I’ve been reading the book, Contact, by Carl Sagan (you may remember seeing the movie with Jodie Foster in it), and I read this passage that seems eerily familiar. I’ll quote it:

“The joint American-French-Soviet robot roving vehicles on Mars had produced a spectacular wind-fall of color photographs, some — like the Voyager images of the outer solar system around 1980 — soaring beyond their mere scientific purpose and becoming art. The poster featured a landscape photographed on the vast Elysium Plateau. In the foreground was a three-side pyramid, smooth, highly eroded, with an impact crater near its base. It had been produced by millions of years of high-speed sandblasting by the fierce Martian winds, the planetary geologists said. A second rover — assigned to Cydonia, on the other side of Mars, had become mired in a drifting dune, and its controllers in Pasadena had been so far unable to respond to its forlorn cries for help.”

Remarkably similar to what happened not too long ago with the Mars rover, Spirit. Carl Sagan really was ahead of his time. Not surprisingly, the book is immensely better than the movie. The movie was too dumbed down for the masses, and not as enjoyable as the book.