July 25, 1976: Viking 1 shows the Face of Mars

July 25, 1976

On August 20, 1975, the Viking 1 probe was launched into space from Cape Canaveral, followed shortly afterwards, on September 9 of the same year, by its homologous twin Viking 2. Viking 1 was composed of an orbital satellite which, as its name suggests, it was designed to orbit Mars, and a lander, which instead landed on the planet on July 20, 1976. The orbiter was to provide a mapping of Mars in order to find a good place to land the lander. br>


Only 5 days after landing, the Viking 1 probe immortalized one of the most peculiar landscapes of our neighbor: what appeared to all intents and purposes as a face, the so-called “Face of Mars “.

The face of Mars in 1976

On 25 July 1976 the Viking 1 spacecraft took some photographs of the Martian surface. Among these photographs was also the Face of Mars, a formation that then appeared as a human face, or at least humanoid:



The formation is located within Cydonia, a region of Mars called by one of the names by which the Greek goddess Athena is also known. The Face of Mars, also known as the Face of Mars or the Face of Cydonia, is 2.65 km long and 1.8 km wide. His first photograph, however, was not disclosed immediately by NASA, but 6 days later. Of course, the same aroused the curiosity and imagination of many people, but there is nothing supernatural, nor was the Face of Mars created by some kind of alien intelligence. So how can a plateau be there that obviously closely resembles a face?

The Face of Mars: the truth behind the interpretations

In the collective imagination this photograph has stimulated many interpretations, for which it has been cited in various fictional and science fiction works not only in 1970s, am also in much more recent times: for example, the Face of Mars is present in Futurama and X-Files.

On June 31, 1976 a description of the same was published, together with the photograph , of which we propose below an interesting excerpt:

“The huge rock formation in the center, which resembles a human head, is formed by shadows that give the illusion of eyes, nose and mouth. The complex is 1.5 kilometers (one mile) in diameter, with the angle of the Sun at about 20 degrees. The appearance of the image is due to transmission errors, emphasized by the enlargement of the photo ".

Naturally, it was immediately necessary to specify that it is not a real face, but simply a Martian plateau that appears to be a human face simply because of the particular lighting, the resolution of the image, not very high and greatly enlarged, and also because of errors in the transmission of the bits that make up the original image itself.

Another mechanism also takes over, which resides only in our brain: the association with a given image of another that resembles it and that is somehow familiar to us. In this case, it seems to be in front of a face of which we can clearly see the right eye, both nostrils and lips, while the left side of the Face on Mars is in shadow. But that's not the case at all. Simply, we associate the relief on Mars with an image that is decidedly familiar to us, a bit like looking for similarities between clouds in the sky and real objects. This particular phenomenon is known as pareidolia: it is precisely the tendency to mistakenly believe that completely random forms actually reproduce something that is familiar to us.

It is therefore simply coincidences and associations that we only make in our mind , but which, in fact, do not have any kind of confirmation in reality. Some might think that perhaps the explanation is not so pragmatic and, so to speak, devoid of poetry, but, even in this case, another photograph of the same plateau comes to our aid, taken "a few" years later.

The Face of Mars as it really is

Let's take a good leap forward in time up to 1998. On this date, and later also in 2001 and 2002, some new photographs of the plateau that could be interpreted as irrefutable proof of the existence of intelligent life outside our planet.

The photos in question were taken at higher resolution. The direct comparison between one of these images and the one that dates back to 25 July 1976 makes it clear that it is not a human face at all, nor a humanoid:



Another important step was made on 21 September 2006, when the ESA (European Space Agency) released new images of the Face of Mars in very high resolution. Not only that: thanks to the photographs taken by the Mars Express space probe it was also possible to develop a 3D reconstruction of the formation. The result is incredibly fascinating, even if it completely refutes the hypothesis that it could have been some creation of some intelligent extraterrestrial being:



Certainly believe that the Face of Mars is indeed a face, irrefutable proof of the existence of aliens, has its indisputable charm and has inspired several works, so learning that it was actually simply an optical illusion deprives the story of all its magic. >
However, living in a time when scientific progress allows us to admire such high resolution photographs of objects so distant from us, allowing us to appreciate details that are simply invisible or indecipherable a few decades ago, isn't it just as fascinating?