MORE “PAREIDOLIA” ON MARS, OR, ANOTHER MARTIAN ANOMALY

This week I'm starting off our blogs by a bit of "fun" and relaxation from the normal pattern of "our leaders are monsters and our scientists are mad" sort of stuff that I normally like to blog about and do a lot of high octane speculation about. Before we get to that, however, I want to remind everyone that there is a vidchat this Friday at 4PM US central time, weather permitting. As usual, get your comments and questions emailed to me by 10PM Central time this THursday, limiting yourself to one page of questions and comments please. Also, please remember to put your username ABOVE the text of your submission, and to use ALL CAPITAL LETTERS in the subject header of your email, which should read VIDCHAT QUESTIONS or VIDCHAT COMMENTS. That's so I'll actually see your email and archive it for the vidchat.

Now then, as I mentioned, I want to start off this week's blogs with a bit of fun, or rather, a story that is only "fun" viewed against the insanity that seems to have gripped every major western capital and culture.  The story was shared by T.M. (with our gratitude):

Now, I'm intrigued by this  story for several reasons, not the least because, as a study in pareidolia, I'm not convinced that the author of the article is seeing the same thing I am, or even looking at the same picture perhaps.  And yes, I cleaned my glasses... twice. Here's the background, according to the article, on the picture:

When we think of Martians, we tend to think of little grey men.

But if a resurfaced image taken by a Nasa rover is anything to go by, the aliens that call Mars home are land-walking ‘jellyfish’. Maybe.

The photo was taken by Curiosity in August 2023, 3,924 Martian days, or Sols, into the extraterrestrial explorer’s time exploring the red planet.

The black-and-white panorama shows the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater, an ancient meteor impact crater, with a black, spindly object on the slopes.

And if that is not enough, there's this highly inconvenient factoid about the picture:

Strangely, the dark object was not there in a photograph taken less than 10 seconds before. It was also the final photo taken that day.

As the article notes, the individual who was combing through NASA's Mars images and who flagged the picture and posted it to the internet, Kari Sivertzen, replied to another individual who maintained that it was simply a blurry picture of the NASA Mars helicoptor "Ingenuity" hovering off in the distance. Nonsense, Sivertzen replied, because "Ingenuity" was nowhere near the surface rover on that day.

So as usual, for my high octane speculation of the day, I'm going to assume my usual methodology and (1) assume the picture is true and (2) try to figure out the implications of it, and the article accompanying it. My first reaction upon seeing the picture of what the author and others are calling a "jellyfish" was to say, "no way." When I look at both the picture and even more at its enlargement, I'm not seeing the dangly fluid, wiggly tentacles of jellyfish. I'm seeing straight lines, perhaps - as one commenter noted, a tripod - beneath a triangular body. And my first thought was, "H.G. Wells is alive and well and on Mars playing a practical joke on NASA," because the object in the photograph looks very much like Wells' descriptions of the Martian tripod war engines from his class novella War of the Worlds, the tripods epitomized in the two Hollywood productions of Wells's yarn, the 1950s version, and the more recent "update" with actor Tom Cruise.

And that creates some problems. The first is that of pareidolia itself: how can some people be seeing a "jellyfish" when the straight line geometry suggests everything but a Portuguese Man-O-War? Or is that part of some sort of weird journalistic "psyop"? Call it a "jellyfish" often enough, and hopefully people won't draw the even more highly inconvenient connection to Wells' classic tale of interplanetary war.  The second problem is, once one dispatches of the "jellyfish" characterization, and if one accepts for the sake of argument that it's not the NASA Martian helicopter Ingenuity, then that resemblance to Well's story and the Martian machines of war becomes highly inconvenient.  We're left with two alternatives, equally unpleasant. The first is that NASA is having "a bit of fun" and doctored the photograph, and buried it in hopes that someone would notice and post it, demonstrating once again that one can trust absolutely nothing it says or shows about space.  And the second is that it is genuine, it's really there, and is not Ingenuity, which means that it is some sort of Tripod Thing making its way around (or near) the Martian surface and it just happened to be photographed by the rover.

It is that very last possibility which raises what may be the most inconvenient question of them all: did H.G. Wells just happen to "hit upon" the tripod machines as the war vehicle of choice for his Terra-invading Martians?  Or did he somehow know something? And if the latter, how and when did he know it?

As for me and my house, pareidolia it may be. But if it is, given all the other high weirdnesses in the photographs innumerable people have by now spotted when combing through NASA's photo archives of the planet (not to mention some very intriguing Soviet pictures from our celestial neighbour), weirdnesses that must by now number in their hundreds, then that means Mars is home to a statistically abnormally high amount of pareidolia...

So, as for me and my house, at this juncture I'm betting that it's a Tripod Something. Maybe Ingenuity took an unscheduled trip near the rover and was photographed. My problem is, the photograph of Ingenuity in the article does not look like the Tripod Something to me.

See you on the flip side...

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