Sometimes, you just have to give credit to the conspiracy theorists out there. Whether they are waiting for that unlikely moment to capture Big Foot or to glimpse a suspicious light above Area 51, there’s no lack of entertainment. And now, since the landing of the Mars rover Curiosity, there’s a whole new world or, ummm, planet, to provide us with a host of new theories.

Sightings on the red planet have ranged from ancient pyramids to military bunkers and the most recent is, well, a crab. Since the photo’s appearance in the Facebook group ‘Journey to the Surface of Mars’, alien hunters took to commenting, settling on the idea of the crab’s likeness to the facehugger monster from the 1979 film, Alien.

What actually is most likely just a cave mouth, the photograph was taken by Nasa in July and has since been simply turned into a victim of pareidolia mixed with a bit of apophenia. Casual. (Basically, pareidolia is the phenomenon of seeing faces in every day objects and apophenia is when people see patterns or connections in random, unconnected data).

Seth Shostak, director of the Centre for SETI Research commented on the phenomenon, saying ‘Recognising a crab in a landscape filled with wind-weathered rocks is no more surprising – nor more significant – than seeing a winking face in a semi-colon followed by a parenthesis. ;)’

[source: dailymail]