NASA is trying to get a closer look at the man on Mars.

Remember the "Face," that black and white, blotchy image that sort of resembled a squarish baboon with helmet hair?

The Viking spacecraft took that particular image of the Cydonia region in 1976.

Well, last week NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (the same folks who were nice enough to let us know that no, we're not going to be flattened by an asteroid in a few years) released new images of the Face.

The Face doesn't look like a badly-groomed baboon anymore.

Now it sort of looks like a caterpillar with a really big head sleeping in a bassinet.

You can sort of see its little arms or legs -- several pairs, actually -- folded across its body, and it's kind of curled up and snoozy.

The new images of the Face (or the Caterpillar, if you prefer) are available on NASA's website, www.NASA.gov

If you'll recall when the Face became a cultural phenomenon (that's politically correct for "tollbooth on the conspiracy theory superhighway"), some theorized that it was an artificial structure of some kind. Maybe a temple. Maybe some kind of communications beacon, waiting to release a message of welcome.

Or a warning.

But the Face wasn't forthcoming.

There's nothing like a good "no comment" to fuel speculation.

When the Mars Observer craft went on the fritz several years ago as it approached Mars, the suspicious among us accused NASA of sabotaging the mission so that no more conclusive photos of the Face -- or any other possible structures on the Red Planet -- could be taken.

NASA strikes me as one of the few federal agencies that could successfully perpetrate a global conspiracy.

They put a man on the moon, after all, when the CIA was looking for ways to kill Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar.

This time around, NASA released the most recent images from Global Surveyor to let everybody draw their own conclusions.

"We put the raw data out there so that anybody can take the raw data and process it any way they want," said Glenn E. Cunningham, project manager for NASA.

OK, let's process some raw data.

Obviously, some unknown intelligence got our attention with the Face, and has remodeled Cydonia with the Caterpillar to send us some sort of message.

Maybe that's what Martians -- or baby Martians; after all, it's in a bassinet -- look like.

Maybe when they grow up they look like that thing in "Alien."

Maybe NASA is manipulating the Cydonia images to draw attention away from some other, darker phenomenon here on Earth. The CIA conspiring to let Castro die of old age. The Cubs going to the World Series. Something unthinkable.

Maybe, as the "X-Files" suggests, aliens are already among us, and when colonization is complete, we'll look like bassinet-bound caterpillars, too.

Or maybe there's a mountain range on Mars that just happens to resemble a caterpillar in a bassinet.

There's a scary thought.

Peggy O'Farrell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.