One of the latest images doing the rounds on the alien life conspiracy circuit is one of the most outlandish yet. A detail in a stunning panoramic shot by NASA’s intrepid Curiosity Rover has attracted the attention of ET enthusiasts around the world.
A rocky area in the upper left-hand corner has been described by some to look unerringly like a humanoid head.
The apparent anomaly does indeed have a forehead-like shape and an indent where eyes are commonly found.
And there are also slight protrusions very roughly where ears are commonly located.
Self-styled expert in all things alien Scott Waring is the man responsible for the odd claim.
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He took to his UFO Sightings Daily site to speculate about his highly-controversial, so-called discovery.
He said: “I found a face on Mars, but this one has a doorway built into his chin.
“The face is a little bit similar to that of a human face, but the nose is smaller with one nostril and the ears are much higher and smaller on the forehead.
“The actual photo is on Gigapan and I made the false red photo into original colour to see Mars as it really is.
“It doesn’t sound like the huge human-eating aliens the movies make them out to be does it?”
However, even to the most ardent believer in extraterrestrials on Mars, this is clearly nothing more than a rock sitting on the red planet’s desolate surface.
Experts commonly agree there are there main explanations for such alien evidence claims.
These are fanciful thinking, a wish to deliberately deceive and also a fascinating tendency to anthropomorphise inert objects.
In this instance, perceiving a rock as an alien culture can be explained through a phenomenon known as pareidolia.
Pareidolia is a category of apophenia describing human’s well-known propensity to see recognisable shapes and patterns where they actually do not exist.
This effect has been widely-documented as causing people to see UFOs in clouds or alien artefacts in otherwise mundane objects.
US space agency NASA said in a statement: “Pareidolia is the psychological phenomenon where people see recognisable shapes in clouds, rock formations, or otherwise unrelated objects or data.
“There are many examples of this phenomenon on Earth and in space.”
