My pareidolia knows no bounds.

Although the various studies of the Cydonia face are interesting, and to me compelling, I take them all with a grain of salt. In this I agree with my brother and the other skeptics like jrich who have commented on them from time to time. Although I don't of course agree with their conclusions, since I obviously favor the artificiality hypothesis.

That said, taken in context with these studies and visual observations of the Cydonia Mesa, (face), the image I post here is to my mind the <i>coup de grace </i>to the "pareidolia hypothesis" (this kills that, IMO). Here we have an eye with several levels of detail; you can see the bone structure under the sculptor's "skin," including the temporal bone, supraorbital process, frontal bone, and nose bridge. You can see skin texture, you can see 3 or more parallel lines (skin wrinkles) under the eye, and crows feet at the corners; you can see a great hairline at the side and top; you can see strands of hair.

Compare this to the cloud face shown above.



Neil

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by pareidoliac</i>
<br />i have seen no mention on the face, (in the chin and below) in the main image along with it's neck and body, and the anguished looking face (like Munch's "Scream, "with a down-turned anguished mouth below that, (in the body of the midle image.) Also please note the classical cruxifix im the mouth-nose portion of the middle face) for those who are into "religious," pareidolia.
............ It seems like a perfect area for "meta-research."<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
I hadn't noticed the other faces in this picture, but I did notice something else equally as important.

Over the last couple of weeks, as everyone knows, there have been many 9/11 specials on TV. One day I was watching one that showed the footage that gave rise to Mark Phillips photo. While I was watching the footage, I could easily see how someone might have captured this and other faces.

I had a friend once who bought a Nikon Camera with an automatic shooting device (sorry, I don't remember what they are called). He used to take it down to Pebble Beach to take pictures of Jack Nicklaus' golf swing. You know, pull the trigger and you get 20 shots like with a machine gun. One day he came home with about 500 pics of Jack's swing. I guess he thought he could market it somehow.

Anyway, I could easily see that when that smoke was billowing, if someone did that, and then reviewed the photos later, he would be likely to get many faces. So, the question is "why?"

Pareidoliac has an artist's viewpoint as to why. Maybe even spritual when he says: <blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">pareidolia is the great overlooked center where the physical and spiritual world meet and communicate, sending messages from the highest spirit in it's infinite hidden subtelty.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Maybe, but it could be something much more concrete, and quantifiable. Something along these lines.

We know that humans are hardwired to see faces, right? (let's assume that for the time being). So what type of signal do we need? In order to answer that, we have to look at the face itself. What does it have? If we look at it from a distance, it has two eyes, a nose and a mouth in a larger area which is the head and hair. If we get a little closer, we might see two eyebrows, a dimple or two. Closer still, and we start to see wrinkles, beard stubble, freckles, hair on head, etc.

So, the first view from a distance, is really pretty simple. All it requires is two blobs for the eyes, and one blob for the mouth, and a flat blob for the nose, and a shape that could be the outline of a head. Even the second view isn't much more complicated, but it does require some noise that's a little more tightly spaced, or in scientific terms it has to have a higher spacial frequency than the eyes (only two eyes span the face, but there might be 10 wrinkles, and 100 beard stubbles).

The bottom line is that in randomly generated noise, it's not all that hard to get just the right distribution of spacial frequencies to make up the "soup" for faces.

Eventually, I'm going to try and prove this, but right now I'm struggling with trying to learn the Fourier Transform.

rd

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Samizdat</i>
<br />If only sports television crews with their expensive super slow motion production capability had raced to the World Trade Center and given us orders of magnitude more stills in which to find imaginary monsters! Then we could spend even more time, energy, and bandwidth on this nonsense.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">This topic is about pareidolia, the seeing of faces in random or vague images. In some cases, we're attempting to assertain whether or not they are real (i.e., artificial) or pareidolia, but in other cases the pictures are presented merely as examples of pareidolic images that we know aren't real to show that (a) it happens, and (b)what is the level of detail.

This one was merely an example of the latter case. I attach no special meaning (as in "monster"), although others might. If you've been reading this topic from the beginning, you would know that I've refrained from posting all the religous examples of pareidolia that exist. I did that because that is not what I'm attempting to show.

Pareidoliac is more in tune with aspects of this that I never considered, and has given me a great deal of insight already, that never occured to me before I started. And although I might not necessarily believe in the "physical and spiritual connection" to these images, I'm not discounting it either.

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 />Compare this to the cloud face shown above.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Yes, but what question do we ask? Do we ask: which one looks more like a face? In that case "Satan" wins hands down. Remember faces consist of <b>two eyes, a nose, a mouth</b> and a bunch of other stuff. Not merely one eye. When we look at one eye only the requirements for the neccessary spatial frequencies change. So, you're really asking an apples to oranges comparison.

Instead let's compare the <b>whole Cydonia head</b> to Fred's photo at this link:

beyondpareidolia.shutterfly.com/1133

Now, back to studying the Fourier Transform.

rd

Thought this might interest you. After taking at least 250 photographs (that got positive results) of pareidolia (500 if you're less fussy), shooting anything that had eyes or looked like any type of face, they all looked human with less that 2% exceptions. A dog or two, one gorilla, a couple of aliens, one camel. The whole project convinced me that we peoject these images from our unconscious, at the same time that some higher spiritaul force projects them to us and hard-wires our system to see them. It also convinced me that each of us is the other half of what we perceive in a yin/yang manner.

rd- It's not the number of eyes, or nose, that makes the difference but the number of countable details. A face with a patch over the eye that had 100 countable details would be more phenomenal than a face with two eyes and 35 countable details.