On July 25th, 1976, history was made when NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter sent back an intriguing image
of the Martian surface. Showing what appears to be a human face set into the landscape,
it’s become an enduring image in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence,
heralded by many as proof of life on Mars. But what’s the true solution to this puzzle?
This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question:
can we understand the Face on Mars?
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The image sent back by Viking 1 in the 70s was of a large plain called Cydonia, home to many
unique geographical features as well as the Face on Mars. The Face itself certainly does
look like a face in this picture. However, since the beginning, scientists have universally agreed
that the Face is just a natural rock formation. Of course, not everybody buys this explanation,
especially not when the Face on Mars has an undeniable resemblance to a human visage.
In the decades between Viking 1’s photo and additional images being captured from Mars,
imaginations ran away with themselves trying to explain the presence of the ominous
Face. It even formed the basis of an early episode of “The X-Files”,
in which the Face possesses an astronaut. The formation is still seen by many as a key
piece of evidence in the argument that Mars may have once supported intelligent life.
The Face is vast, over 1.2 miles long and around 0.9 miles wide,
which would make it significantly larger than even the Great Pyramid of Giza,
which has a base length of 756 feet – or only 0.14 miles. Eventually, additional NASA missions
to Mars in 2001 and 2007 respectively were able to produce far better images of the Face,
in high enough resolution that you can tell it doesn’t resemble a face at all.
It just looks like an ordinary rock feature. Even beyond this evidence, there are a few other
problems with the idea that aliens built a giant Face on Mars. For a start: who would
it be supposed to represent? Why would Martians want to build a huge human face on their planet?
The most obvious answer would be that this was some kind of message to Earth. The Martians who
built it want us to know that they’re out there and they’re watching us. But building an enormous
stone relief definitely isn’t the easiest way to communicate; if they can see what we look like,
they can probably also send radio messages. The Face on Mars would have to be relatively recent
for this hypothesis to make sense, too, since hominids have only existed for the last two
million years. And these early humans didn’t look like us, either, nor did they look too much like
the Face on Mars. Homo sapiens only emerged 300,000 years ago at least, which would date
the Face on Mars to within the last 300,000 years since they’d need to know what we look like. It’s
easy to imagine that it’s been worn down by Mars’s brutal weather in that time, but it also doesn’t
answer where the Martians have gone since. Mars lost its atmosphere roughly four billion years
ago, when Earth was still in its infancy, and long before humans appeared. So, that means either the
Face on Mars was not constructed as a message to humans, or that there are still Martians living on
Mars despite its inhospitable nature. Suffice it to say, if Martians were there and wanted
to communicate with Earth so badly that they set about building a statue bigger than the Pyramids,
they wouldn’t spend so much time hiding from us. The other alternative is that the Face does not
represent a human, but rather a Martian, meaning that Martians may resemble us very closely
and could have died out an extremely long time ago. But there are still issues,
such as why they would build a face looking up at the stars when no one on the ground
would have been able to see its features. Even the Nazca Lines can be seen from nearby hills.
Humanity’s largest monuments can be seen for miles around, like the Great Pyramids once again,
the Great Wall of China, the Roman Colosseum, or Christ the Redeemer, while the Face on Mars would
just look like a large rock. As all the evidence suggests, the Face on Mars really is just a rock,
albeit one that does have spooky similarities to a human when photographed at a lower resolution.
So, why does it look so much like a face in that image,
even when all logic and reasoning say that it’s something completely normal?
A phenomenon called “pareidolia” is likely to blame. Pareidolia is a well-documented
phenomenon where humans see patterns and shapes in everyday objects that aren’t there. The most
common example is cloud watching, something almost everybody will have done at some point,
where people try to make interesting and familiar shapes out of the clouds they see in the sky.
And we’ve been making shapes on different planets for a long time, including on the Moon.
The Moon has the huge benefit of being close enough for us to see a lot of detail with the
naked eye, and of being tidally locked to Earth, meaning everybody on the planet sees the same side
and always has. The near side of the moon is covered with dark patches, or “maria”, named for
their resemblance to oceans. They’re not oceans, but over the centuries, people have claimed to
see all kinds of things in them. There’s the famous Man in the Moon in the Western world,
but in Far Eastern folklore there’s also the Moon Rabbit.
The shape of a rabbit is quite clear on the lunar surface once it’s pointed out.
Back on Mars, in the late nineteenth century, there was a fuss very similar to the Face on
Mars when somebody claimed to have seen canals on the red planet. For a while,
it was believed that intelligent creatures lived on Mars and were building advanced waterways.
As with the Face on Mars, we didn’t know the truth – that the canals are an
illusion – until technology developed a little more. We’ve also seen unusual shapes in Pluto,
and there are objects in outer space with familiar shapes as well; multiple asteroids have been
identified over the years as being “space peanuts” because of their resemblance to the nut. Even
on our own planet, a rockface in New Hampshire nicknamed the “Old Man of the Mountain” became a
famous symbol of the state until its collapse. In one of the strangest recorded incidents of
pareidolia here on Earth, Singapore was caught up in a bizarre episode called the “monkey tree
phenomenon” in 2007. Noticing that a tree on a residential street had a callus resembling
two monkeys, someone put a sign up in Chinese claiming it was the home of the monkey god!
This prompted people to travel from all over to visit the tree and make offerings for good
luck. Some people even won the lottery after praying to the monkey tree. The incident has
intrigued scientists, as have other episodes of pareidolia. It seems humans are just hardwired
to see faces everywhere, probably because of how important faces are in human communication.
We’ve already started training AI and algorithms to spot these strange patterns,
with great success, but even computer programs have a penchant for pareidolia. An AI built to
crack down on the distribution of adult films in the UK has an extremely difficult time
telling human bodies apart from photos of deserts, making it basically useless
for the purpose it was built for when it flags sand dunes as naked people.
As well as being the cause for the Face on Mars’s uncanniness, pareidolia has even been blamed for
other supernatural occurrences; seeing ghosts in the shadows at night; hearing voices and sounds
that aren’t there; and frequent incidents where people say they can see the image of Christ or the
Virgin Mary in everyday objects. For example, a number of people have claimed to see Jesus
in their toast. In 2004, a Florida woman auctioned off a cheese sandwich that
supposedly bore the image of the Virgin Mary for $28,000. God moves in mysterious ways!
It seems that humans are just primed to believe in something bigger and more exciting than
themselves, even to the extent that we believe a rock on a different planet is a message
from some long-lost, celestial beings. And that’s why we do understand the Face on Mars.
What do you think? Is there anything we missed? Let us know in the comments, check out these other
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