Space Case

The Strip wants to report an alien abduction.

No, this meat patty didn't see strange lights in the sky or witness the kidnapping of a human being by space-hopping, big-eyed, bulbous-headed, anal-probe-wielding extraterrestrials.

We didn't actually see the subject of the abduction get carried off. But we're sure it happened all the same. And here's the irrefutable evidence.

Subject name: Mac Tonnies

Age: 29

Last known residence: Apartment just off the Plaza

Hometown: Independence, Missouri

Background: Starts writing science-fiction in elementary school. By the time he graduates from William Chrisman High School in 1994, he's completed enough short stories to fill a small book. Illumined Black is published by a small press a couple of years later when Tonnies is a sophomore in college. The young man's future looks bright. The book carries positive cover blurbs from established writers, such as cyberpunk pioneer Bruce Sterling, and Booklist calls Tonnies a "surprisingly mature craftsman."

As Tonnies continues his college career, bouncing around before finishing with a bachelor's degree at Ottawa University, he continues to produce short stories but doesn't get many of them published. Tonnies takes to the emerging world of Internet writing like he was born for it.

His "Posthuman Blues" becomes one of Kansas City's best blogs, filled with well-written, intelligent takes on offbeat news items and humorous rants from a left-leaning political perspective.

Evidence of Abduction: Tonnies returns to book publishing this year not with another volume of short stories or a novel but with After the Martian Apocalypse: Extraterrestrial Artifacts and the Case for Mars Exploration.

The book, yet another in the cottage industry of speculative musings about the "Face on Mars," is published by Paraview Pocket Books, a 2-year-old paranormal-studies imprint of the publishing giant Simon and Schuster. Paraview started as a publish-on-demand house, a sort of Internet-based version of the vanity press model of publishing. But when Simon and Schuster turns Paraview into a more traditional publishing imprint in 2002, Tonnies is one of the beneficiaries. His book suddenly gets a major press run and a big promotional push.

It's the latest in an ever-expanding genre that speculates about signs of intelligent life on the planet Mars. Quick recap: After a 1976 Viking image showed something on the surface of the planet that had an uncanny likeness to a human face, NASA examined the formation with its orbiting Mars Global Surveyor in 1998. Up close, the formation looked merely like a slightly unusual mesa, and the Face on Mars controversy appeared to have been firmly debunked. But "researchers," who by then had invested years of their lives trying to prove the Face was an artificial structure, spent several more years staring at pixels of NASA images and claimed that the Face was still a face -- and they demanded even closer inspection by scientists at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at California Institute of Technology, whom they accused of intentionally trying to cover up evidence.

Tonnies' book on the subject is smarter than most, proposing startling histories for the Face while debunking the more outlandish notions of out-there Mars prophets such as the infamous Richard Hoagland. But the book's squishy nature -- it's nearly impossible to nail down any outright statement of fact by Tonnies that can be checked against a verifiable outside source -- can be explained only by alien interference, this tenderloin figures.

After all, what rational Show-Me Missourian would make assumptions that a hill on Mars "might" betray signs of artifice, which in turn "could" indicate ruins of an ancient civilization, which "maybe" could have been wiped out by some kind of ancient planetary cataclysm?

All that from a few grainy spacecraft photos.

This meat patty is especially intrigued by Tonnies' explanation that much of his theorizing rested on the work of an actual astronomer, a man named Tom Van Flandern, and his "exploded-planet hypothesis." According to Van Flandern, Mars is actually a former moon that orbited a much larger planet that exploded hundreds of millions of years ago, its fragments forming the asteroid belt that fills the space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Tonnies speculates that this explosion wiped out the ancient civilization that carved the Face. He also calls Van Flandern's theory "frightening and cinematic" and "colorful," though he gently suggests that it conflicts with "prevailing interpretations."

But we figure space aliens prevented Tonnies from mentioning the small detail that Van Flandern is actually a classic crank and that his theory -- which forms the backbone of Tonnies' book -- is dismissed by professional astronomers.

That's one of the things we learned in a conversation with Brian Marsden, the prominent Harvard astronomer who arbitrates the naming of new objects in the solar system. When night-sky observers argue over who gets credit for discovering a new comet, for example, it's Marsden who makes the call. Marsden tells the Strip he knows Van Flandern well -- the two were classmates at Yale in the 1960s. But when Van Flandern went to the Naval Observatory after graduation, he developed "whacky ideas," Marsden says, about gravitation and solar system evolution -- ideas that other scientists don't take seriously. (Van Flandern left the Naval Observatory in 1983.) Marsden hinted that there was an odd story behind Van Flandern's turn away from mainstream science, so we called up the man himself, who today operates something he calls Meta Research.