Pareidolia – What’s That?

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pareidolia

Pareidolia is the phenomenon of recognizing patterns, shapes, and familiar objects in a vague and sometimes random stimulus. It’s the result of your brain trying to “make sense” of input that really has no sense to find in it.

Pareidolia – Chiesa Madre di Nereto – Teramo, Italy

 

This is seen often in inkblot tests, where random splatters of ink suggest different images to different people (look, it’s a conspiracy, they’re all deliberately made to look like vaginas!) but also in cases of people seeing visions, ghosts and other likenesses in what is actually just random patterns that happen to look like those things.

Examples
The Rorschach test, or the famous “inkblot” test asks people what they see in otherwise random blobs of ink. The accepted standard answers for the first four are A) a bat, B) a bat, C) a bat, and D) my father killing my mother with a hypodermic needle

inkblot test – Google Search

1-dollar bill
($1 bill must be not too new and not too old) Hold dollar bill with pyramid and eagle facing you. fold eagle behind the pyramid. If folded exactly in half the two circles will align on top of each other and touching on both sides. Hold up to an old light bulb to see the face of Baphomet come through the pyramid side. (The eyes will come through in the two circular clouds just below the eye on the pyramid).

_Baphomet.png – RationalWiki

5-dollar bill
Repeat the same steps. The result is the Pentagon before the attacks.

-5d.jpg (350×189)

]10-dollar bill
Repeat the same steps again. The result is the Twin Towers on fire.

10a.jpg (360×249)

50-dollar bill
And again. This time, you get the building collapsing.

50c.jpg (360×259)

100-dollar bill
All you get this time around is a bunch of smoke, which looks more like someone played around with the MSPaint airbrush tool. Just a bunch of smoke, presumably a result of a fallen building, perhaps after being hit with an airplane. When was this dollar bill made? Well before 9/11. So what is with the Twin Towers, in a mass of smoke?

100c.jpg

A picture made by NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter in 1976 showing a hill that looks like a face started a new hobby – looking closely at images returned by Mars probes and trying to find as much “evidence for extraterrestrial life” as possible.

RationalWiki

 

Contrary to expectations, magnifying images to the pixel level and repeatedly applying the “sharpen” tool are not considered cheating. Notable participants in this quaint activity are Richard Hoagland and the Mars Anomaly Research team. Not only a ‘face’ but whole pyramids and causeways are claimed to be seem – with the ‘face’ being ‘identical’ to that on the Sphinx at Gizeh. Sci-fi pedants have been amused to note that long-running BBC sci-fi show Doctor Who broadcast a serial in 1975 called The Pyramids of Mars, featuring a baddie called Sutekh the Destroyer who was imprisoned in a pyramid. On Mars. “coincidence??” etc. etc.