Figure 1- Image from Mars Rover showing putative “Thigh Bone.” From NASA and in the public domain.

Well jumpin’ pareidolia! The world of UFO enthusiasts and other wanna believers was set into an internet frenzy with NASA’s release last week of an image (see Figure 1) from the Mars Rover showing what looks very much like a human thigh bone.  Well sometimes a rock is just a rock, and such is the case here. Sorry!

I want to admit that there is nothing that would excite me more than the discovery of a fossil on Mars. And while Mars Rover has conclusively shown that Mars was once dripping in water, geologists and exobiologists think it very unlikely that Mars ever harbored large creatures – the atmosphere and environment are not believed to have ever been sufficiently sustaining for evolution to progress in that direction.

On the other hand, we may continue to wonder what if – and such is the thought provoking nature of images like this.  Mars indeed has long been a refuge for seeing things, for associating natural inanimate phenomena with objects of human or even divine origin.  There were the “Canals of Mars,” the “Face on Mars, “the Mars Rat,” and now this thigh bone.

Two years ago when I launched this blog, I promised that one of the points that it would feature was the pure magic of photographs.  Well, the Martian Thigh Bone now joins the ranks of images that titillate and fire off the associative neurons of our brains.  Just as we post our selfies in pursuit of connection, just as we look at nineteenth century photographs and see connectivity, so too we look at the alien worlds that NASA brings into crystal clarity and seek something familiar, a connection with what we know that goes beyond a bit of iron rich rock lying in the sand.  We seek the magic of the image.