Sorry Conspiracy Theorists, That's No Woman On Mars
(CBS SF) -- Whenever the Mars Curiosity Rover beams back images of the Red Planet to Earth, the Internet blows up with countless theories to explain the mysterious shadows and shapes we perceive.
People have spotted a "man made" pyramid, a giant crab scaling rocks, and most recently, a spooky woman watching the Curiosity Rover.
Writers at UFO Sightings Daily first pointed out on Monday that the new Rover image looked like a woman partly cloaked.
But NASA has claimed that no life exists on Mars, not that they know of anyway.
Still, once you see these images pointed out for you, it's nearly impossible to untrain your brain not to see them.
TIME's science writer Jeffrey Kluger calls this pareidolia, a psychological phenomenon that makes us see or hear familiar things in unfamiliar patterns.
Examples of this include seeing animal shapes in clouds, faces on the moon or the Virgin Mary divinely etched into a burnt piece of toast.
"The pareidolia phenomenon is actually a deeply rooted one, something that helps infants focus on faces early and also allowed humans in the wild to spot danger easily—picking a potentially menacing human or animal peering out from a backdrop of leaves or scrub," Kluger writes. "Yes, more often than not it's a false alarm, but better to overreact fifty times than under-react even once.
American cosmologist Carl Sagan said the phenomenon is likely carved into our genes and has even contributed to our survival. In his 1995 book, "The Demon-Haunted World -- Science as a Candle in the Dark," he argues recognizing faces that weren't really there helped humans to instantly judge danger from safety. Humans who thought they saw a predator in the bushes and ran away were much more likely to survive than those who ignored potential danger and decided to stick around.
Nicole Jones is a digital producer for CBS San Francisco. Follow her musings @nicjonestweets
