Forget about that Man on the Moon – how about that Face on Mars?

In 1976 the Viking Or­biter ra­dioed back many im­ages from Mars. Among those form the Cy­do­nia re­gion, one de­picted a rock for­ma­tion that strongly re­sem­bled a human or hu­manoid face star­ing straight up into the heav­ens.

You can prob­a­bly guess what was made of this… ‘Parei­do­lia’ is the term for neu­ro­log­i­cal or psy­cho­log­i­cal phe­nom­ena where vague im­ages are in­ter­preted by the brain as spe­cific im­ages. Sta­tis­ti­cally speak­ing, it is a type I error, a “false pos­i­tive”.

A nice ar­ti­cle “Para­nor­mal Phe­nom­ena: The Face on Mars: Once and for All” con­tains some back­ground ma­te­r­ial on the en­su­ing ker­fuf­fle, in­clud­ing links to large NASA im­ages of the en­tire re­gions pho­tographed.

In 1998, the Mars Global Sur­veyor (MGS) reached the Red Planet with far bet­ter, more high-res­o­lu­tion equip­ment than Viking had car­ried. Ini­tially, NASA had not planned to re-map the Cy­do­nia re­gion, but pub­lic out­cry was so great that in April 1998, the MGS was pro­grammed to re-pho­to­graph seg­ments of the Cy­do­nia re­gion, in­clud­ing at least one of the face (there was also some­thing on ‘pyra­mids’ there which we will not cover here). If you move the mouse over the ad­ja­cent fig­ure, the newer photo ap­pears, roughly shifted and ro­tated to match the one taken 22 years ear­lier. You can judge for your­self whether you in­ter­pret this as a face – about 2.5 km tall, 2 km wide and about 0.5 km of height – star­ing right out into space…

Related:

In early 2006 a new face was found in Peru [GoogleMaps, Reg­is­ter ar­ti­cle]

And in Oc­to­ber 2006 an In­dian with an iPod… GoogleMaps

More: Holy Toast…

More on Parei­dola at The Scep­tics Dic­tio­nary