The unusual mountain of the planet Mars has previously been tried to be attributed to extraterrestrial activities within the framework of conspiracy theories. In a low-resolution photo taken by the Viking 1 spacecraft in 1976, the outline of the mountain appeared to be drawn in the shape of a human face, an optical illusion. However, when looked at more closely and with appropriate lighting, the shadows forming the face disappeared.

SETI Institute experts shared a higher quality image taken by the Mars Global Surveyor satellite that clearly shows the so-called “face of Mars.” The original photo showed “dark eyes” on a “pale face”, but in a more detailed image the facial features looked more like weathered rocks.

This phenomenon has nothing to do with the existence of extraterrestrial sculptors, as no one has been able to carve a monstrous face on a 3 kilometer mountain. This is an example of pareidolia, a very strange property of the human mind that allows it to see faces and other familiar shapes in random patterns. It can occur in both healthy people and people with mental disorders.

Neuroscientist Joel Voss (researcher at Northwestern University, USA) hypothesized that pareidolia is a side effect of the brain’s work to analyze visual information (lines, surfaces, shapes, colors) and is an error in classifying “ambiguous” images. But little is known about the exact causes of pareidolia. Recently, scientists discovered that this mental process is affected by oxytocin. Source