Pareidolia – Seeing familiarity…

It’s debunk weekend again, and I know, I missed last weekend through no fault of my own. I’m making up for it by doing a series on a subject that touches on a UFO related matter that I consider to be one of the most fascinating and compelling, but in the spirit of  debunk-ness (!) I would ask you to bear with me as we look just for a minute, at the marvelous workings of the mind!

As some of you may know, there are professional psychologists who encourage patients to try to make out familiar shapes in an ink blot in order to try to get to know them better. Everyone is in fact born with the capacity to recognize faces and familiar shapes in truly random objects like clouds.  What an individual is able to see reveals many things about the intelligence and personality of the viewer. People who are not afraid to say that they see images are considered to be balanced…

The phenomenon is called pareidolia and is a favorite dismissal tactic of every skeptic. Of course the most famous of all the tricks of light and shadow to be trampled on by said skeptics is the persistently infamous ‘face on mars’, which first wowed us in 1976, when the Viking Orbiter 1 sent back this astonishing image.

As we all know, subsequent trips to Mars have revealed varying impressions of this Martian ‘mesa’, showing that at some light angles, it is a face, and at other light angles, it is pretty much… a face, albeit  with eroded features.

I find it funny that skeptics seem to go to great lengths to explain why this most famous of Martian mesas does not in fact a resemble a face anymore!  It is OK to see faces in randomness you know! It is in fact healthy! See my comment above about being balanced …Harping on about how the latest images blows artificiality out of the water is simply unscientific. Something can look fantastically artificial and is clearly not… And something that is actually artificial can be pretty much garbled, like a photocopy of a photocopy.

Check out this recently formed image of a typical North American Indian. Soft material and water , with a little hand of God produced this natural sculpted masterpiece, which you can check out on Google Earth at co-ordinates 50.010611, -110.113422. It is located in an oil mining zone in South East Alberta, Canada, and has been officially named the “Badlands Guardian”.

Fantastic isn’t it! And that is the action of blind and RECENT water erosion.  You can look at this sort of thing 3 ways of course:

1) It is actually artificial and made to look like it was produced by recent water erosion
2) It is naturally formed, but was guided by supernatural forces (!)
3) It is completely random and God / Ghea / The Great Spirit had nothing to do with it.

Whatever the case may be, one thing remains  a constant and irrefutable fact; the human mind’s ability to perceive familiarity in its sensory field is astonishing. I will leave you just now with this image of Mickey Mouse.

No, I don’t think the Martians like Mickey Mouse particularly. I do wonder though whether they get Disney channel up there…