization
scattered across the Martian landscape?
Ruins that mirror those that exist on our own planet?
Ancient astronaut theorists say yes,
and propose that this is one of many artifacts on Mars
that seem to have counterparts on our Earth.
Certain structures on Mars
may be completely related
to structures here on Earth.
On Mars, we have structures that look like pyramids.
There are standing stones
and Stonehenge-type of structures on Mars.
There's also a structure on Mars that looks like a Sphinx.
[Bara]
including an area called the "City"
where the so-called "Face on Mars" is located.
There's a massive pentagonal pyramid.
There's a cluster of other pyramidal objects nearby.
One of the things that's really interesting about the City
is that some people have pointed out that if you take the apex
of all of the pyramidal structures there,
and there are a number of them,
that they basically match the layout of the Pleiades.
This is something that we've seen here on Earth.
We've seen various ancient architectural monuments
that are also laid out to reflect
the constellation of the Pleiades.
Is it possible that the structures on Mars are real
and of artificial origin?
That is something where all of science says, "No, impossible."
Well, is it really?
Water on Mars. Impossible, right?
No! It has been proven.
So we have to ask ourselves,
"What civilization built this?
And what happened to them?"