In 1976, the Viking 1 spaceprobe took this now famous photograph of the Cydonia region of Mars.

Many people still believe that the photo shows an artificial humanoid face and therefore evidence of a past civilisation on the red planet, however high resolution images obtained by Mars Global Surveyor in 2001 and by the Mars Express Probe this year confirmed that the “face” is an optical illusion.

Seeing faces when they are not really there is in fact very common, humans have an amazing ability to identify a face or other objects often in very poor lighting and with only minimal details available. We have developed this ability as a survival technique, it is built in from birth and is called “Pareidolia”. It is of course preferable to identify a shadow mistakenly as a predator than it is to mistakenly pass off a predator as a shadow, therefore we are highly prone to false positives and tend to find recognisable shapes in all sorts of random objects, even seeing a “man in the moon”.

Here are some other examples closer to home:

Face in Peru (google maps link)

 

 

Indian with an iPod in Canada (google maps link)

 

Tomato with a human face (source)

 

 

Jesus in a tree trunk (source)

 

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Filed under: illusions, weird