Cydonia, Mars (WHTM) The Viking 1 mission to Mars had already accomplished Amazing Great Things. Launched on August 20, 1975. It arrived in Mars orbit on June 19, 1976. On July 20 the Viking 1 lander touched down on the surface, and starting sending up the first close up images of the Martian surface.
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Meanwhile the Viking 1 orbiter continued circling the planet, taking pictures. On July 25, it passed over Cydonia, a region in the planet’s northern hemisphere. It’s a transitional zone between heavily cratered regions to the south and relatively smooth plains to the north. (Some planetologists suggest that Cydonia may once have been a coastal zone, and the northern plains were once ocean beds.)
One of the pictures the orbiter took that day showed a two-kilometer long mesa – with a human face. This sparked conspiracy theories and alien invader scenarios which continue to circulate today, in spite of a mountain of evidence (I had to slip that in somewhere) that the “face” isn’t a face at all.
Since then other exploration spacecraft, with better imaging systems, have photographed the “face” mesa, at different times of the day. (This one was taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera about the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft on April 5, 1998, with a camera 10 times sharper than Viking 1.) They show clearly there’s no face there.
So what’s going on here? There is a word for it – Pareidolia. It’s the name for our tendency to see patterns and resemblences where there are none; shapes in clouds, pictures in the stars (constellations), and particularly seeing faces in everything from burn patterns in toast to mountains on Mars.
In the case of the original face, two factors made it easy to see a face there. First, the low image quality (relatively speaking) of the Viking 1 camera blurred details which would have shown the face was weathered rock. Secondly, the sun was at a very low angle, which hid lots of the mesa in shadow. If the picture had been taken at high noon (Mars time) the whole face thing would have never happened.
Since then many more probes have reached Mars, and some have landed on the planet. They have sent back thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of images. Inevitably, people spot things that look like faces (human or otherwise), structures, and even the wreckage of alien spacecraft. (Keep in mind there are indeed alien spacecraft on Mars. We put them there.) It’s actually kind of fun, as long as we don’t take it too seriously.
Another face from Mars taken in 2022 by the Mars Perseverance Rover. Note that the things that make it look like a face are the same conditions that created the original Mars face illusion – a lack of detail (this is a blow-up from a much bigger picture) and heavy shadow hiding details.
Star Trek canon has it that there’s a major starship construction facility on Mars, which would explain this Starfleet insignia.
Paddington Bear on Mars.
“Oooh Noooooo!”
Just keep smiling!
(Two mile wide crater taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Context Camera.)
