No little Martians here

LONDON: No there are no little green Martians – male or female! The idea of a woman spotted on the Red Planet in a photograph taken by the Nasa Mars Rover, Spirit, has been pooh-poohed by scientists who called it an example of pareidolia – the phenomenon where people tend to see familiar forms in unfamiliar inanimate objects. The first and best-known example of pareidolia in space was the ‘Man in the Moon’.

The Daily Mail printed a picture, taken from an unnamed website of a greenish-brown human, possibly a woman, perched on a rock staring at a crater below her asking the question ‘Life on Mars?’

But Michael Hanlon, the tabloid’s science editor insisted it was just an illusion, “There is no woman, green or otherwise, on the surface of Mars. If there were, she would suffocate and freeze in short order,” he writes.

Hanlon calls it a trick of light, shadow and perspective “with the brain seeing something familiar in an alien jumble of volcanic rocks under a strange orange-pink sky”.

Mars seems to inspire more apparitions than the other planets. In 1890s American astronomer Percival Lowell thought he saw a network of intricate canals and oases on Mars through his telescope.

Then in July 1976 Nasa Viking 1 probe photographed what looked like a giant human face. It turned out to be a wind-eroded, craggy hill in the Cydonia region, a couple of miles long and a few hundred feet high.