Face on Mars Mystery Solved by Unknown Artist
Is there a human face on Mars? Of course there is. I’ve got proof for you. Here’s the very latest, recently declassified photo of the Face on Mars, the 2008 version:
Republicans really are from outer space. Doh!
The old 1976 photo shows what looks like a face.
Actually to a trained artist, the old photo (above) it doesn’t really look like a face (below, my ‘corrected version’). The original’s proportion of telltale shadow patterns creates a disfigured face, wide. It’s missing ‘Rembrandt’s Triangle,’ a flash of light normally seen on the cheekbone inside the shadowed side of the face. Also missing, a somewhat more normative shadow-shape under the tip of the nose, cascading across the upper lip. And what an awfully smashed lower lip, flattened into the chin and missing the usual angular shape of shadow there. Why does the chin/jaw shadow result in such a long pointy shape – that makes no sense at all, that is, if it’s a human face. And where’s the frikkin’ ears, huh?! I guess they wear hoodies on Mars. It must be cold there.
Incidentally, all those little black specks in the old photos represent missing data. Why was there missing data? Because in 1978 computer-aided and digital photography sucked. You try to hurl an image back to Earth from Mars using a camera that has less than 1/10th the resolution of your cell phone. Good grief, back then most of us were still using instamatic cameras that loaded film in a hard plastic cartridge. In any case, here’s what it looks like in the latest mars missions, a computer model from the Mars Express mission, and an earlier 1998 photo:
People see a face because they are generally unaware of the visual artist’s best trick: pareidolia. The newest pareidolia variation is the Figure on Mars that looks strikingly like the famous faked film footage of Bigfoot.
And just what is pareidolia?
It’s a case of mistaken identity. Known to psychologists, it’s the effect of our minds that finds recognizable imagery in random patterns. We are pattern-seeking creatures, and we find them everywhere even when they aren’t there. We’re especially sensitive to hard-wired patterns that are important to humanity’s survival: human figures, and faces. Artists use pareidolia on purpose all the time, generating new drawings and paintings from a mess of marks. When we carefully tune this imagination with the world, it can help us immensely. The constellations and their stories, names, and patterns can help you remember and communicate about the stars. But pareidolia can also grossly mislead us, steering us away from reality and causing us to mistake our invented pattern for reality.
Personally I think a kind of conceptual pareidolia explains why religion exists; but instead of sensory input the mind riffs off raw belief instead of evidence. Alas, that’s a story for another day.
[...] And don’t forget that the Face on Mars mystery has been solved by an unknown artist. See my article about it here. [...]
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May 27, 2008 at 7:50 pm
and what about sin? is that too, a conceptual pareidolia?
rich mohlmann
November 21, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Thanks Mr. Mohlmann first of all for reading my post and secondly for commenting — always appreciated.
Evil is an action that people do: harming one another, harming the planet, creating suffering and loss. There are far too many of such actions. As an atheist I am against evil. Sin, however, is another issue entirely — it is specific kinds of actions that are thought to be specifically against a religion’s dogma, beliefs, or ideals and as such they are characterized as evil eventhough they may not actually be evil. Worse, what’s sinful in one religion isn’t necessarily sinful in another — and so the whole issue of how do we reduce the evil in our lives gets muddied by the supernatural beliefs involved with the idea of sin.
Personally I think humanity would be far better off and far less likely to undertake evil actions if in contrast to supernatural dogma and false belief and the many pareidolia they lead to, we instead understood evil in the context of evidence and reason and conscious decision-making.
But then it is George Bush’s face on Mars, so who knows?!
vger
November 22, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Trained artist? What the hell is that guy talking about. More like trained monkey. What a bunch of jive talkin’. Do you get paid for this shit?
yousuck
September 3, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Yes. For a trained monkey, I make a right dandy living! You’re probably just another idiot who thinks things like the so-called face on mars are real, real, real. And now you’re responding to a blog post. Yeah, you’re a smart one!!!
vger
September 4, 2009 at 9:15 am