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© Copyright 1997, Jim Loy
The tabloids have gotten a lot of mileage out of the remarkable face on Mars. It's a NASA photo (Viking 1) which shows a mountain, as seen from almost directly above, which looks startlingly like a human face. And many people seem to think that this mountain is some kind of monument left by the ancient Martian civilization.
The face is a fairly amusing coincidence of shadow angles. And if you think that someone designed it, you are being silly (I almost said "stupid," but I won't be that insulting).
I've seen the "man on the moon" and the "woman on the moon." I've even seen clouds and rocks that look like faces. Why don't people think that aliens are responsible for these? Maybe they do.
The face on Mars looks like a face, mainly because the shadows are just right. The eyes and mouth were not painted in. They are shadows. Such an object would look like a face only at a certain time of day, and only from a certain angle. It is, very likely, a natural phenomenon.
I've stated my opinion, above. And the silly people who think the face was made by martians have their opinion. Does the tie go to me or the silly people? Or do we stay tied, "no contest" as a tie was called in the olden days? Believe it or not, the tie goes to me.
The claims that I have made are rather mundane: This thing is a natural phenomenon, caused by coincidence of shadows at the right angle. The claims of the silly people are bizarre, outrageous, unusual. These bizarre claims may be true! But, they require proof. It doesn't make sense to believe bizarre things too readily. An open-minded skepticism (a scientific attitude, by the way) is the logical attitude, until we see proof.
This idea, that mundane claims require less proof than bizarre claims, is called Occam's (Ockham's) Razor. It states that the simplest explanation is the explanation which is most likely to be true. The simplest explanation is not always true. But, it is most likely to be true, until more evidence comes in.
See Occam's Razor.
Addendum:
Here are three images of the face, from Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The first is the Viking 1 image which got the tabloids and their readers all
excited. The second is a much more detailed image taken by Mars Global
Surveyor, more recently, with the sunlight coming from the opposite direction.
The third is an inverse image of the second, so that the sunlight appears to be
coming from the same direction as the first image.