Cydonia face of mars7/15/2023 ![]() Pareidolia causes cryptozoologists to see crouched Bigfoots in forest photographs. The famous Rorschach inkblot test is based on pareidolia. This is a perceptual phenomenon called pareidolia, which is the tendency for the brain to see order in randomness. Your brain will still say “Face”, even if it’s as indistinct as the Cydonia face. From the day the first protohuman looked into the sky, we have marveled at the Man in the Moon, the largest facelike structure known.Īlthough some of these features are pretty astonishingly realistic, they don’t even have to be. Sundance, Wyoming is home to the Old Man of the Park, and the Absaroka Range in Montana features an amazingly lifelike face called the Sleeping Giant near Livingston. North Carolina has a giant head sitting on a cliffside ledge called the Devil’s Head. The Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire looked just like the profile of a man jutting out from a cliff until it collapsed in 2003. In fact, it looks way more like a person than the Cydonia face ever did on its best day.īut the Badlands Guardian is only one example. In Alberta Canada, there’s a figure called the Badlands Guardian that, when viewed from the air, looks astonishingly like a Native American wearing a full headdress and listening to an iPod. Geological features that happen to look like faces, people, or other objects are not rare. Although a two-dimensional view of the hill does have the appearance of some symmetry, the improved image shows that it’s nowhere near as symmetric as it appeared to be in the original blurry image. While those black dots of missing data in the original image gave the illusion of sharp focus, the image is now shown to have been extremely blurry. However you can see the general contours that made up the facial features in the original image. The Cydonia “face” turns out to be merely an unremarkable hill, with plenty of natural random variations on its surface, and no longer looks anything remotely like a face or any other kind of carving. Before long, to the dismay of astronomers worldwide, there was a firmly established pop-culture belief that there was a real gigantic human face on Mars, carved in perfect detail by aliens.Īs the decades wore on, better cameras took better images, finally culminating in the 2007 image taken by HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, with a super high resolution of about 30 centimeters per pixel. One of it most important distinguishing features, a nostril, was only one of many black dots that actually represent missing data in the image. But what they hadn’t anticipated was that some in the public thought it was actually an artificially carved human face, despite the accompanying explanation that it was just a hill that happened to have this funny resemblance to a face when the light was at a certain angle. It was a clear rendering of a human face! NASA engineers loved it they passed it around, put it out for publication, and had all sorts of fun with it. Among a number of similar hillocks and mesas in a region of Mars called Cydonia Mensae, one feature stood out. It was 1976, and Viking I was sending its latest images. There, in yet another series of photographs from Mars, is a distinct human face. But then, as it finishes printing the second page, your eye catches that long sheet of perforated printer paper folding into a pile on the floor, and you see something unbelievable. You’ve heard this all before and seen a million badly printed images. You’re startled, but annoyed and as it starts hammering out its latest data, you try to go back to sleep. You start to drowse off in your chair, when suddenly the teletype jumps to life with a loud mechanical bang. The coffee’s cold and, outside, the rain drums steadily against the window. Imagine yourself in a NASA control room, late at night. Today’s sponsor: This episode of 365 Days of Astronomy is sponsored by the Amateur Astronomers from Launceston Tasmania. He has appeared on numerous radio shows and television documentaries. A Silicon Valley computer scientist by trade, Brian now uses new media to promote critical thinking. Brian is also the author of two books based on the podcast, Skeptoid and Skeptoid II. Skeptoid has a weekly audience of 70,000 listeners. But photography, the perceptual phenomenon called pareidolia, and the Law of Large Numbers combine to say that it’s simply a natural hill.īio: Brian Dunning is the host and producer of the podcast Skeptoid: Critical Analysis of Pop Phenomena ( ), applying critical thinking to paranormal and pseudoscientific subjects promoted by the mass media. Some believe it’s proof of a Martian civilization. Description: Today we look at the face on Mars in the Cydonia Mensae region.
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