To the folks at UFO Sightings Daily, NASA's archive of Mars images from its rovers is better than a candy shop. Every visit yields a new treat.
"Alien critter found on Mars, gazing at rover," reads the headline on a post published recently. If you squint at the accompanying image, which is so zoomed-in that it's pixelated and fuzzy, you can almost see a tiny creature with spindly arms and a pumpkin-shaped head peering out from behind a rock.
Also spotted: two alien ships, a reptile head, a face looking up. And that's just from one photo.
"There is so much evidence of intelligent life in this NASA photo, it's really amazing that the public hasn't done this kind of research long ago," says the post's author, Scott C. Waring.
Waring is hardly the only person to make such "discoveries." In August, certain corners of the Internet were agog over what appeared to be a crab crawling up a Martian cliff face. Others saw a …show more content…
"There is no group that would be happier to see such a thing," he told CNN. "So far we haven't seen anything that is so obvious that it would be similar to what these claims are."
When we look at chunks of space rock and piles of sand and "see" a crab, or a lizard, or an alien spaceship, we're being tricked, he said. Not by NASA, but by our own brains.
The phenomenon is called pareidolia, and it explains why we so often find Jesus in our food, the Virgin Mary in tree trunks, a man in the moon, Hitler in teapots and pumpkin-headed aliens on Mars.
Rather than being supernatural, pareidolia is deeply biological. It stems from a skill humans have honed over millennia of evolution, an instinctive ability to spot patterns and find the familiar. That skill is what enables us, without thinking, to recognize things that are important — the sight of a smiling face, the sound of an alarmed voice, the low growl of a
"Alien critter found on Mars, gazing at rover," reads the headline on a post published recently. If you squint at the accompanying image, which is so zoomed-in that it's pixelated and fuzzy, you can almost see a tiny creature with spindly arms and a pumpkin-shaped head peering out from behind a rock.
Also spotted: two alien ships, a reptile head, a face looking up. And that's just from one photo.
"There is so much evidence of intelligent life in this NASA photo, it's really amazing that the public hasn't done this kind of research long ago," says the post's author, Scott C. Waring.
Waring is hardly the only person to make such "discoveries." In August, certain corners of the Internet were agog over what appeared to be a crab crawling up a Martian cliff face. Others saw a …show more content…
"There is no group that would be happier to see such a thing," he told CNN. "So far we haven't seen anything that is so obvious that it would be similar to what these claims are."
When we look at chunks of space rock and piles of sand and "see" a crab, or a lizard, or an alien spaceship, we're being tricked, he said. Not by NASA, but by our own brains.
The phenomenon is called pareidolia, and it explains why we so often find Jesus in our food, the Virgin Mary in tree trunks, a man in the moon, Hitler in teapots and pumpkin-headed aliens on Mars.
Rather than being supernatural, pareidolia is deeply biological. It stems from a skill humans have honed over millennia of evolution, an instinctive ability to spot patterns and find the familiar. That skill is what enables us, without thinking, to recognize things that are important — the sight of a smiling face, the sound of an alarmed voice, the low growl of a