Mark Carlotto is an engineer, scientist, and author with almost forty years of experience in satellite imaging, remote sensing, image processing, and pattern recognition. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1981 and has written over one hundred technical papers and seven books. Outside of his occupation as an engineer in the aerospace industry, his journey as an independent scientist has taken him to Mars and back again by way of planetary mysteries, UFOs, local history, and most recently, ancient origins and archaeology. The journey began in 1985 when he first learned about the existence of the infamous “Face on Mars” in a newspaper article in the Boston Globe. Carlotto’s first book The Martian Enigmas describes his investigation of the Face and other unusual objects on Mars that were first imaged by a Viking orbiter spacecraft in 1976. His work using a method known as shape-from-shading to analyze the 3-D structure of the Face was cited by Carl Sagan in his TV series Cosmos. His second book The Cydonia Controversy steps back from the science of the Mars investigation and examines it within the context of the centuries-old search for life beyond Earth and its possible implications. Carlotto’s involvement in space-related investigations continued through the late 1990s with analysis of imagery from later Mars Global Surveyor and other probes, videos from two Space Shuttle missions of what appeared to be UFOs in space, and publication of the on-line electronic journal New Frontiers in Science. The next chapter in his journey began soon after moving to Gloucester Massachusetts a few years later where he applied his knowledge and expertise to a completely different but equally mysterious area of investigation. As a result of getting lost exploring the woods in a place called Dogtown - a deserted colonial settlement in the middle of Cape Ann - he decided to map the old roads and trails, the stonewalls, and the cellar holes of the houses that stood there hundreds of years ago. His next book The Dogtown Guide, a far cry from Mars, was a field guide and history of Dogtown that received a Preservation Award from the Gloucester Historical Commission in 2007. Expanding his research, The Island Woods is a three hundred year-long spatial history of the interior of Cape Ann (complimenting other books that have been written about Gloucester’s well-known maritime heritage). Fulfilling his passion for Dogtown, his third Cape Ann book The Cellars Speak uses maps and genealogy data to gain new insights into the people who lived in Dogtown hundreds of years ago. During this time he also wrote two papers related to the study of astronomical alignments at a native American ceremonial site in Gloucester known as Poles Hill. Carlotto’s sixth book Diary of a Serial App Developer is a tongue-in-cheek autobiography of a ten-year stint moonlighting as an early iPhone app developer during this time in his career. In the latest chapter in his journey, Carlotto comes full circle back to explore basic questions concerning ancient mysteries and human origins. His most recent book, Before Atlantis, shows that numerous ancient sites across the world whose alignments cannot be explained using conventional theories are aligned to previous locations of the North Pole first proposed by Charles Hapgood more than a half-century ago. That Carlotto has found so many sites aligned to old poles offers new proof of Hapgood’s theory and suggests that these sites are not just thousands, but many tens of thousands of years old. His blog and website https://beforeAtlantis.com is frequently updated with his latest research.
