My pareidolia knows no bounds.

Here's a look at the left half of the photo that Meph was taken from:

Again, no processing was done:

This is a case of many minor faces with few details each, but interesting when taken as a whole, and for it's pareidolic value.

The arrows show the direction that the eight faces face. The key is at the bottom:

1. Girl
2. Matron (Marlene Dietrich style)
3. Manchurian
4. Another Western (he's with the guy under Meph) but looking the other way.
5. Devil outline, (no internal face features)
6. Ugly Witch (classic)
7. Townslady
8. Dandified man

At a later date it might be a good idea to expose these characters to the "Ressler Scale".

rd

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by neilderosa</i>
<br />I want to do a little comparison of rd''s new pareidolic face and one that I myself called "Pareidolic Face," taken from the MOC images (found in my "Keys" thread). First I''d like to compliment rd on his quick study in this field of capturing suggestive faces from shadows and leaves.

The face itself has lots of suggestive features, but none of the kind needed to conclude for artificiality, which of course rd is not doing. (“Artificiality” of course, can either be defined as “in the thing imaged” or, “put there by the artist”). There is only one arbitrary closure in the outline, that being at the top of the head; the rest of the outline is actually in the “raw data.”

But there is no "elaborate detail" of the kind I have described elsewhere. For example, if the shadows (or pine needles) that suggest the eye, actually formed an outline with an iris, a white, and lashes, as in the "Profile Image" (Nefertiti), or if the "cheek" actually had "3-dimensional" shading, that would be truly amazing (and would arouse my suspicions). But it doesn''t. I am not suggesting that the comparison image has much elaborate detail either. It is only for comparison. I felt that posting Nefertiti would be too provocative, so I posted one that may indeed be pareidolia (though I lean, obviously, toward artificiality).

All in all I''d have to say, good job.


Neil<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Thank you for the analysis, and please see previously stated suggestions.

rd

The Yafi (Y[et] a[nother] f[rivolous] i[mage])

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Here is S1402499 confirmation of Barbara. Note that you can only see part of the face because the 2km face is too large to fit inside of the 1.5 km wide hi-res swath. Note also that the first two images of Barbara (and crownface) were imaged from directly overhead. S14 has a somewhat oblique viewing angle, hence accounting for the foreshortening of the features. But the details are still evident. Neil DeRosa<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Here’s a cropping from S1402499 covering all of the area in the swath of the so-called “evidence” of art and artists in the area surrounding the image known as "Barbara". This is a great example of how powerful pareidolia can be, depending upon the angle of the camera, lighting, etc. Logically, anyone looking at this angle with this resolution would conclude that we are looking at a rocky Martian landscape (aka “Pile of Rocks”), and leave it at that. But because a previous angle had a little different shading, it was possible in that view to delude oneself into thinking they were seeing a half hidden face. All it took was two dark patches for the eyes. The rest of the so-called face was totally hidden, and the mind got to fill in all the blanks, and voila “Babs” appears.

It is important to remember how pareidolia works. Because the mind is hard wired to see faces, it wants to complete the face if it thinks it sees part of one. So when there are features missing it fills in the blanks fairly easily. This makes partial face pareidolia less impressive as pareidolia goes. Real Pareidolists tend to avoid this type of example. One of the first quotes I posted in this thread was from Alexander Boes, a photographer in Kristiansand, Norway, who said that “Very detailed faces are rare. But crude faces and otherwise detailed faces missing one or more important parts are very easy to find.” In the case of Barbara, the whole face is missing. There is no chin, mouth, nose, cheeks, forehead, ears, head, eyebrows, neck, or just about anything but these two dark patches, so it’s quite easy to imagine the filled in face from very little to start with, especially if you key around it in Photoshop to give the impression that there’s a hairdo that goes along with it. As this image clearly shows, there is no such hairdo.

In short Barbara got Skullfaced by this image swath. So wags the world of Martian Art. That this should be held out as one of the best possibilities for Martian Art says all we need to know. Look this over real good, because I suspect there will be many more such non-confirmations to come in the near future, and that it will become increasingly difficult to continue to argue logically for the Artificial Origins Hypothesis as it pertains to Martian Art.

rd

There's a saying in the legal world that "you can indict a ham sandwich". It's intended to mean that you need virtually no evidence at all to get an indictment, all you need is a good imagination and the will to do it.

Well, you can "key" a ham sandwich also. Keys help to show what you think you're seeing, but they prove next to nothing, and they can be highly misleading in some cases by providing an illusion that the image features stop there. As I showed with Mephistopheles, they can easily be used on pareidolic images (see previous page).

rd

Now that the MRO images are coming in nicely, and they have resolved their software issues, it's not hard for us pareidolists to sit back and enjoy the show. I guess we figure if someone from the artificiality camp comes up with something concrete, they would plaster it all over the internet. As it stands all we've seen to support the AOH since the MRO started publishing was an image of Barbara Streisand.

Now call me skeptical, but I'm thinking if you polled all the readers of this forum, you'd be hard pressed to find 5 that believe that Martians once etched images of B.S. (as Rush likes to call her) into the surface of Mars.

But, like I said, we can sit back and wait because we don't believe the unambiguous proof is coming along anytime soon.

Sure, occasionably we'll see some hocus pocus mumbo jumbo about how this proves this to a certaintly of four trillion to one, but I'm thinking it just ain't there, no matter how many digits you put after it, until we can all look at it and say, "oh yeah it is there."

So, I think I'll leave it there and let history decide.

And anyway, I have a much more interesting pastime now.....online poker, Texas Hold'em. The explosion in the number of people playing is absolutely unbelievable. I'm not going post any links for obvious reasons, but man is it fun. I've been playing in at least five tournaments a week (3500 to 5000 participants).

So good-bye for now.

rd