How your brain tricks you into seeing crabs on Mars

[bogeyman]

To the folks at UFO Sightings Daily, NASA’s archive of Mars images from its Curiosity rover is better than a candy shop. Every visit yields a new treat.

“Alien critter found on Mars, gazing at rover,” reads the headline on a post published Monday. If you squint at the accompanying image, which is so zoomed-in that it’s pixelated and fuzzy, you can almost see a tiny creature with spindly arms and a pumpkin-shaped head peering out from behind a rock.

Also spotted: two alien ships, a reptile head, a face looking up. And that’s just from one photo.

“There is so much evidence of intelligent life in this NASA photo, its really amazing that the public hasn’t done this kind of research long ago,” says the post’s author, Scott C. Waring.

[The Hubble spotted this smiley face in space]

Waring is hardly the only person to make such “discoveries.” Earlier in August, certain corners of the Internet were agog over what appeared to be a crab crawling up a Martian cliff face. Others saw a “levitating rock” in June.

Ashwin Vasavada, who works on the Mars rover project, insists that NASA scientists are not trying to hide evidence of alien life from us.

“There is no group that would be happier to see such a thing than the 500 scientists around the world who work on this Curiosity rover,” he told CNN. “So far we haven’t seen anything that is so obvious that it would be similar to what these claims are.”

When we look at chunks of space rock and piles of sand and “see” a crab, or a lizard, or an alien spaceship, we’re being tricked, he said. Not by NASA, but by our own brains.

The phenomenon is called “pareidolia,” and it explains why we so frequently find Jesus in our food, the Virgin Mary in tree trunks, a man in the moon, Hitler in teapots and tiny, pumpkin-headed aliens on Mars.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/m...-life-on-mars/

I personally saw Jesus in a potato once as well, yeh right.

[PurpleLama]

There are plenty of instances of pareidolia in all the weird things observed in the Curiosity footage, but all it takes is one weird artefact to slip past the censor to be real before the entire paradigm gets turned on its head. That crab might actually be the one thing to slip past them. You ought to check out the thread here.

[samildamach]

Look in the north west of the zoomed in picture I'll point out the big nosed soldier wearing a conical helmet .now I've mentioned it you can see it and I would consider that to be normal shape pareidola.the crab like shape is clearly something else and looks more fossil like shape.if only we could ask the rover for a close up

[Carmody]

We have a definite and real issue of cover up but the process is all about divide and conquer. To manipulate on all levels and in all potentials of reasonable argument.

Which in this case... is to discredit and ridicule via the introduction of ridiculous premise and ridiculous conclusions.

Kinda like a serious report on how the..the unhh...'the pope farted and a small country blew up - must be the will of god'. (small g intended) (simply what poured out of my mind as ridiculous, in the seconds to took to write this)

Control the true argument by destroying any potential to get real or obtain credibility. To hold the line in the group mind phase lock of the masses.