Mars Face: Natural

Human face on mars

The idea of a “human face” on Mars is often associated with the Cydonia region of Mars, where a mesa formation resembles a face when seen in certain lighting conditions. However, this is a natural geological formation, and subsequent high-resolution images from Mars orbiters have shown that it doesn’t actually resemble a face when viewed from different angles and lighting.

There is no credible evidence to suggest that there are artificial structures or a human face on Mars. Any such claims are typically based on pareidolia, which is the tendency of the human brain to perceive familiar patterns, such as faces, in random or ambiguous stimuli.

Discovery

As the Viking 1 mission circled the red planet in search of a landing site for its sister ship, Viking 2, it snapped photos of Mars for engineers at NASA to study. On July 25, 1976, it captured the image of a pile of rocks that greatly resembled a human face. When NASA released the photograph almost a week later, they described it as a “huge rock formation in the center [of the photo], which resembled a human head.”