In both of the freeby London newspapers yesterday on the tube there was a story about the picture from planet Mars which seemed to show a human like figure walking across the Martian surface. At first glance the picture looks like a joke or a fake, reminding me of the “Elvis found on Moon” headlines from the launch of a new tabloid in the eighties. But in the articles they seem to claim that it’s a genuine photograph from a Mars Explorer that shows a part of the rocky terrain that just happens to look very much like a bipedal torso with head and arms. Here it is again on the BBC website. Now the newspapers may have enhanced the illusion slightly in their image processing, but it does beg the question what are the chances of a randomly formed piece of rock looking so much like a recognisable figure competely out of context?

Then I remembered the rock I saw with my own eyes when travelling along the Canyon de Sil in Galicia, northern Spain. This photograph is straight from my own camera in 2005

It’s the old ink blot phenomenon again, like seeing faces in clouds. Our human brains are so wired by evolution up to recognise the specific patterns of faces and human forms or figures that we tend to over-detect them, and given enough random material to look at, we’ll eventually notice one somewhere. So is there really any evidence of Life on Mars? – that’s for another post!