Mars pareidolia strikes again. The image captured by the Perseverance rover on duty is one of the most gruesome yet: for all the world it looks like a desiccated, rotting human head, severed from its body, drying in the harsh sunlight.
It's not a human head, you may be relieved (or excited) to know. Like most things on Mars that aren't ice, cloud, dust, or a small hole, there's a rock that looks like something else. This particular rock was photographed on September 27, 2024, and when viewed from the side, it looks like a piece of sedimentary sandstone, indistinguishable from other surrounding rocks. Which is not unusual for Mars, especially where water once flowed.
Image from: mars.nasa.gov
What makes it unusual is its shape: the way it is oriented towards the camera makes it look like a head lying on its side, you can see similarities with the ridges of the eyebrows, nose, mouth and chin.
Pareidolia, or the identification of significant shapes and images in random objects and arrangements, is surprisingly common in images of Mars. So far we've found rocks that look like a bear's face, a fungus, a carved warrior image, a spoon, a thigh bone, and even insects.
It's thought to happen when your eyes see a shadow or an arrangement of objects or shapes, and some part of your brain that processes visual information jumps to conclusions before the rest of your gray matter catches up, and it also happens here on Earth. There is even a special part of the brain that deals with the rapid identification of faces and it is located deep in the brain.
Image from: mars.nasa.gov
Check out the Onformative Google Faces project to identify face-like shapes in Google Earth images. The one below is a particularly famous example. Other examples include what look like human faces spotted on individual grains of sand.
It's a pretty cool coincidence that a rock on Mars can be broken down into the shapes and proportions of a humanoid head, but that's about it. To date, there is still no evidence that complex life has ever appeared or been found on the red planet.
Humanity hopes to change that with plans for future manned missions to Mars. We might just be aliens leaving behind mysterious objects to confuse other alien explorers in the distant future.
