Flashback: The Face on Mars.
Forty years ago this week, NASAspotted something odd on Mars. Something strange. Something creepy. Something easily explainable.
On July 25, 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 spacecraft was orbiting the planet days before it released its lander. The orbiter was snapping close-up pictures of the Martian surface, in hopes of finding a suitable spot for the Viking 2 lander, which was still a couple of weeks away from Mars. Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif., got a surprise, however, when they received the picture at right, which appeared to show a sphinx-like artifact on the surface of the red planet. A few days later, NASA released the image to the public. The caption described “a huge rock formation” that resembled a human head “formed by shadows giving the illusion of eyes, nose and mouth.” The idea, apparently, was that the photo would drum up some interest in the upcoming Viking landings. The idea backfired in a big way. The image went viral in a time before the word “viral” had been coined. The Face on Mars was featured in TV shows, movies, books and especially grocery store tabloids. The idea of an ancient civilization leaving a face-like image on the surface of Mars wasn’t exactly new. Jack Kirby, who’d later achieve fame working for Marvel Comics, had dreamed up that very story way back in 1958.
Conspiracy theorists, especially, loved the image and said it proved the existence of life on Mars. In some cases, these are the same folks who claim that NASA never landed on the moon and that the U.S. government keeps deceased alien bodies in a morgue at Area 51 in Nevada. So when the Mars Global Surveyor arrived in Martian orbit in 1997, the so-called Face on Mars in the Cydonia region of Mars’ northern latitudes was high on the priority list for further photographic examination. The Mars Global Surveyor sent back those pictures in 1998, at a resolution more than 10 times sharper than the 22-year-old original picture. And — to the surprise of virtually no one at JPL — the photos proved the Face on Mars was no face at all. It was just a lump. An 800-foot-high, 1.2 mile-long mesa, to be precise, located in the transition zone between crater-filled highlands of western Arabia Terra to the south and comparatively smooth, lowland plains to the north. In 2001, the orbital camera platform took another high-resolution look at the mesa. Again, no evidence to suggest an ancient civilization or oversized artifact or tribute to Jack Kirby was found. It’s called pareidolia: a psychological pheomenon that causes people to see images — expecially faces — where none exist. The best example, perhaps, might be finding objects in cloud formations. In the case of the original Face on Mars photo, the angle of the sun caused minor depressions atop the mesa to look like an eye and a mouth. A small ridge happened to resemble a nose. The black dots that appeared throughout the image are, in fact, transmission errors: missing pixels. But one falls precisely where one would expect to see a nostril, adding to the effect. But again: There is no face on Mars. It’s just a mountain. And it’s not the only time scientists have found strange-looking things on Mars or elsewhere in the universe. See a modest collection of examples below.