Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [3]
The face is unmistakable. Two eye sockets, a nose, and a mouth gash form the rudiments of a human face. What’s that doing on Mars? For decades this feature (about a mile across), as well as others gleaned from eager searchers perceptually poised to confirm their beliefs in extraterrestrial intelligence, claimed it was an example of Martian monumental architecture, the remnants of a once-great civilization now lost to the ravages of time. Numerous articles, books, documentaries, and Web pages breathlessly speculated about this lost Martian civilization, demanding that NASA reveal the truth. This NASA did when it released the photograph of the “face” taken by the Mars Global Surveyor in 2001, seen in figure I.8.
Figure I.6. The 3-D impossible-crate illusion explained. Camera angle is everything!
Figure I.7 (above left). An unmistakable feature on Mars photographed by a NASA spacecraft in 1976.
Figure I.8 (above right). The “face” on Mars morphs into an eroded mountain range.
In the light of a high-resolution camera, the “face” suddenly morphs into an oddly eroded mountain range, the product of natural, not artificial, forces. Erosion, not Martians, carved the mountain. This silenced all but the most hard-core Ufologists.
Such random patterns are often seen by humans as faces, such as the “happy face” on Mars “discovered” in 1999 (figure I.9). If astronomers were romantic poets would they find hearts on distant planets, like the one in figure I.9, also from Mars?
We see faces because we were programmed by evolution to see the expressions of those most powerful in our social group, starting with imprinting on the most important faces in our sphere: those of our parents.
We also see at work Bacon’s idols of the cave in the peculiarities of religious icons that often make their appearances in the most unusual of places, such as the famous “nun bun” discovered by a Nashville, Tennessee, coffee shop owner in 1996. The idea of seeing a nun’s face in a pastry provokes laughter among most lay audiences (it was featured on David Letterman’s show, for example). But some deeply religious people flocked to show their reverence when the nun bun was put on display at the Bongo Java coffee shop. (An attorney representing Mother Teresa forced the bun’s owner, Bob Bernstein, to remove her name from the icon.)
Figure I.9. The “happy face” on Mars, along with a Martian heart
Arguably the greatest religious icon in history (after the cross, of course) is the Virgin Mary, who has made routine appearances around the world and throughout history. In 1993, for instance, she appeared on the side of an oak tree in Watsonville, California, a small town whose population is 62 percent Mexican-Americans and whose dominant religion is Catholicism. In 1996 the Virgin Mary manifested on the side of a bank building in Clearwater, Florida. Once again, believers gathered around the icon, often in wheelchairs and on crutches, in some cases hoping to be healed.
A Christian group purchased the building in order to preserve the religious image, fencing off the parking lot, which is now chockablock full of candles lit in veneration. However, as I discovered in visiting the site in 2003, it turns out that there are several Virgin Marys on the sides of this building, appearing wherever there happens to be a sprinkler and a palm tree. The water, contrary to the name of the city, is not so clear. In fact, it is rather brackish, loaded with minerals that stain windows such as these (see figure I.10; the palm tree that originally stood in front of the window where the big Virgin Mary image appears has since been cut down by the owners).
The image is a striking example of the power of beliefs to determine perceptions. Instead of saying, “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it,” we probably